Kevin McIlvoy: The One Reader (January 2012)

Kevin McIlvoy examines the influence an imagined reader, receptive or resistant, can exert on a writer. He selects prose poems by Russell Edson, Matthea Harvey, Francis Ponge, William Stafford, and James Tate as poems which, he suggests, are both mistakes and “the perfection of mistakes.” McIlvoy encourages writers to think about what might be possible were they to imagine their “one reader” as positive and receptive, able to appreciate such work, rather than resistant.