Not odes, not apostrophe, not epigraphs, not allusion, not acknowledgments pages, but those little italic tags under some poems’ titles: how do dedications rewire the writer/reader circuit? (I’m putting aside book dedications for the moment; they’re worth discussing but inflect reading much less directly, I think.) In performance the author might gloss that “for M.” or whatever it is, or even point out a smiling friend in the audience. When you’re sitting around perusing print, though, you might have one of the following responses:

• Electric recognition: I know who that is! Maybe it’s the name of a musician whose work interests you, maybe you have some personal information on the poet’s family, but in any case, you now have an angle on the poem before you even start reading it. This is ekphrastic, this is a love poem, this one’s about that stupid politician. The upside AND the downside of this knowledge is a sense of command. Advance intelligence means you’re less able to surrender to surprise.
• Guilty half-recognition: That’s the name of a famous philosopher, I think, or was it a historian? Now you have homework to do and just have to decide if you care enough. You read the poem daring it to be worthy.
• Cluelessness. That single “M.” is only intelligible to the initiated and no one inducted you. Or perhaps the dedication gives a full name, date, place of birth, but it’s the poet’s niece or some other obscure figure. Does this make you irritable? Or do you feel cozy, invited to listen to a lullaby over the baby monitor?

Before Google, cluelessness seemed like the natural state of things, although it was problematic for a teacher-scholar. When I read “Howl” for fun at fifteen, I could care less who Carl Solomon was. In college, what wasn’t in the footnotes seemed like it wasn’t important anyway. When I was a graduate student trying to write a chapter on Gwendolyn Brooks, though, “to Marc Crawford, from whom the commission” posed a research problem—I was going to have to sift through a lot of prose before learning who Crawford might be. And in my first years as a teacher I was in a perpetual state of fear and trauma: someone would ask, and I wouldn’t know the answer, and I would therefore be exposed as an ignorant imposter. I’ve relaxed since, having learned that everyone is an imposter. I can always answer a student’s question like a psychotherapist: “How does it make you feel not to know?”

That sounds smirky but I actually want to know: how does the apparatus of a poem affect a reader’s response? There’s never a universal answer; we read for different reasons and approach our reading with different temperaments. I may feel attracted to poems by their ambiguity or difficulty, but if I can see there’s a key it drives me crazy not to possess it (Bluebeard and I would have had serious marital conflicts).

A colleague says the clubbiness of dedications puts him off. I can imagine their attractions, though—dedications reminds you that poems are instruments of communication, that language is motivated, however obscurely, by human relationships. I can’t find any literary theorist or critic who has opined about them (I was hoping for an illuminating essay or chapter somewhere, along the lines of Jonathan Culler or Barbara Johnson writing about apostrophe). So, dear reader, I pose this question—how do dedications change poems?—

TO YOU

Lesley Wheeler