The poem is process

"A production process. But not a process toward some final product. The poem has no final answer--you cannot say what it means in the end--because the poem always moves along before you can say it. In a sense, the poem is an act of refusal. Before producing sense, the poem refuses sense. Not entirely (or sometimes entirely) but refuses sense for the moment. The poem puts sense in its place, semantics in equal measure to the nonsemantic aspects of words, the abstract grammar of language and the concrete presence of the words themselves (typescript, handwriting, voice, digital image). The poetry of the poem resides not in its meaning, but in its musicality: the aural resonance created by the sound of one word next to another word, words on top of words. The spatial resonance of marks and symbols set against the page, the screen, the sidewalk. The physical resonance, the way the head rings, the way the poet holds on to the time and space of the audience, the way words come through the stereo speakers and knock on your chest. And yes, the erotic, emotional resonance, the feeling the poem leaves on your skin or in your head or on your heart. Only at this point does the semantic sense of the text reenter into context: amidst the multiplied resonances of the poem one finds sense, creates new sense, starts making sense where no sense was before....the poem is the process by which all of this comes to pass."

~ Justin Read, Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies