In the Preface to Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (1996) Stephen Dobyns writes:

I believe that a poem is an emotional-intellectual-physical construct that is meant to touch the heart of the reader, that it is meant to be reexperienced by the reader. I believe that a poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms. I also believe that a poem is a noise and that noise is shaped. A poem is not natural speech; it is artificial speech. I believe that whether one is a formal poet or a free verse poet, one is always involved with the relation between stressed and unstressed syllables. And I believe that a poem doesn't try to present reality but presents a metaphor that represents some aspect of the writer's relation to the world: a metaphor that can be potentially reexperienced and become meaningful to the reader. In the next several hundred pages I will expand upon these ideas and ideally they will grow more precise.

And so he does, in a series of essays some of which themselves shatter windows with their imagery and insight ...

_{(cf. Rules vs Principles (23 Jun 1999), Iambic Honesty 1 (23 Apr2001), Lying Verses (15 Mar 2001), Where We Are (24 Apr 2005), Chekhov on Tolstoy (15 Jul 2005), Dangerous Literature (3 Mar 2006), ...)}

TopicPoetry - TopicLiterature - 2006-03-10

(correlates: SyntacticSugar, DangerousLiterature, LeverAge, ...)