According to St. Thomasino: "The Go poems were originally composed on a standard manual Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. They were and still are considered to be "typewriter poems" by virtue of the fact that they were conceived and composed according to the "standard" all-letters-take-the-same-space-as-the-widest-letter arrangement that is the case with most popular manual typewriters. Until the availability of the monospaced Microsoft TrueType font Courier New, reproduction for publication had to be accomplished by paste up (and this is still the case, as most editors still do not have a monospaced font available for layout, notwithstanding the fact that typewriter poems are usually notoriously difficult, and time-consuming, for an editor to reset). Most importantly, I could not compose or revise a Go poem on my PC. Until a monospaced font became available, the typewriter poem was bound to the typewriter. (And a poem such as "Jacques' Dilemma" could not, until then, be composed on a PC.) In order for a poem to be a true typewriter poem, it must adhere to the all-letters-take-the-same-space-as-the widest-letter standard. Working on the Go series, certain concerns were foremost in my mind. First in order was the idea of a verbal Cubism. (To transpose and utilize the procedures implicit in Cubist painting, something I had been concerned with in my Ekphrasis and igne manuscripts.) My inspiration for this was the work of the Alsatian-Jewish poet Max Jacob, and then Gerald Kamber's remarkable book, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism. However, Max Jacob wrote, for the most part, in the idiom of the prose poem, while in my work I was also concerned with writing visual poetry or the "typewriter poem." My Cubism had to meet the added request of being (in the same sense as the, typewriter poem) somehow visual. One concept I could not do without, but would first need to transpose to my medium, if I was to attempt this, was the concept of enframement. But while I did not want to make available to my reader a picture as such (the closest I came to this is seen in "Go sixteen" where I sought to portray the utterance of God pinned to a cross), I did want to make accessible to him some sort of extra-verbal, visual structure. But then every poem, regardless of whether it is strictly speaking a visual poem, has a visual structure. I call this generic visual structure the poetic template. The poetic template, generally speaking, is the margin and indentation pattern, the outlining or profile or sectional pattern that meets the eye. It is an identifying pattern, an eidos, and when we encounter it we associate it with poetry. With regard to the visual (or typewriter) poem, it is by way of scanning the scope of the poetic template that we construe and know the presence of and come to recognize a picture or object, or shape. This picture or object then refers us back to the verbal matter of the poem and works in complementarity with it to strengthen and increase the poem's conveyance or exemplification. Furthermore, the poetic template need not only be thought of as a surrounding or exterior pattern, it can also be thought of in terms of an interior, inlining or in-lying pattern. What if the poetic template were reversed, what if it were somehow turned inside out, with the inner pattern turned to face the outside? In painting, the concept of enframement is really for the most part a matter of borders. The painting (concepts of the construction of spacial perspective such as vanishing point and hill and dale and measuring points notwithstanding) literally ends at the frame. But then in another sense, enframement has to do with composition, with the ordering and combining of the constituents of the picture so as to achieve a certain effectiveness, an effectiveness that in and of itself may serve the aims, and ends, of enframement as such. The constituents of my poem are the words, and their ordering, to one extent, is a matter of syntax. But then to another extent, their ordering is towards a visual structure that goes beyond the poetic template as such. This visual structure must have meaning. We know from communications that signs without meaning (without reference) do not amount to anything (they amount to noise), whereas signs that do have meaning, are so because they are redundant, when they recur they refer to the same, they carry a significant degree of reliability, and we enjoy a certain luxury of predictability where concerns their usage. Our vision is active. We do not see things so much as the relations that hold between things and ourselves. Whereas to one set of eyes a cloud formation may be the sign of an incumbent weather pattern, to another set of eyes that same cloud formation may be the Holy Mother weeping tears. Which interpretation is correct (which is most liable to cause panic among the thought-policy makers)? My visual structure (the poetic template) must have meaning, but this "meaning" must not be anterior to its coming into sight. For this reason first of all it must not be determined beforehand by me prior to my writing of the poem.. I must not know what this visual structure will ultimately look like (at the same time I must still somehow determine its coming into being). And second this meaning must not be a matter of my for this and no other purpose presenting a definite figure to my reader. This meaning must reside with the eye of the spectator, within the eye and imagination of the beholder. What sort of meaning can do this? It is a meaning that is properly given to insight and inference, and the best comparison I can call upon is that with the projective Rorschach bisymmetrical inkblots. It is in this sense that the Go poems are visual, and that their visual structure should have meaning. Visually, then, the Go poems would exercise the "reader's" fertility of imagination and not perhaps to be induced to see a definite figure or picture or object. (If I say, "in every ink-blot I, see a basinlike cavity that reminds me of a female pelvis," then the ink-blots have no value for me. But if upon being shown the plate I am unable to express in words what I see, then my very shot of aphasia, or perhaps it is nothing more or other than introspection, may in and of itself be meaningful, as affective or abient/adient states are meaningful.) The reader ought to see, ought to experience, structure only. And this structure must revert back to the syntax, back to the word constituents, which in conjunction with it came into being. In this way only is the synthesis of content "shaped." And whereas at one time the typewriter poem was referred to as the "concrete poem," here we might see the "abstract or Cubist typewriter poem." While composing "Go sixteen," I had a definite object (a shape) in mind, and I superimposed this onto the structural formula. That poem is "seen" through this lens if you will, (through this template). Such a deciding element was deliberately kept absent from the other numbers in the series. I think the structural formula as such can be easily figured out and applied elsewhere, it is redundant, it is fundamentally the same in every number. But to whatever degree you elucidate it, it is and remains a technical matter, and technical matters, however supportive, are beyond the experience of the poetry. Go Poems 1 & 2 are missing from this copy. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.