sleight of letters

The word is the alphabet’s prestidigitation.

stick figures

The alphabet: Those stick figures signaling us toward sound, then speech.

let there be dancing

When writing finally returned to Greece, in the eighth century B.C., the new Greek writing, its users, and its uses were very different. The writing was no longer an ambiguous syllabary mixed with logograms but an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenician consonantal alphabet and improved by the Greek invention of vowels. In place of lists of sheep, legible only to scribes and read only in palaces, Greek alphabetic writing from the moment of its appearance was a vehicle of poetry and humor, to be read in private homes. For instance, the first preserved example of Greek alphabetic writing, scratched onto an Athenian wine jug of about 740 B.C., is a line of poetry announcing a dancing contest: “Whoever of all dancers performs most nimbly will win this vase as a prize.”

—Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999)

kelp diver

He had delved so deeply into the poem that he felt submerged in the text, a diver with the alphabet twisting upward around him like kelp.

strings and stick figures

Poet, treat the alphabet as so many puppets commanded by your hands.

acrostic composed

alphabetically
composed
revealing
only
simple
truly
insipid
composition.

new word

All the other letters should stagger backwards or scatter with each new word dropped into the poem.

twenty-six tones

A whole alphabet of musical notes.

stitching it together

The alphabet is your sewing kit.

required letters

To write this poem, you’re almost going to need a new alphabet.

alpabetic roots

A poem’s roots are the alphabet.

sound the leaves make

At times meaning is no more than a wind moving through the forest of the alphabet.

crow words

Insolent as crows the letters perched there on the ruled lines of the notebook.

alternate alphabet

The reviser’s alphabet: the squiggle, the strike-through, the arrow, the slash mark, etc.

effigy of alphabetic straw

To read materially is to make the word a crude effigy of alphabetic straw.