gone asemic

Reading the words of the poem, the mind stumbling over them for lack of coherent language beyond some presumed idiosyncratic intent, one wished the letters themselves could be obscured to the point of asemic writing, where at least one could engage the work on a purely visual level.

sleight of letters

The word is the alphabet’s prestidigitation.

figures dancing

Reading a poem and thinking that the printed letters are figures dancing.

slippage

There is slippage in all poems, the language has its limits. It's like working on a sign-board with a bucket of moveable type. You're never sure if you'll be able to fit all the letters together properly and you're unsure whether or not you have the letters needed to make all the words you want to display (or say).

touching bottom

Written in letters that could touch bottom.

discouraging the biographer

Documents relating to Cavafy’s life are scarce. He seldom kept a journal, and very few of his own letters have survived. His life was rather uneventful, and his remarks on his poems are generally unhelpful, while the observations recorded in his sporadic journal entries are seldom of great interest. His poem ‘Hidden’, which he wrote in 1908 but never published, is particularly discouraging for the biographer:

   From what I did and what I said
   let them not seek to find who I was.

—Peter Mackridge, introduction to Robert Liddell’s Cavafy: A Critical Biography (Duckbacks, 1974).

old marquee

Like on the marquee of a closed-down theater, letters had tilted, slipped down or fallen entirely from the title.

no rain

Block: Why will the letters not rain over the desert blankness of the page?

working dog

A critic should be a terrier let loose in a thicket of letters.

equal letters

A correspondence between equals is of most interest.

weight of white

The thin line of letters trekking across the page felt an avalanche of white building over them.

new word

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

in silence and solitude

Poetry and letters
Persist in silence and solitude.

—Tu Fu, "Night in the House by the River," translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New Directions, 1956)

fear of falling

With white knuckles the letters of the poem clung to the page, fearing they’d be knocked off the anthology page at any moment.

stick figures

There was no one behind the poem and no real people in the poem…thus the words reverted to groups of letters that began to look like so many stick figures.

crow words

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

blank page block

Block: The letters lie buried in an avalanche of whiteness. You can hear only muffled cries, but can’t make out any words.