CELESTIAL ALPHABET EVENT

The work of a Christian kabbalist of the seventeenth century, it can be best compared to contemporary attempts to model poetic structures on — or read them into — natural phenomena. Here as elsewhere the key is calligraphic: a form of the (Hebrew) alphabet ("magic letters") going back to the Hellenistic period, in which the lines of the letters culminate in rounded points, permitting a later application to the night sky, where patterns of stars (points joined by "lines") can then be read as letters, groups of letters read as words, etc. In the process the sky becomes a massive concrete or visual poem, whose words or "messages" are constantly transforming.

Image and commentary from Rothenberg and Joris, Poems for the Millennium, volume 1.