Stephen Dobyns: Poetic Closure (July 2009)

“Closure,” Stephen Dobyns remarks, “usually means putting something behind us.”  But in a good poem, he argues, “it means something ahead.”  Through close readings of poems by Billy Collins, Philip Larkin, Kay Ryan, W.S. Merwin, Charles Simic, Carol Ann Duffy and Miroslav Holub, Dobyns examines different types of poetic closure that, by suggesting other levels of meaning, can pull the reader back into the poem again.