Pattern Poetry as Paradigm
Dick Higgins
From roughly the eighteenth century until 1970s, pattern poetry, that is, poetry in which a visual image is formed by placement of words or letters, when it received any attention at all, was strongly under attack almost all critics and observers. This not because its mimesis, since early twentieth most art itself mimetic. Rather, feeling poem intermedial, lay conceptually between literary media, therefore unable to stand on own thus inherently mediocre. In recent years, however, many our artists, as well visual, have explored potentials intermedia-sound happening, concrete postconcrete so on-and, due course, has been given earlier intermedial works, suggesting fairly widespread taste for such forms present. Emblem previously ignored denigrated observers up 1950s, reevaluated Mario Praz (1964) others 1960s (see, e.g., Hatherly 1983 Pozzi 1981). The same appears be happening with poetry. Just describe situation United States, I wrote little monograph George Herbert's poems (Higgins 1977), could find nothing Englisha chapter here there (Hollander 1975), but substantial. A book Kenneth Newell (1976) had published, an extremely obscure press; unlisted usual sources, knew only later found copy New York Pub-
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