[Much modern poetry shows a predilection for weak closure of line, an open-endedness which] values the "natural" (or its illusion) over the artful, the openness of the discourse of everyday life and the common man over the seemingly artificial, even elitist conventions of traditional, closed poetic forms…. The ultimate coherence and unity which poetic closure announces, the sense of a completed and whole design of lasting weight and significance that it prompts, has increasingly come to be regarded as fraudulent—if not fraudulent, then at least frivolous. (p. 39)

The "open" poem is, from [the point of view of American New Criticism], an "anti-poem" because it is not a self-contained text, an organic whole, a completed entity. In all sorts of ways it reaches beyond itself. It demands a different kind of reading than the New Critic brings to it. What I would like to do here is look...