offer and payoff

The sonnet works by offering a promise (or hook) in the first 8 to 10 lines, and then immediately giving the reader the payoff.

no chance

One of the sad things, I have come to think, about making Literature an academic subject is that it doesn’t really give poetry a chance. What poetry has to offer us isn’t easily handled in examinations; everything else about it—formal aspects, tendencies, sources, biographical indications…the trivia, the incidentals of the enterprise—alack, most distractingly, are.

—I. A. Richards, "The Future of Reading," The Written Word (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)

double or nothing

The poet said he was paid zero for his last reading, so he needed to charge me something. I offered to double what he was paid for his last reading. He went silent on the phone…I guess he was considering my offer.