Dear Editor,

David Orr says in his review of Muriel Rukeyser (“Eight Takes,” December 2005) that the effort “to express and interpret contemporary experience and imagine a different future” (these are Adrienne Rich’s words he is quoting) is “boring.” Since this is exactly what great poets have often done—one thinks of Whitman, Pound, Williams, Eliot, and others of the post-Enlightenment world—I have to wonder what he really might have meant, other than to express a deep dislike of political poetry that names names. His complaint of the “documentary feel” of Rukeyser’s work misses the point of a good deal of America’s best writing, i.e. Moby Dick, Pound’s Cantos, The Waste Land, Olson’s Maximus, the novels of Paul Metcalf, and much more. Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, which is most likely not included in the Library of America selection under review, is a pioneering effort in this area.

Later in the review, Orr suggests that poets ought to be restricted from dabbling in complicated subjects with their complex terminology and expertise like “politics (and science and medicine and law).” This is to miss one of the most important and liberating functions of poetry, namely, to keep the mass of people from being ruled by professional elites and those who have mastered their obscure or obfuscating discourses. But, gosh, that might make poetry political. It might even make it pertinent and disturbing, which David Orr would seem not to want, just as he would not want to acknowledge the conservative and political bias of his judgments.

Roger Mitchell
Jay, New York



Dear Editor,

Thank you for publishing the review by David Orr of Kenneth Fearing’s selected works. Fearing has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager (I’m now seventy-three) when my Uncle gave me one of Fearing’s books from Dynamo Press. I would reread the book often and read poems from it to my brother and friends. My favorite was “Obituary.” He certainly captured the times, and there is a lot of music in his poems—which balances the dour message. I enjoyed Orr’s comments and appreciate Library of America’s publishing Fearing’s selected works.

Mark Soifer
Vineland, New Jersey



Dear Editor,

Regarding December 2005’s eight Orrs: each a stroke of crit wit genius. Knifely done.


Richard Thayer
Reston, Virginia



Dear Editor,

I was surprised by Dargie Anderson’s letter, in the December 2005 issue, bemoaning “established writers” like Kay Ryan and David Orr for “crapping on younger writers.” Anderson must have been delighted to encounter the essay immediately preceding her letter, by David Orr, who also heartily craps on several dead writers.

As for this young writer, I’m thrilled with the current mood of demanding criticism, which I much prefer over the saccharin-sweet reviews of the previous decade. I, for one, don’t want “a break,” as Anderson calls for, and can’t even fathom expecting one from more established writers, who have to deal with the added pressure of continuing to publish and remain relevant while “the kids are coming up from behind,” to use an LCD Soundsystem phrase. Last time I checked, there was a disproportionate number of first book contests available to new writers, as opposed to slim pickings for second or third or fourth book contests. Now is a good time to be a young writer—if you watch where you step.

Molly Brodak
Morgantown, West Virginia



Dear Editor,

Upon reading Mary Karr’s essay “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer” [November 2005] I submitted a prayer of my own that before I die I might write a single paragraph as skillfully and cleverly as Karr does. Anyone who refers to a “dildo-wielding dominatrix,” Prufrock, Charles Mingus, and the Pope all on the first page truly is achieving something special. Karr’s account does not reßect the obligatory religio-regurgitation readers have grown used too, but instead a truthful narrative on the sensible struggle with prayer. Thank you, Mary Karr, for such an enjoyable essay, and also to Poetry for suggesting it.

Benjamin McVay
Shawnee, Oklahoma



Dear Editor,

Regarding Dan Chiasson’s dismissive review of June Jordan’s collected poems [“Eight Takes,” November 2005]: June Jordan is a poetic descendant of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda who aimed to distill many rhetorical modes of various world poetries as well as African-American traditions of protest and affirmation. Who we are in the world affects our aesthetics. It always has, whether one sees the world as a perennially violent place in need of forms in which to cry out and other forms to investigate a love ethic that can stand up to violence; or whether one sees joy and grief as atomized and private experiences rather than public ones.

There are some poets, like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Hayden, who leave behind relatively small, exquisite bodies of work wherein most of the poems are polished gems. That is one kind of poetic temperament. There are other poets, like Neruda and Jordan, who write big, sprawl, and declare. Within such bodies of work are, inevitably, poems that are weaker or stronger than others. Their aesthetic project is different from that of the Bishop-Hayden project, and should be read accordingly.

Black people (and so many others) have always felt the responsibility of “defending our names” against unreasonable attack, and that can be tiring work. Is it best to not justify arguments by refusing to dignify them? Best not to try to enlighten those who would refuse the gesture? Better to turn the pen to writing new words that illuminate rather than words that merely respond? Better to create your own terms of engagement than work with someone else’s? Alas, all the eloquence in the world has not given writers of color and women their fair shake in the literary world, not even close. But Jordan offered this line in her “Poem for South African Women”: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” The “we” in the case of Jordan’s work is not defined only by race, gender, sexuality, or geography but rather by the choice to hear beyond our own experiences and aesthetics. I know I am not alone in my profound appreciation of June Jordan’s poetry, in which she sought to find a poetics that could contain all she saw in an unjust world. That is a great artistic accomplishment.

Elizabeth Alexander
New Haven, Connecticut



Dan Chiasson responds:

Elizabeth Alexander’s comments suggest that there can be, or ought to be, no way of ranking talents within a given discourse(s). To say that June Jordan writes poems of “protest and a∞rmation” that descend from Neruda, Whitman, and world poetries, is simply to assign her (accurately I think) to those particular discourses. But participation in such rich heritages isn’t synonymous with doing important work within them. My review of Jordan made plain why I think, despite her personal courage and really admirable commitments, her poetry falters.

Dan Chiasson



Dear Editor,

So many thanks for Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems in the December 2005 issue. I particularly enjoyed “To Our Land.” The work by both poet and translator alike are exactly the kind of work I have come to expect from your magazine.


James A. Holman
Lewiston, Idaho



Dear Editor,

Were a contemporary Walt Whitman, or an Americanized Bertolt Brecht, or a North-American Pablo Neruda to send work to your magazine, they would, more than likely, get your polite, standard rejection slip, for there is no real world in the pages of Poetry! There are no worker-writers in the pages of Poetry; there are no poems about a war for oil, in which the poor and the underclasses still get sent to do the bloody job; there are no poems about torturing political prisoners; there are no poems about poverty, or about people driven to madness and suicide because they can’t make a living or feed their families.

Truthfully, you should be ashamed that your magazine advocates for the best poetry being written when you publish only tired, faint, what-passes-for-Belles-Lettres verse.

Bill Witherup
Seattle, Washington



Dear Editor,

I join those expressing enjoyment of the poems now being published in Poetry. I’ve been a subscriber to and reader of the magazine for some ten years or more. Over those years I had become increasingly disenchanted with the poems being published. They were for the most part incomprehensible, seemed to lack beauty, and were causing me to form, erroneously, a negative opinion of contemporary poetry. I was contemplating ending my subscription when to my gratification that changed very abruptly.

Writing poems is an art form. Art must express something useful and comprehensible in a form of beauty. The poems now being published do.

James V. Davis
Albany, Georgia