Well, the cats are out of the bag, but I never cared much about Ron Silliman's little test, which was much less interesting than Kasey Mohammad's response. He begins with the image, out of Lacan, of finding a stone covered with unfamiliar hieroglyphics, unreadable but clearly (how? why?) a message to people who are not you. Kasey suggests that Ron has presented us with a less drastic but similar situation because "as a consequence of not knowing who wrote them" we "don't have access to an entire set of implied cultural instructions for reading." [emphasis added] Further, even those stylistic habits which we can identify as characteristic of certain schools are "dauntingly dull … because they are by themselves, rather than accompanied by their interesting human inscribers." [emphasis in the original]
But some poems, Kasey notes, don't depend so much on context or on knowing the author. He mentions Frost's "Mending Wall," which can be read "not knowing who Frost was, or when or where the poem was written" but which nevertheless is a richer poem if set in its web of influence (both to and from) and in the context of the 20th century US transition from a rural to an urban nation. He's glad that there are poems like "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow" which "work in a relative social vacuum." Up to this point, I'm with him almost completely.
Now for the promised information theory. In the late 1940s Claude Shannon, working on the problem of transmitting information reliably over a noisy channel, demonstrated that the equations describing that problem have exactly the same form as the Boltzman entropy equations (a clear explanation and lots of links here). The important result for my purposes is that any message ("Oh, happy day!" is a message, and so are "I'm confused" and "Remember me!") can be conveyed with arbitrary (though not necessarily complete) accuracy over any medium—if you're willing to do enough work by increasing signal strength or redundancy or both.
To some extent, that is implicit in Kasey's recognition that some poems ("Mending Wall") provide enough internal context (redundancy) to be understood without looking very far outside the poem. But I'd argue that any poem which doesn't provide sufficient context to be understood pretty clearly without personal acquaintance with the author is a poem which needs more work, at least if its author is going to complain about being excluded from the mainstream. I'll go a little further: a poem is a failure if understanding it requires an effort on the part of the reader incommensurate with the complexity of its message.
Of course poems must do more than be understood: they aren't instruction manuals. Poems must elicit a response from readers, emotional or intellectual or both, that encourages those readers to buy them, remember them, and share them with other readers. That means shouting and near-endless repetition are strategies of limited usefulness for poets, but there are other things we can do.
Let's look at "O western wind." The message here is really very simple: "I miss the warm winds and gentle rains of spring, and, even more, I miss my absent love." Unlike Kasey, I don't think the power of the poem has anything to do with persona or a "dream of identity"—in fact, its message depends on its near-universal application to human experience, on its separation from particular identity. Beyond that, its power (compared to my affectless paraphrase) derives from its musical qualities: in this case, alliteration, meter, and rhyme.
At last I'm getting to the little poems from Thom Gunn, and Wordsworth's not far behind. I told you that "JVC" was J. V. Cunningham, and knowing that Cunningham himself wrote many rhyming, metrical epigrams probably increases a reader's pleasure in the poem. But does the poem depend on that knowledge in any way? Doesn't it embody in its own structure a description of the type of poet it praises, so that, even not knowing Cunningham's verse, we know a good deal about it? Here's one of Cunningham's:
Jack and Jill
She said he was a man who cheated.
He said she didn't play the game.
She said an expletive deleted.
He said the undeleted same.
And so they ended their relation
With meaningful communication.
Are you surprised? Has Gunn has done the necessary work?
Finally, here's the whole sentence which Gunn quotes from Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads:
For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
And, from the same source: "What is a poet? He is a man speaking to men."
It's important that Wordsworth didn't say "a man speaking to his friends," or "a man speaking to those in his circle" (what some would now call his "scene"). The poet must speak, as much as possible, to those who aren't clued in, aren't hip, who disagree, who even disapprove. And he or she does that by doing the work necessary both to free the poem from the poet's particular circumstances (without necessarily ignoring or hiding those circumstances and sometimes, in fact, by explaining those circumstances) and to make it memorable, moving, and even beautiful.
11:47:39 PM 
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