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. RulesVersusPrinciples (23 Jun 1999), IambicHonesty1 (23 Apr2001), LyingVerses (15 Mar 2001), WhereWeAre (24 Apr 2005), ChekhovOnTolstoy (15 Jul 2005), DangerousLiterature (3 Mar 2006), ...)

TopicPoetry - TopicLiterature - 2006-03-10

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