Have You Thought of "Shift & Switch" Recently?

via rob mclennan's blog:

Impressive, too, that the editors would include as much visuals as they have, since visuals in trade books seem few and far between (the production values of "Cantextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada," the visual poetry issue of Open Letter edited by Jars Balan [10th series, number 6, summer 1999], was unusually bad). Unfortunately, very little of the visual pieces do anything for me, and even for me, who knows so little of visual works, I feel as though I've seen so much of this type of work before in the works of older Canadian writers, including bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Judith Copithorne, bill bissett, jwcurry and others, but for a piece here or there by Max Middle, or derek beaulieu's "For Brian" piece (otherwise, I know for a fact that derek, one of the most visible of the younger visual poets in Canada, can do better; we will know for sure when his book of visuals from Talonbooks comes out in the spring…). Windsor, Ontario writer gustave morin, as well, has produced some extremely interesting visual works, but unfortunately, there is little evidence of it here, and Jason Le Heup, who used to self-produced odd chapbooks of visuals when he still lived in Vancouver, included text as his submission (he's been threatening to produce a full manuscript of visual pieces for years, but so far, nothing seems to have surfaced).