You might well ask, "Does there need to be a poetic form uniting literature and typography? Isn't the fact that poetry is presented through typography enough?"
And the answers would be "No" and "Yes" respectively.
If (and this is a big "if") you can answer all of the following with a "No":
Was it necessary for e.e. cummings to write in all lowercase and arrange his poems on the page the way he did? Did Emily Dickinson really need all those weird dashes—and perhaps more pertinently, does the typographer setting her work need to preserve them? Should Marinetti, Tzara, and Mallarme have satisfied themselves with standard lineation?
?
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The fact is that every poet, every writer, makes choices about that relate to typography as part of their work. For some, it is a simple matter of ignoring it as much as possible—though matters like line breaks, which are both semantic and typographical matters—remain inescapable. For others, careful consideration of typography becomes just one more feature of the work itself, another means to create and convey meaning.
In fact, whole movements—including Futurism, Dada, concrete poetry, lettrism, and today's visual poetry—have made typography a central concern of their poetic production, praxis, and ethos. In many cases, that concern expresses itself through the strivings of enthusiastic amateurs, which must be appropriately translated by the professional typographer in the translation to print. In others, the "author", if such a term can remain sufficient in this case, possesses sufficient knowledge of typography and its methods to create his or her works in such a way that an awareness of the discipline informs every decision, from font choice to line spacing to overall layout.
