At Geof Huth's blog, Ed Baker asked Geof to label a work of his. Geof declined to, so I posted the following: "Ed, I would say that that your page is either an illustrated set of annotated poems or a photograph with a set of annotated poems captioning it. In any case, I very much like it. A fun piece on the surface but with a lotta depths. (Note: for me, the periods in the main poem are infraverbally but not visio-aesthetically significant.)"

I'm afraid the trend toward slovening the term, "visual poetry," to cover more and more different kinds of art has me going the other way. Eventually, I may be back to my original definition: poetry whose central aesthetic effect is due to a metaphoric combination of a visual element with some part of its text. That would eliminate most visio-textual collages as visual poems. I don't think I'd go that far. It'd be like requiring a linguaesthetic poem to have a metaphor at its core.

As a joke (although the truth), I signed myself, "The World's Only Sane Poetics Taxonomist." Later I realized that I may well be the world's only genuine poetics taxonomist. Certainly the only American poetics taxonomist. Do I consider this something to boast about? No, I consider it something to be shocked and dismayed about.

By "taxonomist," incidentally, I mean a person attempting systematically to classify a field. There are a number of people haphazardly naming poetries and poetic devices, but they don't really know what they're doing. Not that I'm sure I do, but I am systematic.

To remind myself because I do keep forgetting. My taxonomy of poetry begins with linguaesthetic poetry and pluraesthetic poetry. Poetry that is all verbal (linguistic) and poetry that makes significant use of expressive modalities besides verbal language. Note to feebdom (in case someone from that locality mistakenly finds himself here): that doesn't make pluraesthetic poetry necessarily equal in importance to linguaesthetic poetry--although I think it is. Nor does it make it better, which I don't believe it is. It makes it one of the two main kinds of poetry, taxonomically.

Urp.