Jeff and Jenni have both asked for more comments on cloaking. I wish I could give particular examples, but last thing I want to do is get a big fire going when I'm just talking about personal opinion.
This is quite rambling and incoherent because it is such a huge and fundamental topic.
To me, the urge to write poems comes out of a fundamental need to explore relationships among signs. These signs can come in the form of sense impressions (images), thought structures (words, phrases, ideas), and some internal mechanism (form, musicality, phrasing, line) that is the engine. A poem is, in a sense, an ontological thing. It is an investigation of first principles. Now, the way that a poet approaches a poem is unique to his or her viewpoint. The connections, and the ways those connections are expressed, are unique to that poet. Part of this has to do with voice. Another part has to do with engagement with the text itself (we all know that feeling of give and take in a poem, what you want for it to achieve versus what happens when the poem begins to assert itself through revision).
One of the joys of reading poetry is pleasure. This is primal. But there is are poems that aim to ape a turn, a phrase, a movement, a form, a color -- whatever -- that makes *another* poem work. Usually this is a matter of style. What happens in this situation is that the poet is taking a kind of template and pounding his or her work into the template and trying to make the poem similar, in some way, to another poem that has gone through the process of personal engagement. This produces work that is stylistically similar to another, but vacuous in the sense that it does not live. It does not live because it has not done the work that poetry must do.
Part of this phenomenon, I think, happens because we are fascinated with the formal elements of writing. How does he do that? Why does this work? And often, this sort of questioning leads one to discovery.
Another way that poems begin to employ cloaking is when the poem is not complete. Substitutions begin to happen for the real work that has to be done yet. I've been thinking about Tony's comments about the New Sincerity, and here I think he is right. There is a real personal danger in opening one's inner world. As a species, I think one survival mechanism is disguise. Disguise might be essential, but it might not. Disguise might be essential, for example, if you are demanding certain suppositions from a reader, that part of the artistic domain of the poem, as it were, is to take the reader through a process of discovery. For another poet, that particular move might be wrong because she thinks differently.
