first, fast, last vispo

Like olden days when great beat generation US 45rpm singles couldn't make the British hit parade because Tin Pan Alley ruled the charts - The Someday Funnies has not yet hit radar UK - neither comics fandom nor liberal arts media.

Short extract year-old post here . Similar observation can arguably be made about The Last Vispo Anthology; a fairly new tome produced by Fantagraphics (vispo's own independent website here)

With David Miller's and Chris McCabe's Visual Poetics exhibition at London's Saison Poetry Library extended until May 5, due to popularity, and The Last Vispo Anthology physically dominating small poetry section of UK's chain bookstores, it begs question - if this is the last "vispo" anthology, what was the first? With vispo's start date 1998, was Cobbing and Upton edited Word Score Utterance Choreography (Writers Forum,1998) in editors' mind?

Doesn't seem to be large crossover between Poetry Library's current exhibition display and international contributors to Fantagraphics book, suggesting book and exhibition have been conceived and curated in separate bubbles on both sides of the pond. Like pre-Liverpool beat group/Mersey poet days, with largely different hit parades and music/publishing industries on each side of the Atlantic- except this isn't 1961.

The UK doesn't have comics publishers doing poetry. Ghostly influence of Bob Cobbing and his Writers Forum looms like 20th century giant within and above these two comparable, current, very welcome "vispo" endeavours.