Marvin Sackner wrote the essay for this catalogue, entitled "Introduction to WordSeen Exhibition." To begin, I must declare a conflict of interest in writing this introduction. Such a statement is required when a physician presents a paper to a scientific audience while having ownership in a company or being paid for conducting studies on medical devices or drugs related to his lecture. Since I am a physician and my wife Ruth and I own works by most of the artist/poets in this exhibition, I wish to be in front with this declaration. Nevertheless, I believe that I can be objective in my views since the works in this exhibition must stand visual relevance by attendees to this exhibition regardless of what I say just like medical studies must stand the test of reproducibility by other investigators. I hope you get the point about my opinions on conflict of interest. In this introduction to the exhibition, I shall comment on the differences between concrete and visual poetry as well as placing these two genres in a historical context. This exhibition consists of concrete, visual, and sound poems by American, American-Cuban and Uruguayan artist poets. Simply stated, concrete poems conveys a visual image to the reader/viewer through the arrangement of words and/or letterforms on a page, wall work or object. There may or may not be additional meanings to the poem in that relates to the same kind of content present in conventional poems. Visual poems integrate images with the words and/or letterforms. Sound poems may be concrete, visual or convention poems as well as abstract images that convey sounds represented as words, phonetic expressions, neologisms, and onomatopoeia for oral enunciation. Despite this simple-minded approach, controversy abounds among poets and critics as to the definition of concrete poetry. It was declared a new poetic form in the early 1950's although a subset, figurative or shaped poetry, in which letters and words outline representational shapes such as animals, altars, objects, etc. is well known in ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Malayan, Burmese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Greek and Latin prayers and literature. Most critics date the beginning of contemporary concrete poetic movement to Mallarme's poem, "Un Coup de Des," published in 1897. Here, several changes of typeface and font size take place, the poem runs across facing pages, and separation between lines of text with spaces of varied dimension become an integral part of its visual appearance. Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgium conceptual artist published a book in 1969 with the subtitle "image" rather than "poeme" as in the 1914 edition of the work. He cancelled out the words with solid black rectangles and the resultant image viewed through the translucent pages of the book gave a bold, constructivist image. In 1914, Kamenski called his poems Ferro-Concrete because at that time in Russia, the construction industry began using iron rods to strengthen the concrete in buildings then being built. Kamenski drew an analogy between the visual impact of his poems (varied typefaces and spacing) that strengthened their meaning and the new building material. These poems would be classified as concrete poems contemporaneously but neither Augusto DeCampos nor Eugen Gomringer, the founders of concrete poetry in the 1950's were aware of Kamenski's work as both told the Sackners in the early 1980's. Eugen Gomringer, who was the secretary to Max Bill, a Swiss sculptor making Concrete Art (non-objective forms), set about to produce poetry as a verbal counterpart of this non-objective art, i.e. incorporating shapes which were not realistic nor abstracted from nature. Gomringer composed poems with clusters of nouns or adjectives without verbs that he called "constellations" in an attempt to achieve this result. However, the Brazilian co-founders of Concrete Poetry, Augusto and Haroldo DeCampos and Decio Pignatari, viewed this poetic form as an extension to the poems of Stephane Mallarme, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. They arranged words, varied the size and character of the typefaces to achieve visual effects that provided visual meanings to the reader even if the language of the poem could not be understood. Therefore, the concrete poem had two distinct aspects, viz., poetry to be seen and pictures to be read. The preceding is more widely applicable to the characterization of concrete poetry than Gomringer's "constellations." However, even the Brazilians' definition does not describe all variations of concrete poems. For example, letters alone may be used to create shapes or patterns without attaching verbal meanings. Their creator(s) and critic(s) may designate them as concrete poems. I consider visual poems as an extension of concrete poetry in which images are integrated into the poem; such poems differ from picture poems, a modern day version of emblem poems, in which the image illustrates the poem. But when critics become involved the situation becomes murky. Consider the turgid remarks of the Italian poetry critic, Matteo D'Ambrosio who wrote the following definition for the Italian version of visual poetry, "poesia visiva" which initially had a political content. "Poesia visiva, in short presents itself as a phenomenon of creative contestation directed against the diffusion of the discourses of the mass media and of their manifold effects (to be summed up as the progressive degradation and humiliating impoverishment of codes and languages): those same effects that have induced the areas of the artistic community most sensitive to the transformations taking place in the relationships between art and society to accentuate their functions as innovators and to envision new contexts and models of creativity, and a new rhetoric of new figures capable of augmenting the complexity of their messages." After you've digested this polemic (or skipped over it), let's look at simpler controversies. How does one classify poems with the shapes outlined by words? Some would call them concrete poems since there is no added image while others would designate them as visual poems since there is text with the image being the outline of the words themselves. Several years ago, Ruth and I attended a conference hosted by Klaus-Peter Dencker in Saarbrucken, Germany organized to produce a video for German television on visual poetry. Dick Higgins and we were the only Americans invited; the other some 25 poets were European. As in most video productions, the conference took far longer than the time allocated for airing it. And it was conducted exclusively in German, a language that we do not speak. So after 10 hours of taping, the question in German was posed to each of the participants, "What is visual poetry?" The poets gave lengthy explanations over another two hours and even with a translator seated next to us, their responses were barely intelligible to me. Toward the end of this session, Wolfgang Schmidt, who was seated near us, was asked the question. He turned toward us, winked and in slow measured tones in English with a heavy German accent, "I don't know!" The scores of sound poetry may be legible, written with abstract shapes, laid out in a nonlinear manner. I've always wondered how poets deliver a reproducible performance in the same circumstances as the avant-garde musical scores that John Cage reproduces in his book, "Notations." I think I now have the answer for the musical scores and probably for the abstract and non-linear sound poems. Recently, the director of an east coast art museum who is also an accomplished musician paid us a visit. During the course of our conversation, this question came up for avant-garde music scores. He told me that when he asked the question to a friend how he played music with squiggles or lines rather than notes, the friend responded "damned if know - I just make it up as I go along!" The poets/artist in this exhibition entitled, "Word Seen: WordWorks by 12 Visual Poets include the American poets, mIEKAL aND, Michael Basinski, John M.Bennett, Kathy S. Ernst, Peter Ganick, Bob Grumman, Scott Helmes, Michael Peters, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, and Irving Weiss. Carlos Luis (Cuban-American) and Clemente Padin (Uruguayan) comprise the remaining exhibiting poets/artists. Most of them write poems, draw and paint images, publish books and periodicals, collaborate in performances, produce sound poems, and contribute critical texts to the field. I have known and collected the works of most of them for about two decades. mIEKAL aND came to my attention in 1984 as a publisher together with his collaborator, Liz Was, of Xerox Sutra editions. This later was subsequently renamed Xexoxial Editions owing to copyright considerations. Their books that featured aND along with experimental poets of the 1980's and 1990's including some participants in this exhibition, e.g., Ernst, Helmes, Padin, and Rosenberg, were printed using a photocopying process. The soft cover books were priced under $5 at the time of their issue but if a collector such as me desired a deluxe hard bound issue, he could order one usually for under $15. Upon receipt of an order for a hard cover edition of a book, aND and Was would visit a second hand book store and search for the cheapest one available that had the same dimensions as their book. They then purchased the book, removed its binding, discarded the pages, and placed the pages of their book into this "new" binding. Was spray-painted the covers and the collector had an artist book! In his own publications, aND plumbed the depths of experimental poetry including concrete and visual poems, Mayan glyphs, neologisms, photocopied manipulations of text, found poems, visual/verbal collages, zaum, sound poems, polemic texts, neo-dada, and picture poems. I became aware of Michael Basinski's poems in the late 1980's from his appearances in small press magazines. I began acquiring his visual poem/drawings that are densely filled with patches of handwritten texts tilted at different angles on paper o cardboard often with made-up words, neologisms, mirror written letters and hieroglyphics along with wacky, seemingly non-related images. At the time, I was attracted to the visual gestalt of these pieces not realizing that they were performance scores. At a recent symposium on avant-garde poetry held at Ohio State University, I had the opportunity to hear one of his performances. He held up one of these poems drawn on cardboard (now in the Sackner Archive) and proceeded to drolly describe its verbal and visual elements flipping the drawing in all directions. After his performance that provoked gales of laughter, I talked to him privately, congratulated him, and asked whether he had recorded the piece. He responded that he hadn't, that each performance was different since he made it up as he went along. Does this response sound familiar? I have known the works of John M. Bennett since 1979 when I subscribed to his periodical "Lost and Found Times" published by Luna Bisonte Prods. I consider the magazine one of the most outstanding compendiums of international experimental literature and poetry. It is one of the few periodicals that I subscribe to in duplicate because I believe that it will have long lasting importance as a poetic mark of our times. Bennett's idiosyncratic poems feature jagged scrawls for written letters that conceal surrealistic content with expressionistic visual appeal. Bennett is deeply involved in the small press publishing of mail art (networking). Kathy Ernst founded Press Me Close (Press) in the early 1980's. This served as a venue for her visual poems as well as those from several participants in this current exhibition. She published the poems in card set format as well as silkscreen 'T' shirts. She also made three-dimensional concrete poems with wooden letters during that period. Her recent work involves computer manipulation of found and abstract images and words to make prints that appear to be photographs of collages. She has also collaborated with other poets featured in this exhibition such as John M. Bennett, Scott Helmes, and Marilyn R. Rosenberg in making computer based visual and performance poems on paper. Peter Ganick was the publisher of Potes & Poets Press from 1981 - 2000. Under his leadership, the press disseminated conventional, concrete, visual and language poetry through chapbooks and a stapled pages periodical entitled, "A.BACUS," of well-known and scarcely known experimental poets. Ganick himself writes poems that appear to be language poems, but as he stated in an interview on an Internet site consist of abstract language without relationship to reality as do the language poets whose texts relate to negation. Recently, Ganick has been painting such abstract poems integrated with colorful abstract images using watercolor and acrylic paint on paper. Bob Grumman composed his first concrete poems and printed them in 1966 in a self-published booklet. Later, he began contributing Haiku poems to small press magazines. In 1987, he founded Runaway Spoon Press in order to publish experimental poetry in small editions using the format of booklets, photocopied colored prints and soft cover books. The poems of many participants in this exhibition have been published under this imprint. At about that time, Grumman began reviewing books of experimental poetry as a columnist in several small press periodicals. He is one of the most erudite critics of visual poetics who clearly presents his convictions. In the 1990's, he turned to writing mathematical poems in a Haiku format having been influenced one of Zukofsky's poems. I have known Scott Helmes, a practicing architect by day and a concrete and visual poet at other times, for over 20 years and have avidly collected his works during this time. I became acquainted with him when he served as a compiler of the Tenth Assembling (magazine). In summer 2002, I was asked to deliver a keynote talk on Concrete and Visual Poetry at a conference run by John M. Bennett and held at Ohio State University. I decided to go through my holdings of each participant (several of whom are also participants in the current exhibition) in the symposium to demonstrate the breadth of styles in visual poetics. When I looked through my holdings of Helmes' work from 1980 on to select a piece to discuss at the symposium, I became astonished on the diversity in almost every phase of concrete and visual poetry. Among the Helmes' poems, the smeared rubberstamped poems formed a unique signature of his work. But Scott is not afraid to tread new grounds. In recent years, he deconstructed the visual poem to leave images without words as a remainder and has collaborated in composing visual poetry performance scores with abstract directions analogous to experimental music scores. Carlos Luis might have been a closet poet early in his life but I knew him as an art critic, gallery owner, and museum director over the several years he lived in Miami. Now that he is "retired," he has become very active in visual poetics and performances mixing his native Spanish language with English. Even to those not fluent in Spanish, these "Spanglish" works have the freshness and naivety of a much more youthful voice. He was responsible for initiating this exhibition and is currently making visual poetic collages with the aid of digital technology. Clemente Padin is one of the giants of Latin American experimental poetics. He is a poet, graphic artist, performer, video maker, mail artist, and art critic. Among others, he edited two of the most outstanding magazines of concrete and visual poetry, OVUM and OVUM 10 1969-1975. His poems often have a strong political message and he is a political activist as well. I corresponded with Padin in 1984 and met him for the first time in 1996 at a visual poetry conference in Edmonton, Canada. In 1989, I purchased several of his classic letter picture drawings entitled "Signografias y Textos" made in 1968-1970. Here, he laid out filled-in black ink, letters in varied ways to provide visual images of letters alone. Recently, he has been involved in photo-documentation of public poems featuring gigantic letters in outdoor environments. Michael Peters is the "young kid on the block" in this exhibition. I met him for the first time at the Ohio State University symposium on avant garde poetry in Summer 2002 where he performed with Helmes, Bennett and Ernst. He makes surrealistic visual poetic collages. Marilyn R. Rosenberg provides painterly approach to visual poetry. In her poems and artist books, image and structure are an important aspect of the presentation. I purchased one of my first artist books from her in 1979. I've met her on several occasions both in America and Israel. She did a wonderful assemblage in collaboration with the late David Cole that I'm proud to own. Indeed, like many of the participants in this exhibition, she has collaborated with others via the postal service on books and works on paper. Irving Weiss composed an innovative, tour de force, compendium of visual poetry entitled, "Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object," published by Bob Grumman's Runaway Spoon press in 1994. He appropriated classical poems and rearranged or altered their presentation one to a page to convey new meanings based mainly on concrete poetic or conceptual text expressions. There is an introduction to each poem that explains it and he designated the style with a personal classification, e.g., zipperpoem, caressed and overloved poem, telegram poem, etc. I corresponded with Irving and told him that the original manuscript was a must for the Archive and purchased it from him in 1995. Weiss' recent concrete poems involve computer manipulations with varied typefaces and dimensions as well as text overlays. The content of these poems is replete with neologisms. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.