Nonetheless, Karl was not entirely on my side. He said I was wrong to consider the nulletter a letter: it was a punctuation mark. He didn't mind its being part of the alphabet, but felt that if it was, the comma, colon, period and all the rest of their family deserved to be there, too.

Another friend in the trade, Paul Collier, was more receptive to my idea--too receptive, I'm afraid. "Bob," said he, "you say there are 27 letters. Why not 52? Or more? The space between letters has a certain quality determined by the letters it lies between. I'm no numbers expert, so I couldn't tell you the exact possible combinations, but my uneducated guess is 26 times 26, or 676. If you add 26, you get 702 'letters' in the alphabet." Clearly my suggestion wasn't the cut&dry proposition it had at first seemed to be. I had some work to do if I expected to make it at all viable.

I knew at once, of course, that I couldn't have a 702-letter alphabet. But what could I say against Paul's line of reasoning? One thing would be that 676 is too high a figure for the number of nulletters since a nulletter inserted between an "m" and an "n," for instance, would look the same as one between an "m" and an "r." But that wouldn't help much since from another point of view 676 is too *low* inasmuch as different font styles could make the shape of inter-alphabetic spaces infinitely variable to the sensitive observer.

For quite a while I didn't know what to do. Eventually, though, I came up with what I think is a masterful solution: I defined the nulletter as a square that is always about the height and width of an "o," which I took to be the most average-sized of the letters. An upper-case nulletter would, of course, be rectangular, and taller. My alphabetical space would thus not include the emptinesses that every conventional letter contains, and my expanded alphabet could stay just 27 characters in length.

As for Karl's point, it seemed to me correct that nulletters are used to indicate pauses in the same way that commas and periods are. Certainly "all" they do in Karl's fission is tell readers to stop a moment and see what has been said--don't, that is, read "guidance" in one Evelyn-Wood-Gulp but pause to hear the "gee" that's in it, and then three times more for its "I," "you" and "dance."

But what about the nulletters in Eugen Gomringer's "Silence?" In this work, which has long been admired by connoisseurs of visual poetry, the word, "silence," is printed eight times to form a box around an unoccupied zone into which a ninth rendering of "silence," with nulletters fore and aft, would exactly fit. Hence, for me, the zone contains nine nulletters, and--aside from the ones fore and aft--they are not special symbols telling a reader to pause; they are an absence of letters and as such express a silence beyond the silence of printed words. And those nulletters, I should add for the sake of completeness, do not represent absent letters the way apostrophes would; they are absent letters.

In a related poem, a haiku by Cor van der Heuvel, nulletters surround rather than are surrounded by, a text. The text is the single word, "tundra," and the rest of the page it is on is not truly blank but teems with a metaphorically-significant absence of additional words.

Similarly by itself on a page is John Byrum's one-word poem, "utter," arrestingly surrounded by the utterly unuttered. . . . A fourth relevant specimen is Ladislav Novak's "Gloria," which consists of the text, "GL RIA"--and, soaring above it like a high note out of Handel's Messiah--an "O." Here, again, we have not just a place to pause but the concrete absence of a letter. As final evidence for my position I submit the following, which is by Michael Basinski:

                                 I

           H  r th  sl dg s w th th  b lls--
               S lv r b lls!
          Wh t   w rld  f m rr m nt th  r m l dy f r t lls!
           H w th y t nkl , t nkl , t nkl ,
              n th   cy   r  f n ght!
           Wh l  th  st rs th t  v rspr nkl 
            ll th  h  v ns, s  m t  tw nkl 
             W th   cryst ll n  d l ght;
           K  p ng t m , t m , t m ,
            n   s rt  f r n c rhym ,
          T  th  t nt nn b l t  n th t s  m s c lly w lls
           Fr m th  b lls, b lls, b lls, b lls,
               B lls, b lls, b lls--
          Fr m th  j ngl ng  nd th  t nkl ng  f th  b lls.

                                 II

           H  r th  m ll w w dd ng b lls--
               G ld n b lls!
          Wh t   w rld  f h pp n ss th  r h rm ny f r t lls!
           Thr  gh th  b lmy   r  f n ght
           H w th y r ng   t th  r d l ght!--
             Fr m th  m lt n-g ld n n t s,
                nd  ll  n t n ,
             Wh t   l q  d d tty fl  ts
           T  th  t rtl d v  th t l st ns, wh l  sh  gl  ts
                n th  m  n!
              h, fr m   t th  s  nd ng c lls,
          Wh t   g sh  f   ph ny v l m n  sly w lls!
               H w  t sw lls!
               H w  t dw lls
              n th  f t r !--h w  t t lls
              f th  r pt r  th t  mp ls
           T  th  sw ng ng  nd th  r ng ng
                f th  b lls, b lls, b lls--
              f th  b lls, b lls, b lls, b lls,
               B lls, b lls, b lls--
          T  th  rhym ng  nd th  ch m ng  f th  b lls!