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Candice: at the risk of boring people who're not interested in following this exchange I'll quote the passage you mean, which is from the paper on Raworth I gave earlier this year--the whole thing will be appearing in _Chicago Review_ sometime next year: ...close reading is of course problematic in dealing with highly openended poetry, since close reading often carries buried within it ideals of a "complete" reading that are at odds with poetries that emphasize openendedness and arbitrariness. I remember reading some time ago a Brian McHale article that quoted Harold Bloom's reading of a passage from Ashbery' s "As You Came from the Holy Land": McHale pointed out that Bloom's reading only actually took into account two lines of an eight-line stanza. That's a fair point about careless or opportunistic reading, and I think McHale a better reader of Ashbery than Bloom, but it would be misleading to approach poetry such as Ashbery's in the expectation that every detail in the poem can or should be justified. (I'm thinking here of such monstrous acts of close reading as Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a book which squeezes significance out of every letter of a poem.) The poetry of authors as diverse as Ashbery, Bob Cobbing, Jackson Mac Low, Tom Raworth, Clark Coolidge and Maggie O'Sullivan does not subscribe to ideas of the poem as organic entity or as machine made of words, and thus is little concerned with the ideals of wholeness, efficiency and lack of superfluity embedded in such aesthetic metaphors. Exhaustive reading of postmodern poetries is neither necessary, nor possible; but this is not, of course, to devalue _attentive_ reading. (the McHale I had in mind is his review of Veronica Forrest-Thomson from 1982. I cited from memory so the exact details are wrong--it should be "took into account five phrases out of the entire poem".) "Paste" and "style" are perfectly good English words. I don't understand your last email, but I'm not going to try reading it as if it were French on the off-chance that that might help. You're welcome to indulge in what Ben Watson calls "poodle play" but it's not a critical modality that interests me very much. all best --N Nate & Jane Dorward [log in to unmask] http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/ 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada ph: (416) 221 6865 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%