Text will continue to become more notably and markedly visual, but these highly inflected texts will supplant or augment not narrative, but lyric forms because they function similarly.

To show how this works, let me show you a favorite Emily Dickinson piece.

Circumference, thou bride
Of awe, -- possessing, thou
Shalt be possessed by
Every hallowed knight
That dares to covet thee.

What constitutes nonlinear text? We build letters of lines. We arrange words in lines (mostly). Eyes flick across a page or (though irregularly) a screen in lines. Spoken words evanesce across a room into what we call past, and we model that idea time with a line. In a sense everyone reads in a line

In another sense no one does.

In response to a few comments regarding the materiality of etext --

I doubt any medium is more or less material than another. The computer light physically strikes us; the book physically hefts in our hands, grants us texture, odor, and an immediate, sensual measure of where we are in our reading.

But when Andreeson & chums invented the graphical browser and the Web suddenly strolled into our homes and offices, most of us untutored folk started by assuming that whatever had been good writing would be good writing, that we could just take a business portfolio or an ad flyer, upload it, and, and set our Buicks on cruise control on down the Information Highway.

I'm in early stages of preparing an online edition of Emily Dickinson's Fascicles. (The Fascicles were the little booklets in which Dickinson bound much of her verse).

I wonder how you would prefer to see such a document. Here are the problems.

• Her nonstandard punctuation changes the meaning of her text.
• Even her handwriting is critical in these changes
• Her handwriting is very hard for most people to read.
• People have tried to transcribe the handwriting in such a way that the visual qualities of the punctuation are preserved. No one has come close.

I'm wondering whether or how people reconcile the creative visuality of sites like the wefeelfine.org recommended by Shock and Awe with the uniformity espoused by usability experts like Jakob Nielson and Vincent Flanders, here in conversation over sticking to standard things like underlined blue links.

More visual poetry, FYI--

The William Blake Archive
http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
(All or virtually all of Blake's illuminated MS's online. Vast and astonishing.)

Guillame Appollonaire's Calligrammes - disparaged somewhat by the Noigandres group -- the Brazillian wing of concrete poetry -- but still pretty interesting.

The book's Les Calligrammes. Ubuweb's got a few samples.
http://www.ubu.com/historical/app/app.html

George Herbert
PoMo in the 1300's, or almost.
The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.

Emily Dickinson's Radical Scatters.
Cybertext collection of the fragments of poetry Dickinson left during her last years.You can log in and and find it through the libraries at Claremont -- one needs a subscription to enter otherwise.

For 12 years or so I've been concerned with electric literature. I'd like to see work with links that does what literature does -- that props revery, that torques thought, that creates of necessity something more than the sum of its parts.

I've tried to do this a lot of ways. I've learned some things, and I like what I've done (yes, and my mother claims to), but without any feeling that I've solved the problem, altogether.

I'd like to show a few things I've seen that seem to me to relate to the problems and opportunities of electric literature: hopefully somebody can straighten me out about some things.