I don't know how I've missed the personal site of Dennis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, but the Blowhards haven't. Some especially good things here and here. The text of the latter is, unfortunately, garbled in a few places.
I've mentioned Paul Lake work as a poet an critic before. His new piece at Contemporary Poetry Review is a tour de force.
I haven't had time to catch up on the poetic blogosphere, but last week Ron Silliman wrote a good and interesting piece on thwarting of expectations as a literary strategy. He sees clearly that no such strategy will work for long: readers will figure it out. At that point the writer can choose to make even more extreme efforts to keep readers disoriented as long as possible, and that is the strategy SIlliman prefers as a writer and as a reader. Nothing wrong with that.
But at each stage of greater disequilibrium there will be fewer readers willing to play the game. Constantly being confronted with apparent meaninglessness is just as boring as never finding anything new. There is another way to play with expectation, one which is, I think, more respectful of the reader, one to which, by the evidence of this passage from the post, Silliman is apparently blind:
A poem in quatrains tells you an enormous amount about itself even before you've absorbed the first word – an entire series of expectations are set & framed. These can be met or confounded – either approach has its pleasures – but it's significantly different from a poem that leaves the reader unsettled, off-balance, not certain quite what to expect.
Let's make those quatrains, in some ways, even more predictable by putting them in meter and rhyming them, say, abab. Now the reader's expectations are surely even more constrained, and for that very reason, deviations become more noticeable and more meaningful, and, potentially, a source of greater pleasure for the reader. The play of the meter across natural speech rhythm becomes a source of unexpected music, a well-chosen rhyme is not predictable, and, of course, nothing in the form places any constraint on content, which can range from nonsense to serious philosophical argument to pure emotional outburst or any imaginable combination of human speech and thought. It is the business of good metrical poetry to keep the reader unsettled while always respecting the reader as an equal partner—that is, to surprise the reader with a new view of a recognizable and shared world.
Clarification: 2/3/04
Yes, the quoted passage says the reader's expectations of the quatrain may "be confounded." But since that is contrasted with poetry which "leaves the reader … not certain quite what to expect," it's either just a careless mistake (natural in a blog) or Silliman means something very strange indeed: that his preferred poetics systematically thwarts the reader's every expectation. That is a literal dead end. People and other animals die when they are are taught that nothing they do matches their world. Luckily, books are not like guards at concentration camps or the gulag. We can throw them at the wall.
10:07:32 PM 
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