Poetic imagination is not simply the capacity of the mind to use verbal
cues to visualize an absent or non-existent object as though it were
present. It assumes in advance an ability and willingness on the part of
the reader to enter into the fictive process. Poetic play, which I recom-
mended in Chapter 3 as a possible solution to several perplexing
problems, obliges the reader to assume the voice and referential con-
texts of others while never relinquishing a sense of the habitual self,
the real "me." This is the willing suspension of disbelief ("for the
moment," as Coleridge wisely added) in the power of the self to be-
come other selves.

The training that qualifies the reader to be this poetic player involves
the learning of certain basic plays, or tactics. Since these are performed
in language, poetic tactics are specializations of linguistic tactics, that is,
syntactics. But unlike the syntax of speech and of what we in a print
culture might term "disposable writing," poetic tactics are fashioned
for a stored and repeatable verbal artifact, a text. Though, as I pointed
out in Chapter 1, the storage mode (oral or graphic) is an important
factor in the structure and content of a text, the very fact that it is stored
and can be repeatedly retrieved differentiates it at every level of inte-
gration from that of unstored discourse. Because of this fundamental
difference, poetic structures are not bound by tactical rules at all com-
parable in rigor to those of grammar. Accordingly, there is no compel-
ling need for repeatable discourse to reveal its complete meaning at
first hearing or perusal. It would have been an impressive announce-
ment -- that the grammar of poetry had finally been discovered -- but
if, as I have argued, the links are loose and determined by the aesthetics
of play behavior, linguistic syntax can never be more than an available
model, not a norm, for poetic tactics.

Since the primary difference between poetic and linguistic tactics
stems from the iterative, textualized character of the former and the
ongoing, speech-grounded character of the latter, the issue of time

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