Interpreters and critics of hypertext fiction are not, as a matter of necessity ­ and certainly not as a matter of urgency ­ looking back to the history of innovative poetics, from Mallarmé to the present, through, to name but a few of the relevant moments, the poetics of the page, the smashing of the pentameter, the ‘ideogrammic’ method of the Fenollosa/Pound, the ‘field’ and its opening out in Olson and others, the various strands of concrete poetry and the more inclusive, less rigid visual poetics now excitingly hybridized with ‘language writing.’