Poems are neither machines nor made of words, although William Carlos Williams understandably felt it necessary to call attention to such affinities by asserting an identity at a time when machines and language were turned into weapons on a worldwide scale. Nor is the poem pure energy or angelic vibrations heard only by the ideal inner senses that transcend historical contingency. The materialist vision of the poem makes it a verbal refrigerator, sold, enclosed, keeping its contents ready for consumption; the idealist turns the poem into an ether that trumps all other physical and metaphysical foundations. Versions of this polarization are endemic to our discourses of poetics, especially our theories of reading and reception. The problem is that poems are not like light, a wave or a particle depending on which way you look at them, they have several aspects. Poems can be manifested as heterogeneous material objects; they can be events in performance; their multiple versions, published copies, and performances cannot be located in any single point of space and time; and they are unusually complex mixtures of all the knowable and unknowable components of consciousness: primary process, reasoning, emotion, memory, and intersubjectivity. The assemblage of dictionary-given words into an optically compressed box of lines on a paper page is simultaneously an unbounded phenomenon extending across time, minds, objects, and meanings. (Middleton xi)