Examines how literary criticism exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. Argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading neutralizes spatial dynamics and reduces material identity to the status of a transparent medium. Suggests that appreciation of silent visual form is a convention of post modernist writing.…

Suggests that a poetic writing of traits, inviting readers to seek meaning in a poem's visual form, rests on a myth of the portrait in which marks of a written language are drawn directly from nature. (DF)