This dissertation engages contemporary American experimental poetry as a visual craft of space, in addition to being a linguistic craft of sound and sense. I argue that the renewed interest in “visual poetry” in the last twenty years is of significant import to debates happening within aesthetic and literary theory. Poems, as linguistic entities, must wrangle with the pressure of sense; that is, when readers come to a poem, even if they enjoy its music and its graphic visual configuration, they expect it to mean something. Examining the use of metaphor in such poems crystallizes these tensions. Metaphor has been taken by philosophers and linguists as both an exceptional form of language use in contrast to ‘literal’ language and, perhaps paradoxically, as an exemplary model for how all language produces meaning. To understand one thing in a metaphor (the tenor), the reader must pass through the understanding or grasping of another (the vehicle). Thus, metaphor emphasizes the difference and deferral that post-structuralism argues is at the center of all language’s meaning-making. My dissertation asks: where does metaphor’s recognition of language’s mediation leave a poem’s undeniable investment in the immediate experience of materiality? To address this question, this dissertation closely reads the innovative visual forms produced by a range of contemporary American poets—from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to Susan Howe to Douglas Kearney. The tense relation between word and image in these poems raises questions resonant with contradictory impulses within theory. How can we think together the recent investment in “presence” within affect theory and aesthetics, on the one hand, and deconstruction’s insistence upon language’s mediation, its “non-presence,” on the other? Put simply, is it possible to bring together the affective turn and the linguistic turn? Rather than condemning the tensions as irreparable ruptures, I argue that visual poetry produces frictions and affinities similar to those that emerge from such a theoretical pairing; thus, studying these poems may help us gain purchase on these wider debates.