Try reading "Thesis 75" for its argument and it slips through your fingers. The title promises a claim to be defended, the kind of sentence a student underlines in an essay. What follows is a run of phrases that sound like reasoning and never arrive at a conclusion. That gap between the form of thinking and the absence of a stated point is, judging by the text, the poem's central idea. It shows how much of what passes for wisdom is tone, vocabulary and rhythm, and how language keeps working even once it stops making ordinary sense.
The opening stanza is full of sentence-shaped things that fall apart. "Be very everything" bolts an intensifier onto a word that cannot be intensified, and "mildly solipsistic" pairs a mild manner with a condition that is supposed to be total. The next lines break on the weakest words available: "ennui of / information is / the right / thing to do." Ending lines on "of," "is" and "the" leaves the grammar hanging in mid-air, so the reader keeps leaning forward for a completion that never comes. "Ennui of information" is oddly accurate for a world of constant data, but the stanza then lands on "the right thing to do," a moral platitude with nothing left to attach to. The poem seems to be making fun of that kind of advice.
From there, sound does most of the steering. "Something wise / and diplomatic / like a / diploma deserts / the kitchen" runs on a chain of related sounds: "diplomatic" turns into "diploma," and "deserts" sits beside "kitchen" close enough to suggest "desserts," though that is an inference from the sound, not something the poem says. Either way, a credential, the badge of being educated, ends up abandoned among pots and stoves. Wisdom is moved from the lecture hall to the place where people actually eat.
Food and appetite then take over. "Cakewalk" gives us an easy task and a dance at once, and it leads into a cat that "thinks school / of evil / steak-machines." "School" can be a place of learning, a school of thought or a school of fish, and the poem lets all three drift together. The "steak-machines" are the grimmest image here, meat-processing and hunger fused into one mechanical phrase. They are "feeding on / the doorway / that grimaces," and the personified doorway gives a mere threshold a face, and a pained one. The vocabulary of education (thesis, diploma, school) keeps meeting the vocabulary of eating, as if knowledge were another thing to be consumed, or something that consumes.
Structurally, the poem uses no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are short, usually two to four words, and the breaks matter more than any beat. The stanzas shrink, from eight lines to five, back to eight, then to four, so the poem seems to thin out toward its ending. That ending changes texture completely: "curious toes / to touch / the quick / soprano." After so much abstraction and menace, we get bodies and senses. "The quick" can be the tender living flesh under a nail, or it can modify "soprano," so the phrase holds two readings at once. Touch and sound merge, as if toes could feel a high note. The closing image is also the gentlest in the poem, a small act of curiosity after all the grimacing.
What makes "Thesis 75" worth a student's time is that it makes you notice how you read. You come to a poem expecting a topic and a message, and this one tests whether meaning can survive without them. Sound links, double meanings and the pull of whole word-families (school, kitchen, feeding) build a kind of sense that works by association instead of logic. You may finish unable to paraphrase it, but you will probably remember "diploma deserts the kitchen" and the grimacing doorway. The poem's quiet claim is that language can be alive, funny and unsettling without proving anything.