Jonathan generously attempts a refutation of Houlihan's actual arguments. & I accept his position, but only to a degree. There is a difference between the original & Houlihan's parody of it : underlying the disjointed phrases ("breath/of a nipple" [???]) is some kind of rhetorical question, if not statement. My translation of the poem : "Does the process of excavating a 'logocentric grid' (the axle) of reality - which is the inverse mirror of stating axioms - muzzle the 'ventriloquist' breath of the (feminine?) body itself?"

So on a "tree" level, Jonathan has a point. But I think he misses the forest. The forest level of Houlihan's argument is that the poetic obfuscation of this kind of style actively discourages its interpretation. I will take a wild guess & speculate that this poet is a young ephebe currently enthralled with Celan. She's taken a fairly unoriginal postmodern idea (anti-logocentrism) and plumped & feathered it in portentous Celanophane, leading to such wonders of metaphor as "breath of a nipple", etc., its "revolving /throat". Faced with this mannered (wrapped) & imitative baloney, Houlihan's parody is justified, & her critique of both obfuscation and wheedling accessibility is very valuable.

I was thinking of you, David, in the context of the Stevens poem, "The American Sublime"(1935):

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

(Let this serve as your chihuahua for today.)

Everyone brings what light they have to this subject (the subject of the poetry blogs, that is). I have a problem with the bicameral criticism emanating from the so-called "avant". That is one of my big themes on hgpoetics. I've tried to look at it in different ways. What strikes me again & again is how often poetic "experiment" leads to obscurity & self-indulgence. & I attribute this tendency in large part to the teachers poets & critics who parlay the binary theory of US literary history. Ie. the theory that there is an inimical centrist mainstream which is both corrupt and cliched, and the only way to get around it is by Russian formalist-futurist "making strange" (a process which becomes mannered & cliched in its own ways).

Far better to read the tradition of poetry in English on its own terms, take as much from it as you can, and bend it to contemporary awareness & concerns. Far better to make no assumptions about your audience, but to conduct an inward critique of your own ethical and aesthetic motives (under which aegis you undertook to write poetry in the first place).