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I:6. [Thus,] the advocacy of hypertextual or cybertextual technologies in the context of
innovative poetics is not the same thing as promoting a new and better word processor.
It is a continuity with the development of form-in-content or indeed the creation of new forms which
has always been characteristic of the ancient and various tradition of innovative linguistic art. The writer
may choose to inscribe new form itself in the work, proposing a novel poetext with each new publication.
The present essay attempts a simple, hypertextual reformation of the linear essay, using an
indexing metaphor which is both familiar and internalized in (Western) codexspace. The point being,
whereas I am severely constrained in my re-engineering of an essay which will appear in a bound
paper collection, in software the potential is much greater, the forms are more plastic, such that the
creation of the form becomes an integral and appreciable part of the creation of the work, if not a
necessary part.
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