page-hogs
*
What is the motivation of those print poets who insert a lot of dead space into the body of their poems?—
Who spread a poem out over ten pages when it could be printed on two or three with normal stanza and section breaks.
Have you seen the poems that do this?
A few piddly words or phrases appear, clumped or sprinkled on the length and width of each page:
these fragment/segments are surrounded or interspersed by as much blank empty white space
as the size of the book format affords.
Surely their purpose is to use up as much paper as possible, to kill as many trees as they can.
Isn't that why Michael Palmer puts double spaces in between his lines,
so his poems can fill up twice the space that regular poems use, so they can fill up twice the number of pages,
and use up twice the amount of paper, and thereby kill twice as many trees?
(And oh yeah: double his bibliography)—
(Oh but of course it's not
*ecocidal egomania*
that causes these poets to claim more page-space for their poems than others use,
no, it's an esthetic choice doncha know.)
**
