Structure & Surprise

“Surprises and turns make reading and teaching poetry worthwhile; they are the reasons for our oft-unheeded appeals to treat poems as more than clever packages for delivering a theme or deep meaning.”

–Zachary Tavlin, from his review of Lucy Alford’s Forms of Poetic Attention in Comparative Literature (2021) 73 (4): 506–508. (This quote is from p. 507.)

I recently wrote about turns and surprise in Lucy Alford’s Forms of Poetic Attention (here). Interested to find out if other critics saw what I did, I did some searching, and found this. Some confirmation, it seems– And always just good to hear another person who cares deeply for poetry speak up on behalf of the surprising turn…!