Mark, I think this has reached an impasse. Like you, I have tried and re-tried with quite a number of poets whose work I find arid, but there is a point at which I give up. I don't, however, consider that any poet's obliged to persist in this way - reading for pleasure seems to me as good a guide as any, unless of course you're teaching or writing a critical essay on the topic, in which case there surely is some obligation to go beyond the pleasure principle. I've honestly no idea, and not that much interest in, what such and such a poet is reading. 

   We can fairly assume that Prynne, for example, has been widely read, way beyond non-mainstream circles, at least since his work became more available in the Bloodaxe Collecteds. But I appreciate that he may well be the exception to the rule.

   What I object to is something different - blanket dismissals based on tribalism, publically aired and without the evidence of thought or reading. I've no problem if, say, Marjorie Perloff decides that Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room' is very small and unimpressive as a poem. I disagree entirely but have confidence she would know the poem and be capable of explaining her judgement. It wouldn't be merely a prejudicial reflex. When the Cambridge academic Drew Milne, in an otherwise highly articulate interview with Charles Bernstein at Penn Sound - some 'visibility' there - is asked about the mainstream, his first amusing response is 'I'm interested in Shakespeare as a contemporary writer'.

  When Bernstein insists on the irksome topic, his reply is more or less:

"...I think of it as verse, not really poetry at all: the work of people who have a peculiarly truncated, modest conception of what they're doing...largely anecdotal and oddly out of time...But then perhaps I don't read it...it doesn't look like poetry to me." You might expect something more than that from a teacher of modern poetry at one of Britain's most prestigious universities, but his righteous scorn for the mainstream gets the better of him. People talk all kind of gibberish in interviews, myself very much included, but since Heaney's relatively mild remarks about the avant-garde have been anatomised here and elsewhere, I just offer this as a counter-example.

  

    I sort of see your idea about Asphodel discovering  'what will be written and the form it will take' in the act of writing, though the form of stepped triplets - loosely speaking - is already one that WCW has been trying out in other poems before this one. It's his own form, but I think his use of it demonstrates that even a relatively free form can often involve certain footholds or ropes. I'm possibly missing something in your argument, but that 'heuristic element' seems to me just as evident and to the fore in another, earlier flower poem like Bavarian Gentians by Lawrence. Heavens knows whether he's considered mainstream.

Best,

Jamie