Its text is shaped, though, billowing like a cloud of smoke, which fits its oozy, magico-meditative tone. And its many melted-together words (e.g., "onscovhoOriintrusive") are strongly suggestive, visually, of the geology the poem seems much about (the quoted word, for instance, containing "intrusive," and being directly followed by "granitic rocks"). The poem's scattered large O's add holes or bubbles equally persuasive as zeroes or peepholes to the mix. Again: a geological--or archaeological-- jumble of questions and answers. The poem, in short, is more than moderately visiophoric (or visually metaphoric), a hallmark of the richest visual poetry.

It wouldn't be that wide of the mark to consider Basinski's work a sound poem, either, considering how archaeo-blurry and strange its sounds are. For me, though, the persistence of its fissuring and deformation of the language make it significantly more an infra-verbal poem than anything else. Take its fourth and fifth lines: "ziteotilowoeshipped throughout panic the southwesterJ belts bells/ onglo of Paleozpic(?) of the ice age metamorphie yan" The first of these lines is only twice infra-verbal, at "ziteotilowoeshipped" with its suggestions of pre-columbian Mexican civilizations and "woeship," which not only Joyceanly refers to bloody gods, but releases "ship" from "worship" to emphasize its voyagery; and at "southwesterJ," with only its J off-convention (and succinctly speaking both of "diverJing" and "verJing," and showing them).

The second of the lines revs up the infra-verbality. First there's "onglo," which is "on-glow," "on-go" and "anglo" (acting more to connect early Mexico with Anglo-Saxon England than to Hispanically denote a white person). "Paleozpic" wonderfully adds "Oz" and "optics" to the "epic" it hints of--with its "ic" about to melt into "ice" three words later, something one would never notice in a less infra-verbal poem. "Metamorphie" is the the central word of the poem, making a dance of "metamorphism," which has to do with the deformation of rock due to heat, etc. And, of course, the word speaks of all kinds of other changes. As for "yan," I haven't quite figured it out. "Yon" works, and maybe "yin" and "yang" combined.

Toward its end, the poem peaks with the word, "workcs"; no big deal until you realize in this poem of metemorphism that "workcs" = "(w)rocks." A visual as much as an infra-verbal effect, I suppose. We're definitely into a border blur where taxonomy is quite difficult. So it is with no little shakiness that I finally classify the poem as a visually-enhanced, auditorily- enhanced infraverbal poem. However fuddled my taxonomy might be, though, it's a great tool for grappling with a poem like this, it seems to me. You can't classify without deepening into what's concretely there.

Other pieces, some quite good, are easier to classify as not visual poetry: e.g., an amusing illustration of Jesus that Ficus strangulensis has cut out from some religious hand-out and added a (probably slightly-altered) romance-comix cartoon balloon to, making Jesus say, "I couldn't go back to sleep last night after I dreamed your husband flattened me today"; a drawing of a wine bottle rack that W. Mark Sutherland has captioned, "Theory and Praxis"; a prose piece by Johanna Drucker with short texts in larger letters scattered throughout it, growing in size-of-print as the piece proceeds; a fascinatingly odd collage by Paulo Brusecky with a giant eye in it but no words--or letters, even; and two of Pete Spence's letter-centered but asemantic urban- maplike designs. Or: two captioned illumages, one typographically-enhanced essay, one pure illumage, and two textual illumages. (Note, for those of you new to my oddities, "illumage" in my lexicon equals "visual artwork.")

Among the pieces that few would argue aren't visual poems is a strongly inner-cityish, graffitiic "xollage" (as its author terms it) by Dave Chirot. Part of it is of a lotful of junked cars; another, of a stenciling of the alphabet, resonates with the cars, for me, as a second sort of dead traffic; but the alphabet, much of it barely visible or invisible, jumps into the word "DEFEAT" to an infra-verbal gaze as it goes from "D" through "EFGH" to the bottom half of an "I."

Another specimen of a "genuine" visual poem here is Jake Berry's remarkable "Phaseostrophe 79," a combination of tendrilly curving lines and fragments of text going off in different directions. Although the whole is labeled, "jasmine-crucifer-ring-Math- domain, and includes the fraction "dew cluster" over "xum," it doesn't strike me as math but could be (1) some kind of chart of the skies (the astronomical sign for Uranus and the word, "Neptune," being in it; (2) a meteorolgical map, one part of it labeled, "cicada fuse(!)/ blood to fire/ raining" (my exclamation mark) with an s-shaped arrow pointing toward the afore-mentioned "dew/cluster" fraction; (3) a map of a river-valley; (4) a medical illustration of nerves and/or muscles and/or the circulation (with one location labeled, "agnonicon viscera"; or (5) a neo-astro-alchemical Master-Chart, as indicated by the line, "Uramapa bears our light through chasms in the sky." Whatever the work is, it's a major lyrical poem, surprising the auditor into manywhere-at-onces of constellations and insect- circulatory systems; rivers and nerves; high science and ecstatic transcendence . . . Jake Berry is the most unself-consciously, integratedly everywhere-going poet I know.

There's a plethora of other first-rate poems here, but I'm afraid I've reached my space-limit.