[John Hutchcraft]

I wouldn't even say that it's a "problem," Rose. You might just like a lot of sonics! Nothing wrong with that, certainly.

I think Moore's poems work really well even if you read them thinking that they're wildly lineated free verse, or if you read them without any thought to form at all. I think they're really driven by the lightning-bolt zig-zag of her thought and syntax, combined with her immense descriptive powers. The prominence of abstract language is another very strange, very striking effect. (Especially when it's held against the descriptive passages, which show that she can be as concrete as she needs, thank you very much.) In any event, I think Moore's poems, like all good poems, syllabic or otherwise, offer many different kinds of pleasure, some of which only become apparent after living with them for a while. So while I agree that a sestina that requires a reader to recognize it's a sestina to have any effect is probably a crap poem, I don't think that Moore's poems or other good syllabic poems require a reader to recognize their formal attributes in order to have an effect, or to offer pleasure. Rather, the pleasure of recognition is just one kind of pleasure, and if the poem's any good at all, then by definition it's offering a whole bouquet of pleasures.

For instance - I love "Fern Hill" and read it about a hundred times before I read a critic somewhere who mentioned how he loved it and had read it about a hundred times before he realized that it was syllabic. You can read "Metaphors" a whole bunch without realizing that it's nine lines of nine syllables each. Doing so, you miss what amounts to an inside joke for prosodists, but "I've eaten a bag of green apples" is still going to conjure the image it does.

In any event, thanks for - excuse me - hearing me out, and for paraphrasing me so succinctly!