"Where I am skeptical about a lot of visual poetry (and where I think Ullán is the exception) is that it doesn't have a strong visual sensibility behind it. It might have a typographer's sensibility (if you're lucky) but not a painter's sensibility."

I would be annoyed with this even if he had said, "What I admire about a lot of visual poetry is that is has a strong visual sensibility behind it." What's stupid about it is that he gives no examples of the kind of visual poetry he is discussing. He doesn't even name a few visual poets whose works lack the visual sensibility he's talking about. And he's just expressing a subjective opinion.

Ironically, I'm in the process of writing a series of columns on the state of current American visual poetry for Small Press Review in which I contend that a characteristic of it is that, in general, it has little verbal sensibility behind it--it relies, in my view, too much on what it does visually.

Mayhew also fails to appreciate that what visual poetry (as I define it) mainly does is neither visual nor verbal but a combination of the two. The verbal and visual content of many of the best visual poems is uninteresting--except inasmuch as what they do in combination.

Classic example (by Eugen Gomringer):

                    silence silence silence
                    silence         silence
                    silence silence silence

I'm feeling better, by the way. Oddly--to me, at any rate--my stomach seems where I'm most screwed up. But only mildly.