generative oblique strategy

"You can get some appealing effects by just imagining the absent poet as part of the audience. This conceptual approach is what Brian Eno might call an “oblique strategy,” and it can be generative: although I think a lot about what Kees would have made of my Robinson poems, and I want to think he would have liked them, they’re not addressed to him, and, furthermore, he’s not even in them. I’m borrowing his fictional creation and reimagining his own life through that character."

from Conjuring Act in the Poetry Foundation blog