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In his seminal essay "Projective/Verse," Charles Olson rails against "that verse which print bred" (386). Though Olson offers an alternative to this cold, impersonal, and musically dead verse, his alternative-projective verse-does not forget the written word, just as it does not forget sound, for projective verse is, Olson insists, rooted in "the breathing of a man who writes" (386). No doubt picture books have their roots in print, Comenius's lovely Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) providing a model for the intersection of image and word that has yet to be completely shaken. This group of essays concerns the books that print bred, from the earliest and most elastic and enduring picture book form, the alphabet book, to what Charles Hatfi eld calls the "dense, encyclopedic texts" Aliki has been producing over the last forty years. In this trio of papers, we examine the materiality of these texts, and how that materiality dictates form. The group begins with Joseph Thomas's experimental essay, which explores the didactic roots of the alphabet book, from the earliest forms of alphabet poetry to the "postmodern" alphabets of the twentieth century. Thomas investigates the various ways children's and experimental authors use the alphabet as a procedure for creating both narrative and non-narrative texts, and how many of these texts remind us of the alphabet's materiality, the didactic impulse bubbling up even in the most avant-garde of alphabetic texts.

This essay explores the nonsensical elements of the composition and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” a fifty-minute poetry reading by Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. prepared for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association’s 2019 annual conference, “Send in the Clowns,” focusing primarily on the theory and practice of nonsense in relation to the writing and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” which was performed in San Diego by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. and Michael Heyman at the 2019 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference, “Send in the Clowns.”