The long poem traditionally exists primarily in time. It consists of a narrative, which is a temporal device, moving along through events in a (generally) chronological order. If events are taken out of the time sequence, these sections are marked off as being a speech or song or flashback or otherwise made easily comprehensible within that boundary that is time. It also traditionally falls back on meter, which is a more blatant temporal device. Meter creates effects over time, whether actually out loud or in the reader's head.
The visual poem exists primarily in space. It exists on various parts of the page at once and must be negotiated not with regard to proper meter or narrative, but a piecing together that can happen at any pace whatsoever. The obvious incarnations of the visual poem, then, are creations of folks like Apollinaire, The Futurists, Cummings, and the concretists of the latter half of the 20th Century.
There are less obvious poems that ought to be called visual, though, and which blend these two states. diluvium strives for both spacial and temporal recognition. But consider any long poem that features enjambment. To enjamb is to assume a reader, not a listener. It is to force that reader back in space, not just in time. And yet the overall narrative, this being a long poem, pushes forward. This is truly hybrid work, asking us to use two very different areas of the brain. What is the first narrative poem ever to use enjambment? I don't know. I'd like to know. Google is pretty useless on this end, so someone smart out there should feel free to chime in.
Working under this concept, can I open the door to calling any of the consciously-different long poems visual ones as well? Is Whitman in the door, at least in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, because he intentionally printed the poems with their full, long lines? He published the subsequent editions with the lines shortened on the page, so that despite the preserved meter of his voice, the effect on the reader (not listener) is distinct. Do I call The Waste Land a visual poem, with its free verse ranging not through meter but through line breaks? Is it a visual poem only in contrast with the typical long poems that precedes it (do we notice its form only because that form is so different than its contemporaries and forebears)? And if the break with prior assumptions is necessary to the visual, are free verse long poems today no longer truly visual, since we've accustomed ourselves to viewing them? Do I call Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette a visual poem despite her explicit effort to create a new meter because said meter is cordoned off by the visual device "of constant" "quotation marks around" "phrases?"
More questions later, perhaps.
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