Weiss' book, "Visual Voices: The Poem as a Print Object," 1994 consists of poems appropriated from ancient and classic poems that have been rearranged or altered in their presentation as typed artpoe to convey new meanings mainly based mainly on concrete poetic or conceptual text expressions. He provided an explanation for each of 71 poems published in the book as well as 28 unpublished poems in the typed manuscript. He classified his styles of typed artpoe with headings such as zipperpoem, caressed and overloved poem, telegram poem, etc. He altered poems from such stalwarts as Andrew Marvell, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning , Alfred Tennyson, and John Keats among others. VISUAL POETRY BY IRVING WEISS Team Sonnet: 14 Lines by 14 Different Canonical Poets from Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object Appease this virtuous enemy of man (MARVELL) The way which thou so well hast learn'd below, (DRYDEN) And dwell, as in my center, as I can, (JONSON) As into air the purer spirits flow-- (POPE) Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie (WORDSWORTH) A chronicle of actions just & bright, (COWPER) Cheerful & fresh as ever as ever: let us try (R. BROWNING) The grave of joy, prison of day's daylight. (DRAYTON) Whom thousand souls devoutly idolize (G. FLETCHER) Full in the smile of the blue firmament, (KEATS) Rise in thy heart & gather to the eyes (TENNYSON) With glist'ring beams, gold streaming where they bent. (SACKVILLE) To sing again, beneath the shadowy trees, (RANDOLPH) Of tempests can no more disturb thy ease. (VAUGHAN) Why print objects? Because, although poetry is supposed to be an oral art, for the last 500 years we've known it primarily from page print: a cluster of words in the middle of the page, each line beginning with a capital letter, recognizable stanza shapes on the page, an irregular right margin with rhymes sometimes clinching the line endings, and so on. Visual Voices is about the poem as a print object in a page environment. Now that most word-poems, including those I still sometimes write, are free-verse sprawls on the page, my visual reworkings of conventional poems can remind us that the printed poem of the past has always been a subliminal pictograph on the page. And so, most of my subject poems in Visual Voices consist of the representative black appearance of verse on the white page. My "visual voices'' are a kind of light verse whose content is the traditional poem. I am transforming the print to compromise the sense by making it difficult to 11 read'' the poem intelligibly except as a print object. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.