01.

Conceptualists have distinguished themselves as poets in part because they explore what I call the “limit-cases” of writing, taking an interest in the most marginal extremes of expression. Some of us, for example, have investigated the limit-cases of “scale” in poetics, composing poems not only as puny as molecules of sugar at the atomistic scale of our DNA, but also as vast as databases of email at the archivist scale of the National Security Agency (NSA).¹ Even though “scale,” as a value, has received only the merest notice in the history of poetics, I believe that a sense of scale (be it in degree, in volume, in length) remains crucial to us if we wish to understand the fundamental perspective of poets, who must often adopt a position with respect to their own “unit” of composition — a unit that, whatever its scale, must act like an “atom,” recopied and adjoined to make a text.