Ah, Julie; I have been waiting for someone to agree with me. That is exactly how I hoped a reader would feel. I think the endnotes are like the session after a poetry reading where the people who have been listening come to meet the poet and ask their questions. If they don't want to, they needn't.
The notes themselves, I realise, are often the sort of spoken links I'd use during the course of a live reading. Not erudite expositions, just gentle oiling of the mechanism that links poet and reader/listener.
And - something nobody else has said - the notes are another way of hanging on to the poems, all the small souls of them, before the readers finally take ownership and carry them off and they are lost to me forever.
And yes, I was smiling as I wrote that. But only just.
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