They were not really designed to be viewed on a CRT, but to be printed out. The stimulus for the idea behind these diagrams came from an effort to confront in poetry a concept common in music called tone clusters. A tone cluster is simply a group of sounds occurring simultaneously but with no necessary structural relation to one another other than their mere juxtaposition. I began by wanting to carry this idea to poetry and to experiment with what the concept of word clusters might mean. This presented a serious problem over what to do about syntax.
Syntactical information is carried partly by the word itself and partly by the context.
As an answer to this problem the idea of having a separate channel, so to speak, for syntactical information immediately presented itself, and thus was born the beginnings of the current diagram notation. As the work progressed I became less and less interested in word clusters, and the words at each node in the diagrams have tended to become more numerous and more grammatical in the ordinary sense. At the same time certain possibilities became evident for types of structural relationships that are easy to do in the diagram notation but quite difficult to do in ordinary syntax. My work is simply poetry, my method is simply another way to make poetry, no more, no less. Computers may be capable of becoming obsolete, but not poems nor ways of making poetry.