LispWorks clients can issue request and poke transactions across a conversation using dde-request and dde-poke, which take a conversation (or a service designator/ topic designator pair in the case of an automatically managed conversation), and an item as their main arguments. In the case of a poke transaction, data to be poked into item must also be provided.
In the case of a successful request transaction with dde-request or dde-request*, the data contained in item is returned to the LispWorks client by the server.
In the case of a successful poke transaction with dde-poke or dde-poke*, the data provided is poked into item by the server.
The accessor dde-item
(or dde-item* for automatically managed conversations) can perform request and poke transactions. It performs a request transaction when read, and a poke transaction when set.
LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual - 21 Dec 2011