The modern poet, adept at the fashionable practices of exterminating punctuation, altering the spelling, ignoring capital letters, drawing with letters, repeating words exhaustively, etc., etc., has to concentrate very hard not to pass for a child or, in more serious cases, for a mental retard. How just a few pages are enough to make one sick of such gimmicks! Then we are left to wonder: what else? Often, we have to conclude that they are nothing more than disguises for an inability to work words in a dynamic and interesting way, showing mastery and making creative use of the resources offered by the language. We end up reflecting on what the Latinists repeat so often, and it seems that intelligence is related to the ability to articulate language…