Reading Anne-Marie Albiach's Figurations de l'image, I wonder why American readers of poetry abhor didacticism. This is one of the frequent accusations leveled against Language Poetry for example. C.K. Williams also called contemporary French poetry "didactic" when asked why he didn't like it during a radio interview (I don't have the link, but the file is stored somewhere on this computer).

Albiach has those lines I really adore due to my relative acquaintance with continental philosophy:

          l'immobilité s'astreint
                  elle déjoue l'altérité et le regard de l'autre
se joint à cette élaboration

         immobility is compelled
                   she thwarts alterity and the gaze of the other
joins this development

Superficial reference to Levinas, sure, and I like the ambiguous syntax created by the line break (or is it a misreading on my part, to see a line break when the line actually continues). But what interests me most here is to see the poem used as philosophical dissertation. Too often in American poetry, I see the poem used as narrative (either fictional or nonfictional, but who cares?), but not much anything else you can do with writing. (well, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a poem as a lot of things, but a lot of people with whom I have discussed this book had no clue what she was doing and were wondering if this should be treated as a poem or something else)