Feedback begins in the middle of things. Its first words, "as it sends out delicate rays," are lowercase and attached to nothing, and we never learn what "it" is. That gap sets the pattern for the poem, which reads like someone tuning in halfway through a broadcast and then flicking from channel to channel. The "rays" suggest a glowing screen in a dark room, though the poem never says so. That is an inference from the later mentions of the "Late Show" and "the movie."
The second fragment, "to be sung, read, or eaten -like a meal," turns art into something we consume. Singing, reading and eating are all ways of taking something in, and the simile makes a song or a poem as digestible as dinner. Even the punctuation looks hurried. The dash is jammed against "eaten" with no space, as if two scraps of text had been taped together. The poem seems to be built from pieces, and it makes no attempt to hide the joins.
Then the voice changes completely. "You never heard of solitude? It comes on / after the Late Show." The tone is chatty and a little pushy, like someone buttonholing you in a bar. The phrase "comes on" works two ways. Solitude arrives, and a television programme comes on. Loneliness is described in the language of scheduling, as though it were one more show in the lineup, the one that follows the last one. The line break after "The eyes drift" is followed by a stanza break, so "away from the movie" lands in a new stanza. The white space on the page makes the reader's eyes drift in the same way.
The next lines are the strangest. "As far as possible // we tend to enjoy our bodies, see?" The sentence hangs in the air after "possible," and the stanza break lets the reader feel the limit before the thought continues. The closing "see?" sounds like a salesman or a self-assured uncle explaining life. The claim itself is slippery. If attention has left the screen, the body is what remains to enjoy, but the phrase "as far as possible" admits that this pleasure has limits. The speaker sounds confident while saying something faintly sad, and that mix of swagger and loneliness gives the poem its odd comedy.
The last line, "Across the great chasm, the cowboy peered," is the only one that reads like conventional storytelling. It is past tense, third person, and straight out of a western. It may be the movie the eyes have drifted from, or what they drift toward. Either way, it echoes the viewer. The cowboy stares across a gap at something he cannot reach, just as the late-night watcher stares across a darkened room at a screen. The "chasm" can also stand for the white spaces between the poem's fragments, or for the distance between one lonely person and another.
This is where the title starts to pay off. Feedback is the howl that comes when a signal loops back into its own source. The poem works like a loop. It begins with something sending out rays and ends with a figure peering outward, so the last line could be read as what the first one is broadcasting. The viewer takes in images made for him, and those images give back only his own isolation.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its rhythm comes from speech: the falling list "sung, read, or eaten," the blunt question, the tag "see?" Sentences stop short or trail off. The poem is quiet and sparse, with no explanation anywhere.
What makes it interesting is how much it asks of the reader. It never states that modern entertainment fills our empty hours and leaves us lonelier. It makes us assemble that idea from a glow, a joke, a drifting gaze and a cowboy who never gets an answer. The poem is also open about being something "to be sung, read, or eaten," so it includes itself among the things we consume. It doesn't offer a neat conclusion, and its slightly unsettling ending, a look across a gap, leaves the reader doing the peering.