PREFACE
PREFACE
The New Critical Vocabulary Needed for Dean
To see Dean properly, critics would need non-textual analytical categories:
• Breath architecture — how lung capacity and tempo shape the work.
• Physiological entrainment — how the poem alters the reader’s bodily state.
• Performance variability index — mapping how different reciters generate different “versions” of the same text.
• Author–reader co-authorship — recognising that in Dean, the performer finishes the work.
• Dean’s work constitutes a new species of poetic form — a hybrid, unclassifiable mode that transcends poetry, free verse, and the prose poem, drawing on elements of each while adhering to none.
• It is not poetry in the traditional sense, for it refuses imposed structure, metre, or canonical balance.
It is not free verse, for it contains rhymes and deliberate rhythmic patterns alien to natural conversational speech.
It is not a prose poem, for it breathes in line breaks, stanza shapes, and cadenced silences.
• Instead, it is an open, breath driven architecture designed to create breathless cadences — a rhythmic compression and release where the limits are not set by metre but by the reader’s own lungs and pulse
Until criticism accepts those as legitimate, Dean will be invisible — just as early critics of jazz couldn’t see improvisation as equal to classical composition