Poems, after all, aren't transmitters of information, and if we usually read them in a linear mode, we know that they also (and simultaneously) move in complex recursive ways.... In this perspective, the critical and interpretive question is not "what does the poem mean?" but "how do we release or expose the poem's possibilities of meaning?".... criticism (scholarship as well as interpretation) tends to imagine itself as an informative rather than a deformative activity....Here we want to point out that lines of performative and deformative critical activity have always existed. Editions and translations are by definition performative. Elaborate scholarly editions foreground their performative characteristics, and sometimes translators do the same. . . . Whereas in imaginative work the passage from performance to deformance is easily negotiated, the same is not true for critical work. Deformative scholarship is all but forbidden, the thought of it either irresponsible or damaging to critical seriousness. It exists nonetheless, and in certain cases it has gained justifiable distinction and importance. . . . Reading Backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels. When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results. As Dickinson elegantly puts it, "A Something overtakes the Mind," and we are brought to a critical position in which we can imagine things about the text that we didn't and perhaps couldn't otherwise know. (Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, Deformance and Interpretation from Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web)