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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/