Poetry, in all its uncountable forms, seems to be difficult to describe. One cannot put "poetry" into a Platonic Form, saying that a sonnet by Shakespeare or a language poem by Tate are instantiations of "The Poem." Poetry seems like a mystery which one can never really solve. In a way, the poet, the writer of poetry, exhibits a great degree of control over the poem, what is understood about it. Through interpretation, the reader can gain back some degree of control, assigning understood meaning to parts of the poem that previously seemed opaque, and thus elucidating deeper, even less transparent layers.

As a poet, I believe it is important to help the reader to gain an understanding of my poetry. I don't have the resources to sit down with everyone who might become interested in my poetry to discuss it at length, so perhaps putting clues in the text is an alternative. How do I go about doing this without robbing my poetry of its form, without stopping along the way to explain the details, without lapsing from the poetic flow itself? One possible way, the way I have chosen to explore in this thesis, is hypertext.