That was where things stood until 12 January of this year when Craig Dworkin announced at the Buffalo site that Charles Bernstein would be the first poet in the reading series that had been set up to accompany Perloff's seminar. Other language poets would later be reading. I immediately fired off a letter that said, "As a long-time participant in and follower of the American visual poetry scene, I have to say that I'm disappointed that Marjorie Perloff, who has the cultural weight to do a good deal for such under-appreciated visual poets as Karl Kempton, Karl Young, Crag Hill, Miekal And, Liz Was, Jonathan Brannen, G. Huth, Trudy Mercer, John Byrum, Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins, Bill DiMichele, Gregory St. Thomasino, Marilyn Rosenberg, Michael Basinski, Jake Berry, Scott Helmes, Harry Polkinhorn (and on and on, to speak only of those contemporary American visual poets whose names are on the tip of my tongue), chooses instead to kick off her graduate seminar in visual poetics with a reading by Charles Bernstein, who is a late-coming dabbler in the field, and needs no career boosts."

Miekal And also complained. Then Luigi-Bob Drake posted a copy of Perloff's syllabus, which he had found at the Stanford U. site. The only book in the field that I thought of any value that was on her list of required and recommended books was the out-of-date, never very complete Solt anthology of concrete poetry (which includes a number of pieces that are not by almost anybody's standards, visual poetry). Not surprisingly, Perloff had not followed up on any of my recommendations.

A while later Perloff personally e.mailed me a greatly extended syllabus; it was pretty much the same as the one Drake had posted except for a quite long supplementary reading list. This, at least, did refer to the light & dust site (which had come up at the discussion group as central to current visual poetry and which I'm sure even Perloff realizes has to be recognized despite all the work on it by people she's ignoring). On the other hand, just about nothing else that has anything to do with "my" visual poets was anywhere in her syllabus.

I responded after a while with a satirical syllabus of a seminar on language poetry that I'd have if the positions of language and visual poetry, and mine and Perloff's, were reversed. All my visiting poets would be visual poets who have also done some poetry most people would agree is language poetry like Jonathan Brannen and Crag Hill. I ignored just about all the big names in the field. There was no immediate reaction to my piece.

One of the few genuine visual poets Perloff discusses in her course is Darren Wershler-Henry, a young Canadian who has a series of poems at the Coach House website. Johanna Drucker characterizes Wershler-Henry's work as "a new synthesis of conceptual and visual poetics." This is nonsense. He is merely a talented apprentice following, mainly, in the footsteps of bp Nichol. He acknowledges his derivativeness, and is even praised for it; but there is a difference between being derivatively derivative and being creatively derivative.

One of his poems on the net, "Grain," consists of a square with a horizontal line crossing it about a quarter of the way up. While we watch, g's appear and fill the square; then they cluster under the line; next their stems "sprout," hoisting their heads above the "ground"; their heads fill with tiny g's that are soon dispersed--to become the scatter of g's that the sequence began with. This is nice, but visual poets, beginning visual poets, have been doing similar things since the sixties or earlier. Wershler-Henry also has a one-liner called "The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein by Marcel Duchamp" at the site: "a rose is a rose is a rrose," with all the letters black except the last, which is red. He has a nice Spencer Selby imitation there called "The Cutting Room Floor," too. Nothing wrong with spotlighting Wershler-Henry, who does have potential, but why not spotlight a few of the host of older, better American and Canadian visual poets around, too, in place of people like Bernstein? Why not spotlight jwcurry, for instance--to name someone who, like Wershler-Henry, is a Canadian strongly influenced by bp Nichol, but who is many many-directioned miles beyond Wershler-Henry as a visual poet? Or . . . but I'm sure my drift is clear by now.