Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "body without organs" — a plane of immanence prior to the organization and stratification of the organism — has been taken up by experimental poets as a figure for the poem that resists closure, hierarchy, and organic form; Artaud, from whom Deleuze and Guattari derived the concept, was himself a poet, and his late writings from Rodez enact the body without organs — language and body simultaneously dismantled and reconstituted outside normal organization; A poet experimenting with anti-form might invoke the body without organs as a philosophical principle — the poem as a field of intensities rather than a structured organism with head, body, and tail (beginning, middle, end); Anne Carson's hybrid texts, which move between essay, lyric, translation, and image, could be read as bodies without organs — they refuse the organizing logic of genre and discipline in favor of a plane of intensities; The distinction between the body without organs (BwO) and the organism parallels the distinction in poetry between the open, provisional text and the closed, finished work — and postmodern poets have often pursued the BwO as an ideal of textual openness; Whitman's poetic body — expansive, containing multitudes, refusing to resolve into a single coherent self — anticipates the body without organs as a philosophical ideal: the self as a field of diverse intensities that resists the stratum of a fixed identity