^* One poet who has made a conspicuous shift from verse formalism to a more open field practice—Jorie Graham—speaks of the need to incorporate chaos as an ethical stance. “No genuine form occurs without the honest presence of chaos (however potentially) in the work,” she writes, reflecting on her growing awareness that “poems, by the implications of their formal characteristics, were providing a metaphysical view of the world which might be a terrible illusion, one which might, moreover, be permitting us to not take certain kinds of actions because we feel ultimately, as a species, safe, compelled me to try to break that illusion as often as I could. Mostly to make myself feel how often I wanted to restore that illusion.” At issue, then, “is the distinction between suffering and understanding, and how we want to merge them in the act of writing a poem. We want to be able to suffer the poem so that the actions that we take in the act of writing are true actions”—because “poems are enactments, ritualistic enactments—fractal enactments—in language, of historical motions. And in the process of them, you experience your accountability” (Gardner, 227, 220, 226, 221).