I spent most of the weekend reading poem submissions for the Beloit Poetry Journal; and during that session I embroiled myself in two lengthy disputes. The first involved a poem that I found supremely, almost unbearably, boring but that everyone else liked very much. The second involved a set of poems that some of us admired and that others of us believed were, among other things, "old-fashioned."

All the poems under argument eventually won their way into the journal. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Manifesto: What Dawn Wants from a Poem, As of March 29, 2009

I want grace of language and syntax, along with deliberate, sinuous grammar.

I want music.

I want images that matter to one another and to the thematic arc of the poem. I do not want a list of fractured visual details.

I want dramatic progression: of action, thought, and emotional discovery.

I want a moral commitment to revelation, to saying what is nearly unbearable to say. This does not mean that I require victim narrative, sexual innuendo, hallucination, or war crimes, though of course any one of those topics could be the basis of a good poem. It means that I want the poet to put his heart into my hands. That metaphor sounds both nasty and banal. But there you have it. I want the heart.

Surely I've left something out of this manifesto, but you can remind me of it.