Dear HAP,

The medium is the message...

No one would agree more quickly than I. That's precisely why I raised the issues I did in the first place. Whatever else the poem is, it's not oriented toward people like me who try to hew to the line of form following function. I don't need to have a poem's structure toyed with arbitrarily in order to pique my interest.

(If poetry readings more often featured poetry worthy of the name, and if we had not gotten so far away in our culture from the worth of poetry, then poetry readings would be better attended. I'm thinking of the very high standing that poetry has in traditional cultures. But then, in such cultures poetry and song often have not been divorced, and perhaps it should tell us something that when we keep them together, the live audiences can sometimes fill football stadiums.)

Somehow, I'm not convinced that Ms. Cader is trying to expand the audience of poetry. It looks more to me as if she's playing the same sort of meaningless games that too many other Tuesday Poets play. I say that tempered by falcon's observation that the layout does have a different effect than the kind of layout I'd use would have, and accordingly, that some facets of her layout might have a purpose that I'm just too dense to pick up on.

wr ()()