18 April 2004. One of the reasons I post a lot to the New-Poetry Internet discussion group, besides the fact that so much of the time I'm the only one there wanting or willing to defend some point of view is that the fire I draw makes me think more concentratedly about my own poetry. Recently, for instance, burstnorm poetry was described by one participant at New-Poetry as "odd spellings and rebuses, etc.," or something close to that. Yes, I thought, infraverbal poetry, one of the many kinds of burstnorm poetries there are, can probably be accurately described as odd spellings, just as traditional verse can be described as regular rhythms and pretty-sounding words. But just as meter and the melodic devices of poetry are, at their best, definers and extenders of mood, and sometimes even metaphorical, oddly-spelled words at their best add to the poems they are in. At a higher level, actually, since (good) infraverbal poets only use them when they achieve metaphoricality, as "lighght" does in multiple ways for those open to its effects.

That made me think about what the "hte" I stole from David Graham, who used it at New-Poetry to make fun of infraverbal poetry, did in the poem I put it in and earlier posted here at my blog. It was intended to convey a whole new way of taking reality, a reality as beyond "the the" as "the the" was beyond any "the something." As I considered the "hte," however, I suddenly realized that Stevens was concerned with some final reality, not some different reality. To go even further in the direction he had been going, I needed not "the hte," but . . . well, my revised poem is below. I liked it before; I think it significantly better now--albeit nothing but an odd spelling: