Josh Corey comments today on Mark Halliday's recent review in Pleiades.

The issues around paraphrase and "paraphrasable meaning" seem very complicated. Are we talking about the poem's style or rhetoric, or about its subject-matter, its themes, its logopeia?

A poem's style would be impossible to paraphrase (cf. Mandelstam's comment : "if a poem can be paraphrased, the Muse has not spent the night, has not ruffled the bedsheets" - or something to that effect).

On the other hand, a poem may have many layers of intelligibility - which might be open to successive layers (like an onion) of interpretive unpacking : which is similar to paraphrase, but not exactly the same thing.

Halliday's remarks about paraphrase were what spurred me to offer the successive "read-alongs" here, of the ongoing poem Rest Note. His essay reminded me of Wallace Stevens' repeated forays in this direction, & thus I felt licensed to give it a try.

Hopefully, the poems have not been rendered completely transparent - which would close off their future, to some extent (cf. Josh's comments on understandability). Probably impossible, considering my obscurities.