Life & Wisdom Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin’s defense of “visual poetry” is less a manifesto than a coolly pragmatic pushback against literary gatekeeping. He’s answering Robert Bly’s suspicion that poems shaped on the page risk becoming gimmicks - clever layouts masquerading as art. Laughlin refuses the moral panic. The impulse, he argues, is durable: poets will keep trying to make language not just mean but appear, to turn reading into seeing. That’s an aesthetic claim, but it’s also a cultural one. Modernism trained audiences to expect typography, collage, and spatial play; postwar poetry inherited that permission slip even as it fought over what counted as “serious.”

The subtext is Laughlin’s publisher’s sensibility (New Directions shaped an entire American canon): experimentation isn’t the enemy; bad experimentation is. By shifting the debate from “Is this form legitimate?” to “Can you do it well?” he relocates authority from critics to craft. He also quietly reframes “visual poetry” as attention engineering. The key phrase isn’t “visual” but “hold your attention.” On a crowded cultural stage, a poem competes with the eye as much as the mind. Shape becomes a technology of focus.

His final standard - “a shape which is interesting enough” - is deliberately unsentimental. Not transcendence, not authenticity: interest. That word carries an editor’s ruthlessness and a modern reader’s truth. Visual poetry earns its keep the same way any poem does: by making form feel necessary, not decorative, and by producing an experience you can’t get from plain lines alone.