Oneiric.

Despite what Archie Bunker said, Edith was never a dingbat.  Dingbat is a printer’s term for a device that divides text, recognizing some pause deeper than the space between paragraphs, but less profound than the full stop at the end of a chapter.  Dingbats dance in the gap.  Dingbats come out in the indecisive twilight.  I made the dingbats used on the following pages with a monster Magic Marker on blank postcards bought at the Tru-Valu Hardware in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  They are greatly reduced from the postcards, and some of them have migrated to the margins of Book IV to relieve the monumental daunt of a long poem.  I don’t guess they’re technically dingbats there. Swimmers.

Dingbats are helpful when you’re not making sustained, connected sense.  Just put in a dingbat, and there’s oneiric coherence.  Dingbats let possibly awkward transitions move in graceful ellipsis.  They should become part of a freshman composition, and children could make them new as they learn penmanship.

Coleman Barks, from the Preface to The Soul of Rumi