Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television." Discussing the term later in Poetry Magazine, Tony Hoagland wrote, "Burt’s definition is quite general in order to encompass the diversity of the poetry [she] champions, but [she] gets the mania and the declarativeness right. Also the relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation." C. D. Wright, a poet termed elliptical by Burt, states her nervousness about the label in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket Magazine: "Regarding the elliptical business, I’m less enthusiastic. But I do think it is a stab at authentication of poets who don’t belong to a team and whose work is reluctant to be either excluded or subsumed by one or the other, yet has sympathetic concerns to certain strains and not to others." In a 2009 essay, also in Boston Review, Burt proposed that a poetic movement she called "The New Thing" has succeeded ellipticism. References Poetry movements American literary movements