On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Alison wrote...
>The eye travelling over the pages of a book can leap where and how it
>likes (to another book, if it desires, or out of the window). I can, if
>I wish, read a book backwards (and have, though not as thoroughly
>backwards as Samuel Beckett might wish). The hypertext link will lead
>only to one destination, which makes it perhaps useful for encyclopaedias
>but not nearly as interesting or unpredictable as the connections that
>can be made in an individual mind.
True. Any yet, if you were preparing a collection of poems, would you
just order them randomly, on the grounds that a reader could (and likely
would) flip from one to another anyway? Or would you attempt to arrange
them so that a reader could, if they wanted to, read them in the order
printed and maybe discover connections between them?
And if, while you were deciding on the arrangement, you discovered that
there was more than one ordering that made sense, that you'd like to
point out to the reader, be a bit frustrated that you could only choose
one?
Best,
--
Peter
http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
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