23 February 2004. Some somewhat scattered thoughts today about the difference between what I call "effective poems" and what I call "important poems." For me, a poem is effective to the degree that it gives pleasure to a knowledgeable, sympathetic infocipient (or "information-recipient," a term required because "reader" doesn't sufficiently reflect all that experiencers of contemporary poetry may be called on to do when encountering it). It is important to the degree that another poet can find significant new ways to make poetry in it.

For me a superiorly effective poem is one that causes its infocipient to say, "whaddafuk," "hmmmm," and "Wow!" There are two kinds of such poems. The much more obvious is the poem too difficult or unconventional to be quickly comprehended, yet sufficiently intriguing in some way to keep its infocipient investigating it, interrogating it, if you will, after his first skim of it. His whaddafuk will be to its surface obscurity or strangeness, his hmmmm to some arresting detail that manages to break through its forbiddingness--a finely-wrought phrase, perhaps, or a reference to some compelling subject, or a curiosity-arousing element unexpected in a poem such as a mathematical symbol, a drawing, a bizarre solecism, or a cloth background. Needless to say, the poem ought eventually to become comprehensible. The Wow! should occur at that point, due to the poem's over-all excellence, a subject for another essay.

The second kind of superiorly effective poem is comprehensible at first, but contains depths that take time to reveal themselves. The whaddafuk will be to its apparent over-simplicity, the hmmmm to something not-quite-right about it, perhaps only the fact that no poem could be as blankly explicit and/or dull as this one seems. Most infocipients will dismiss such a poem, the covertly-complex poem being, finally, less easy to appreciate than the overtly-complex one. (The knowledgeable infocipient--the "altacipient"--who persists with the poem, incidentally, will be helped by emories of seemingly simple poems that fooled him into disregarding them until someone else introduced him to their hidden values; his knowledge of which poets tend to make such poems will help him, too.)

A mediocrely effective poem is simply one that competently does what most of the poems of its time published by commercial or university presses do while covering the same territory they do. No whaddafuk or hmmm--or genuine Wow!

A superiorly important poem is one that introduces, or significantly expands the applicability of, a new, ultimately-major poetic device. Certain poems of Apollinaire and Cummings, which pioneered the use of the visiophor, or figurative use of the way words look, are examples. I'm hoping that the mathephors that Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton and I are among the first users and exploiters of will someday prove as viable.

Poems of lesser importance are those that "only" introduce or pioneer new subclasses of devices, such as the sort of visiophor d. levy used the mimeograph to make, or the ones produced by whoever first used color in visual poems. Such poems, of course, may be of great value even though not of the highest importance, in my terms, because of how well they exploit their "secondary" new device. They may be effective, as well.

A poem can, of course, be important but ineffective. I consider most, if not all, the "tender buttons" of Gertrude Stein to be of this kind. Such poems are important because they reveal fresh paths that better poets can exploit productively, or that no one can exploit (which is of no little value, since a proper map should reveal paths that lead nowhere as well as connecting paths).

Either an effective or important poem can be major. If a poem is both, I term it "multi-major." Not that I mean to imply by that, that a multi-major poem is necessarily better, or even equal to, a "merely" major poem. I doubt, for example, that any multi-major poem will outdo Wordsworth's merely effective "Tintern Abbey" or Yeats's merely effective, "The Swans at Coole."

I feel that many major poets never composed an important poem or that the new of their important poems was subject matter or style only. Robert Frost, who composed about as many effective poems as any poet in English that I know, never composed a poem of the first importance. When I consider Hardy's "A Darkling Thrush" (one of my all-time favorite poems, by the way), I wonder just what it was that Frost did that was even minorly new.

Cummings made many fewer majorly effective poems than Frost, but many majorly important poems, and a few multi-major poems of the first rank. I wonder if there are as many as a hundred such poems in English. Pound was similar to Cummings in this, Stevens and Yeats to Frost. I'd be surprised if there were a single contemporary American poet published by the companies whose books win National Book Awards and the like who has composed an important poem, or many even minorly effective ones.

I'm not afraid to say here that I believe I and a number of my friends in poetry have made both important poems and effective poems, and some that are both, at the highest level. Others will surely disagree. In any case, whether others believe it or not, I'm out principally to compose effective poems. Their importance is secondary for me. I push the value of the kind of importance I've been discussing here, however, because it's pretty obvious that if my poems survive, it will most likely be for their importance.