dublinka

Umberto Eco, in The search for the perfect language, notes that in the Kabbalistic traditions notariqon was the technique of using acrostics to cipher and decipher a hidden message. The initial or final letters of a series of words generate new words. Such a technique was already a familiar artifice in poetry during the late antique and Middle Ages, when it was used for magic purposes under the name of ars notoria. I find this interesting because in theory this technique could have been used by any well read poet of recent times. As such software could easily be written to search the work of Yeats, for example, to reveal new dimensions to his poetry. In fact, standard decryption software probably already exists to do this kind of thing. The technique itself of course would also be a fun constraint to use when writing verse, and doubtless could be used for an infinite amount of other purposes, such as poems, which reveal their meanings, or which include alternative verses, critical commentary etc.