Reading into the side of the Visual

Geof Huth from Schenectady in New York blogs at dbqp: visualizing poetics about visual poetry and personal experience. In this post he writes about Brian Whitener's poem:

In "Bull," the obscuring photo is dominated by a rusting metal pillar, with the word "MALTA" scratched into it. The photograph seems not quite in focus at any point (the depth of field apparently ending in front of the pillar itself), and the central point of the photograph is a bit overexposed, almost obscuring the name "MALTA" itself. The photograph disrupts the flow of the words and seems out of context.

What could the point be of Malta? a Mediterranean island, where they speak plenty of English and a language descended from Arabic but written in the Latin alphabet.* But if we read the visible part of the underlying poem, we learn that it consists of jarring bits of text. Sabine women, green ducks, and plastic windshields are all part of this poem, and their dissimilarity is the point. The poem itself gives us hints: "frequent essential know[ledge]" and "it is therefore impossible." The poem cannot tell us what to think because the world doesn't allow it...