Line and Constellation

1) The situation.

• "formal simplification, abbreviated, restricted forms of language are emerging"
• Think of the generic tones of newscasters, of the dominance of English internationally, of the vanishing of endangered languages (roughly half the world's languages, of acronyms and IM...

2) Is this a crisis? No.

• "Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful use."

3) The new poem.

• "visual as a whole as well as in its parts"
• "an object to be both seen and used: an object containing thought but made concrete through play-activity, its concern is with brevity and conciseness"

4. The Constellation. An arrangement.

• "the simplest kind of configuration in poetry"
• "encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster"

5. Writer and reader. The constellation is an invitation.

• "The constellation is ordered by the poet."
• "The reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play and joins in."