My response to ajl's last post

That was so weird, I was just thinking how much I really liked the arty picture poems, when in the next line of your post you SAID that I would like the idea of them!! It's true, I thought they were great, very creative, it seems like an interesting route for poetry to follow - NOT that all other poetry should go away, NEVER that! Again we don't have the books in our hands, but for me, reading one poem on the net is not like reading a whole ezine. Poems are something we can dip into and so our eyes would cope with reading the occasional one on the net (although I do usually print them out and read them away from the computer), perhaps I don't read enough magazines to realise that I can dip in and out of them too - I hardly ever buy one, and so when I do, I have to read them from cover to cover to make up for some stupid sense of getting my money's worth! Also, the art in those poems wouldn't be possible on a 2D piece of paper, and that is what was so fascinating, it was lovely to see so many creative fields combined to make one blast of meaning that can hit the reader between the eyes with its message and yet confuse them at the same time, and isn't that what most of the poets through time have tried to do? We're always finding that they baffle us with metaphors and symbols to get our cogs working, kind of dazzling us with their words so that we will see them as some sort of 'educating' higher beings - the metaphysicals for instance, and the romantics, with their compass arms and immortal nightingales, and even up to our old favourite Pol Hodge with his hard edged agitprop, they are all trying to teach us something (Well, maybe the Victorians dipped out of this one a bit - too busy eyeing up table legs). Whether they were, and are writing sanctimonious crap or wonderful heartfelt truths, that is for the reader to decide, but they were definately trying to deliver a message to us, their own personal message. These arty picture poems seem to be a good way to do that, ok they won't give us loads of lovely words to think about, but they'll give us the epigram, the little nugget of thought to go off and chew on, and let's face it, a poet will usually amble their way through a whole poem to make the same point. Poets can use this medium to animate their emotions.