This is a fascinating exchange for me. I've spent a great deal of time studying William Carlos Williams' triadic-line verse and arguing that it approximates the chunking of intonational phrasing in English as a means of conveying the spontaneity and affect of immediate speech acts. In other words, in his best poems, the "graphic syntax" doesn't coincide with syntactic units at all, but breaks them in ways that mimic a speaker's idiosyncratic sense of the significance of their speech. Complete syntactic units would be a kind of default--what occurs often at the beginning and end of the poems--to indicate neutral feeling or statements. 
 
I think other poets, like cummings, Apollinaire, Pound, or Olson, use the resources of the page and of typography to different ends that I'm intrigued by but haven't thought enough about. I quite like Paul's playful imitation of cummings.
 
Natalie

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Sat 12/6/2008 2:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Graphic Syntax--a corrected example


It
    all deep end
                       -zzz
Up
        on
                        the poet('s OR s')
S-
    -tile (or sty els)
                            of
Right
            Ink
                    !
 
(wink, wink to mr. cummings), 
 
Paul D.
 
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (_Twelfth Night_ 3.4.127-128). 


________________________________

From: Scott Woods <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2008 12:13:33 PM
Subject: Re: Graphic Syntax--a corrected example




Poets
     who write 
               in traditional forms 
                                 based on meter and rhyme
chunk their poems
                  but
                  in a different way 
                         from graphic syntax,
                                       which chunks 
                                                    based on grammatical units.
Both,
     I believe,
can make text easier to comprehend.
 
My students report
                       that they can understand difficult texts better
                                                           
--- On Sat, 12/6/08, Carolyn Hartnett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	From: Carolyn Hartnett <[log in to unmask]>
	Subject: Graphic Syntax
	To: [log in to unmask]
	Date: Saturday, December 6, 2008, 9:51 AM
	
	
	Isn't the way much poetry is printed somewhat similar to graphic syntax?
	It makes poems easier to read, I believe.
	 
	Carolyn Hartnett
	Professor Emeritus, College of the Mainland
	2027 Bay St.
	Texas City, Texas 77590
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