Dear Editor,

While I enjoyed Danielle Chapman's review of The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks ["Sweet Bombs," October 2006] I was struck by her narrow analysis of the poetry Brooks wrote during the sixties and thereafter. It was insulting to read yet another slanted analysis of an African-American poet writing in, or attempting to create with other black writers, her own aesthetic. Chapman's review is particularly vexing because it relies exclusively on the Western literary tradition to judge Brooks's late work. Chapman writes that Brooks's "formal leanings" were "deep sixed" and that Brooks wreaked "violence" on her own style to "match" the "newfound purposes" of the political sixties. Such a summary sounds disturbing to this reader, who adored Brooks's celebrated formal writing but also her decision to embrace African-American traditions and styles in her later work.

Not surprisingly, Chapman's positions have been advanced against nearly all black poets who decided to embrace the cultural nuances of black America and reject Western literature. To dismiss Brooks's efforts just because she decided that segments of the Black Arts aesthetic were useful to her new work suggests a bias that Western poetic tradition is "the" tradition. But Western poetry is "a" tradition, not "the" tradition. If Chapman was inclined to dig deeper, she would understand that the Black Arts Movement was not just about politics but was specifically about the rejection of the Western formalism that represented, at least to the writers of the period, a denial of self. The movement was, as many a writer from the period has noted, about the creation of new forms, new language (even new words), and an art that was singularly noteworthy not only for its politics but for its acceptance of black cultural traditions infused into the poetry. Haki Madhubuti, whom Chapman mentions as one of the culprits who led Brooks astray, wrote poetry not necessarily in a "hip languor" but with the jazz riffs of John Coltrane incorporated into the text. Jayne Cortez, another fabulous poet from the period, wrote in the jazz tradition as well. This meant that the poetry, and its form, included call and response, improvisation, repetition (the Blues), and an inherent ode to the tradition of poetry as an oral art. These ideals are African-American down to their core, and Brooks wrote many notable poems to join in this important historical moment for black poets. As the unofficial matriarch of black poetry at the time, it would have been unthinkable for her to do anything else.

Brian Gilmore
Takoma Park, Maryland



Danielle Chapman responds:

Brian Gilmore mischaracterizes my article when he implies that I object to all of Brooks's later work, or to the Black Arts movement as a whole. In fact my intent was to praise, not disparage, the "violence" that Brooks wreaks in "Second Sermon of the Warpland" and several other poems from the sixties and seventies. However, Gilmore's summary of Brooks's career, a version of which has been circulating for decades, is just the sort of reductive understanding that I was trying to move beyond. I think that Gwendolyn Brooks was a great poet, and to force her into any box—whether it's "formal," "Western," or "Black Arts"—is to minimize the accomplishment of a fiercely individual artist whose work defies such blunt categorization.

Danielle Chapman



Dear Editor,

I found D.H. Tracy's discussion of seriousness in the November issue of Poetry bracing and enlightening. Recent decades have given us a plethora of poets adopting mythological, botanical, or astrological personae they don't really believe in—at least not enough to commit body and soul.

Writing poems about, say, Aphrodite or The Hanged Man seems risk-free. Unlike previous adherents of Greco-Roman mythology or tarot, we don't really believe and don't ask readers to imagine that we do. This saves us from the slings and arrows of outrageous critics who might call us to task. It also spares us from the ridicule, pain, and even shame that might accompany true conviction

We see everywhere around us the poetry of safety. This is not surprising in a culture in which hedging of bets plays a major role. This is also why the works we encounter from writers under genuine duress—like Neruda, Darwish, Akhmatova—seem so striking and refreshing. The threat of imminent arrest or bombing concentrates the mind amazingly, resulting in a kind of authenticity not available to dilettantes.

It is important that we deal honestly with our own posing. Poems from the war front are not necessarily better than random musings on Bodhisattvas, but they are different in assumption and seriousness. D.H. Tracy has given us a useful means to evaluate our own integrity and that of others.

David Radavich
Charleston, Illinois



Dear Editor,

Michael Hofmann's essay about the poetry of Gottfried Benn reminded me of the surprise I always feel at the surprise evinced by audiences at the conjunction of medicine and poetry. Physicians are surrounded by drama and are trained to listen to their patients and elicit their stories. So is it any wonder that so many eminent writers were trained as physicians and, as Hofmann points out, actively practiced their craft throughout the years of their creative endeavors? In addition to William Carlos Williams, Bulgakov, and Céline, the roster of physician writers includes Rabelais, Tobias Smollett, Schiller, Keats, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John McCrae, and Somerset Maugham.

The ability of physicians to identify with the struggles of their patients, that special empathy that takes one person out of himself in order to believe the reality of another, may be what Keats meant by negative capability. Though Keats quickly abandoned medicine for poetry, Arthur Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes while suffering the dolors of a failing ophthalmology practice, and Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis, having spent seven years as a physician in a sanitarium for consumptives. In a letter to a friend (c. 1886), Chekhov wrote: "Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity."

Michael Salcman
Baltimore, Maryland



Dear Editor,

William Wenthe's poem "Poorwill" in the November issue made my entire subscription worthwhile. Please grace us with more of his finely-crafted poetry!

Laura Stamps
Columbia, South Carolina



Dear Editor,

The November issue is the best of the year. Thank you for printing poets who are not yet known but incredibly talented, like Lucas Howell. And thanks for printing poems that are stunningly creative yet understandable. "Natural Selection" by Clive James is brilliant.

Sarah Merck
Cincinnati, Ohio



Dear Editor,

Since subscribing to Poetry (I've received two issues so far) Richard Wilbur's translation of Symphosius is the first offering that I can say I understood and/or enjoyed. I fear this means I'm nineteen centuries behind the times.

Richard K. Nelson
North Oxford, Massachusetts