“Visual poetry can be defined basically as poetry that is meant to be seen” — Willard Bohn Reading Visual Poetry, “The Word Made Flesh”

Visual poems can be found under so many names: vispo, erasure, black out, cross-out, cut out, cut up, cover up, redaction, retypes, hyperediting, gutters, found poetry, concrete poetry, pattern poetry, shaped verse, figure poetry, word collage, typographic configurations, carmen figuratum, asemic forms, (even the dreaded) creative defacement. The list could go on and on. If all of that sounds too complicated, I encourage you to explore the form on your own. The practice of creating visual poems is much more comprehendible than the naming conventions.

The inextricable link of the visual and linguistic is what makes the form exceptional, as it is intermedial and interdisciplinary.

Goef Huth in Poetry magazine—“The child of both poetry and the visual arts, visual poetry has a double set of interests and its forms are myriad.”