**Thanks.

1. It's highly unlikely that you composed visual poetry with panache at the age of 15. Saying so makes you sound like the idiots who claim a child could equal Jackson Pollock.

Well, we'll talk about the Pollack later. But I haven't seen much work on UBU &c that is any better than what I was doing as a High School sophomore and junior. Sorry. Not that there isn't work better, just that, had I been aware of the "proper channels" I feel that a lot of that work would have been publishable.

Irrespective, it probably wasn't a useful example.

**UBU isn't the place to go for visual poetry, but I still doubt your work outdid it. I remember vividly reading an attack on E.E. Cummings's poetry with its author's parody of

Cu       m,         ings

in which he broke up words, scattered bits of text and insert some punctuation marks in weird places. He thought he'd shown how easy it is to make a Cummings typographical poem. Then there are all the rhymers who write a banal prose piece, then think they've really shown how stupid free verse is when they lineate it.

2. Basing a classification of schools of poetry on "the school of quietude" is foolish because the latter's lack of anything near a responsible definition. Moreover, it seems to cover too diverse a confusion of poetries, basically any kind that Ron Silliman fails to sympathize with.

Silliman is one of the most read voices in poetry right now.

And since Paul Muldoon (arguably the only person involved in poetry with a larger circulation of readers) doesn't pontificate in the pages of the New Yorker, he's got the biggest critical voice.

He's the one who came up with "SoQ" so he was able to set the stage for the debate.

I have no problem engaging him and reframing the terms -- and I'm thankful for sending a lot of people here.

**You're ignoring my point. Who cares who Silliman and Muldoon are. "The School of Quietude" is a meaningless term. You should simply have said that dividing contemporary schools of poetry into "The School of Quietude" and some opposition school is dumb because the first term is undefined, then shown, as you did, how you would divided contemporary schools, but with no further reference to "the school of quietude."

3. Renaming "the school of quietude" "oral poetry"

Please understand that I am not redefining SoQ as Oral Poetry. I am saying that the division (schism?) developing in poetry is not along pre- and post-avant but along Oral and Visual poetry.

And that division is where we should focus our critical energies.

**Okay, but I have trouble with your division, as I showed in my previous post and will show again here.

the rest of your point (and the first part of point 4) was due to the above misconstruction, and I hope I've clarified my definition. I think another post is likely in order.

**Okay.

Visual poetry is a narrow sort of poetry--too narrow to call one of the two major kinds of poetry.

I'd disagree with this. And besides, if we view this in the light of the evolution of the animation / 2-d art critical division, we can understand that the newer art is necessarily more "narrow" than the older art.

**Seems to me visual poetry is to the whole field of newer poetry about as formal verse is to the whole field of older poetry.

5. I divide poetries many ways, for instance, into knownstream poetry and otherstream poetry, the first kind being poetry just about every member of a college English department will be familiar with, the second poetry few in any such department will know more than the name of, it that.

Well, first of all, I'd like to start with poetry that every American reader knows (About 1/3 of the population) and go from there. I think putting poetry in "college English departments" is a very bad practice.

**Matter of personal preference. I'm focusing on the poetry that supposedly knowledgeable poetry people know about and the (good) poetry they don't know about. If you want a third category covering poetry just about anyone at all interested in poetry knows about, fine, but I see no use for it.

Poetry published in bigCirc magazines, discussed by the name critics, taught in colleges, given prizes, etc., versus poetry rarely published anywhere except in micro-zines or on the Internet, only mentioned by name critics sneeringly and briefly, taught or even mentioned in few colleges, and hardly ever awarded prizes.

First off, the New Yorker is the only "bigCirc" magazine out there. The Nation and the Christian Science monitor and the National Review (the next three largest markets) make up maybe half of its circulation.

**By "bigCirc" I mean in comparison to the magazines that publish interesting poetry--roughly the magazines like The Atlantic and even The New Criterion that bookstores might carry and that are often in libraries. Also newspaper inserts.

Secondly, that "otherstream" of work -- if you're talking about work that gets sneered at is often what Silliman would describe as School of Quietude.

**Right. I think that was one of my points.

Thirdly, neologisms almost never work -- and your otherpoetry/knownpoetry smack of Bakhtinian hapax legomenonism.

**Neologisms are required for non-bullshit. (However much they are also used for it.) For one thing, they specify distinctions too often blurred over. For another, they're new, so not yet corrupted by misuse.

6. My formal taxonomy of poetry begins with linguaesthetic and pluraesthetic poetry. This division, ironically, has points somewhat in common with yours inasmuch as linguaesthetic poetry would include your oral poetry since it is all poetry that is linguistically aesthetic only, whereas the main member of the pluraesthetic poetry group is visual poetry, pluraesthetic poetry being poetry making significant use of more expressive modalities than the verbal.

I'm not sure if you're using terms like linguaesthetic and pluraesthetic how and why you're disagreeing with me.

**Just an example of what I consider rational classifying. But my division of poetries is different here from yours. Much different. For instance, school of quietude is in both, and innovative poetry is in both.

Oral poetry (or linguaesthetic if we have to make up words) is poetry that could still exist if the whole world suddenly went blind

**Actually, there are (in my poetics) poem that are all words but need to be seen on the page fully to work. You would call them visual poems, I would not.

and

Visual poetry (or pluraesthetic) is poetry that could still exist if the whole world suddenly went deaf.

**You wuz deaf when you read my definition. Mathematical poems and sound poems are not visual poems but are pluraesthetic poems, in my poetics. There are recordings of sound poems with a fair circulation among those those few who like sound poetry.

Notice I didn't say "were" -- I think having both faculties is important to the appreciation of poetry.

**We certainly agree here (and some on both sides don't)--except that I claim there are more faculties than two that can be important for poetry-appreciation.

However, visual poetry can't be sold at audible.com

**Mostly but not entirely true. Certain poets compose visual poetry and work out ways to audibilize it. The result is not the same as the original, but as close (I think) as, say, a Dylan Thomas reading of a poem is to the original (which won't have his voice and declamatory overlay).

7. Thanks for starting this discussion however I disagree with what you said. I'm all for any attempt to classify poetry.

Well, you're welcome, and I think we agree more than you think we do.

**I usually agree more than disagree with most people in poetry on most subjects having to do with the art. But one tends to discuss areas of clash much more than areas of blend. I look forward to your next post on this.