What is the role of expectation in art? That question haunts me one half hour after having watched I, Robot with my sons over in the King of Prussia. The reason why is that, while I saw more than a few previews for this flick, the details they let out about the film itself depicted just its first 30 minutes. Indeed, once Spooner (Will Smith) tracks down the dysfunctional Sonny who has killed the brilliant but deeply isolated Dr. Lanning, the story whose pieces we are fed in the trailers, the tale itself is really just beginning.

It’s a darker film than I anticipated, closer to Minority Report than anything else, but borrowing heavily from virtually every film in the recent Future Noir canon. One part Blade Runner, one part Donna Haraway. And while nobody will make the kind of preposterous claims for this film as cinema-as-social-philosophy, the way some critics once swooned over Robocop or Total Recall, it was, in the words of my son Jesse, “better than expected.”

That’s the second time in recent weeks I’ve had to readjust my expectations in the last few weeks, and I was happy to do so in this direction. My experience of Spider-Man 2 was rather just the opposite: a part of me bought into the “best film ever made from a comic” hype, especially since Roger Ebert was one of those making that sort of claim. Alas, it’s not even the equal of last summer’s Hellboy, let alone American Splendor. (I will, however, concede that Spidey is closer to The Godfather or Casablanca than it is to the Dick Tracy & Batman films. But what isn’t?)

What am I expecting is a question I’m asking myself all the time with poetry. Recently, one poet whose chapbook I reviewed here emailed me to say that he’d “had to revise a few of (his) assumptions about how the world works” because of that, tho he didn’t say which ones. I know that I cringe when I run into people who think of poetry only in clichés, such as those poetry contests that blithely admonish that there should be no more than one poem to a page or that poems must be “under thirty lines long.” Or the questions that non-writers invariably ask when they learn that you’re a poet.  

When I open a publication and turn to the work of somebody I don’t know, I’m already bringing with me an entire series of presumptions, based on what know about the magazine, about the kinds of things I see from its other contributors, whatever. For example, here is number 85 in the Backwoods Broadsides/Chaplet series that Sylvester Pollet has been putting out from his home in Maine these past several years. Pollet, whom I’ve never met has an identifiable aesthetic, even down to a preference for specific generations. Indeed, there was one run in this series – numbers 10 through 15 – which included Carl Rakosi, Bern Porter, James Laughlin, Cid Corman, Jackson Mac Low, and Ronald Johnson. Of those poets, I believe only Mac Low is still with us, and he’s on the high side of eighty now.

So here is Susan Maurer, somebody I’ve not heard of before, with a series of five poems entitled Dream Addict. The title poem, the chaplet’s opening piece, begins thus: 

The damned don’t cry.
Prior dark red fog. Babblefish.
Rain of small green flames.
The donut emergency tire. Scratch rabbit.

With the exception of Mac Low, this is much more of a disruptive writing than one usually gets in the Backwoods Broadsides, so it changes my attention as I read what follows. As it happens, the poem eventually comes back closer to the range I think of as the Backwoods tone – Maurer integrates the poem through the speaker. What we get isn’t so much the new sentence as it is dramatic monolog somewhat in the David Markson mode. Which is fun & fine. But it makes me all the more conscious of how much more closely I attend to this poem than I might have had the first word been “I,” or had the monolog been more continuous. Maurer very effectively sets the poem up against expectations. And that literally is what draws me in.