Why isn't Poetry a Graphic Art?

While I was reading about how Emily Dickinson collected her fascicles, for initially unrelated reasons, I pulled out a book on visual poetry from the 1920s. (also called concrete poetry) This interests me because I worked as a graphic designer for a while, and I was always considered about fonts and page layouts. Poets talk a lot about line breaks and “the poem on the page,” etc. but rarely to do they really venture off into true graphic design technique. I know there *is* visual poetry out there -- there's always some experimental or web journal publishing it -- but it's still not mainstream after a few hundred years (even George Herbert and Mallarme were trying it). Why is that? What’s this line between the poem on the page and the graphic art work? I get the impression it seems somehow dishonest to cloth your words in anything but Times New Roman… but that's like saying it doesn’t matter how you dress but dressing all black for every party, or saying your hair cut doesn’t matter and shaving your head. That certainly makes a statement! I think the difference between Dickinson’s physical presentation (even if it was self-presentation) of her work and my own is fairly profound.

I think poet’s are a bit afraid to talk about that… there would be too much to deal with . But I think we need to acknowledge that the unwritten rules of the game are that you write with Times New Roman at twelve points; it’s like not acknowledging in the sixteenth century that iambic pentameter was standard. I’m certainly not against having standards, any more than I’m against an other formal frameworks. The Times New Roman standard gives a certain graphic grammar to bump up against. At some point, someone had to come to the full realization that iambic pentameter was the standard and then he could take full advantage of the possibility of diverging from it.
But can the same thing happen with the graphic presentation of the poem on the page? Historically, we’ve moved from poetry as completely orally/aurally transmitted to poetry as an art whose printed component factors significantly in its assessment. But I do not think that we’ve fully made the paradigm shift. Perhaps this is only now possibly as typographic software allows the poet to experiment in private (as poets like to do) with the potential formal variations. I imagine that there are poets – Olga Broumas comes to mind – that poetry is primarily an oral art and thus the visual and physical dimensions of its presentation will always remain secondary. I would argue that it’s already become a printed art; as much as the news went from being the material of the town crier to the material of the printed page to the stuff on the digital screen, poetry can cross media. Poetry is, of course, one of the older arts, and conservative in its way; perhaps it’s just not ready to make the changes. Perhaps… Olga’s right and it won’t ever be on the page any more than Beethovan or Miles Davis is in the sheet music. But couldn’t graphic presentation be just a better tool to help the reader hear more clearly in her mind’s ear?