Dear Editor,

If a book is superior to its reader, the reader may in a defensive and cowardly moment call the work incomprehensible. If the reader is Peter Campion, he may turn to glib reductions that wallow arrogantly in their own comfortable confusions. Instead of addressing Jeff Clark's Music and Suicide ("Ten Takes," November, 2004), Campion redresses the author with baffling hostility. In his one-page review, Campion wastes no time unleashing his roster of ad hominems; he likens Clark to "a computer program that translated French Surrealist poetry based on the neural feedback of a squid," Jeff Koons, a marine invertebrate, and Kim Jong-Il. Besides the obvious bad-joke quality of these analogies, Campion never comes up with any supporting evidence. He's too busy slinging empty, bitter guesses about Clark's intent and his publishing circumstances. Entrenched in the aura of gossip ("Various subcommittee members of the avant-garde are furious about all this"), Campion can hardly think for himself or do his own research. Let me set one record straight: Jeff Clark works as a freelance graphic designer for many presses, and his full-time work is not for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Campion squanders his chance to write a review in favor of passing off pernicious and trifling hearsay. Clark's Music and Suicide is an exacting book that embodies psychological struggles with whipsaw violence and erotic voluptuousness. Musically calibrated lines radiate from the vaporous places of dreams and trance. The resilient integrity of Clark's work has a life lexically tuned enough to outlast Campion's smug blusterings.

Christine Hume
Ann Arbor, Michigan



Peter Campion responds:

From behind her splatter of adjectives, her flubbed metaphors, and her starchiness ("pernicious and trifling hearsay"!) Christine Hume rages at me for not providing enough "evidence." So let me quote one of Jeff Clark's poems in full:

BLOOD DUB
for Christine Hume

Crave your arrival, crave summer lines
to sow inside, Inspirer
crave beads from the tiny vial
crescents and pink tongue
crave vibrations while dining
the salt slide, crave stunning oil
and salivation trails, wet curls
crave tasting the plum drug
a purple pearl on my ear
crave catlapping your lips
and the sun to swell as in the fable
of Jah's throb in a cherry aperture
and flood the folds

Peter Campion



Dear Editor,

It is difficult to imagine the deafness of ear and poverty of soul necessary to dismiss Frank Bidart's "Third Hour of the Night" (October, 2004) as a "dull, unfathomable poem," as Mark Soifer was brave enough to do in your January issue (Letters, January, 2005). I urge him to return to it. Over the past four decades, Bidart has amassed a body of work relentless, and very nearly unrivaled, in its seriousness and intensity; in recent years he has added to those distinctions a more recognizable and often ravishing lyric beauty. I can think of very few recent poems so gorgeous as the imprisoned Cellini's vision of Christ; I can think of none that offers anything so thrilling as Cellini's final victory over "the world's mere / arrangements of power" in the creation of his Perseus. Dedicating an entire issue to Bidart's poem required no small amount of editorial courage; you should be congratulated for it.

Having seen several readers express dismay at your comment section, let me also say that the quality and liveliness of criticism in recent issues of Poetry is a sign of your success in bringing the magazine back so unexpectedly to life. I have been especially glad to read the contributions of Dan Chiasson, who, a propos his recent exchange with Adam Kirsch, seems poised to serve the art not merely by guarding a tradition, essential a duty as that is, but also by furthering it.

Garth Greenwell
Cambridge, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

Poetry serves a community in need of an adjective. Several recent letters, commentaries, and editorials worry about whether "poetry" has become professionalized, why it is not more widely read, whether Garrison Keillor knows poems from pomade, and so forth. Look, there's no such thing as "poetry." There is hip-hop poetry, rock-and-roll poetry, slam poetry, greeting-card poetry—the list is long. This assertion is likely to provoke at least three reactions among the readers of Poetry. The first is to cry out, "Oh, but those examples aren't really poetry!" That complaint exposes the management of power done by claiming a valued term for one's own class, while at the same time denying such a term to unwashed others. A second reaction is to say, "But so much of hip-hop, slam, and the rest is really bad." So it is, but it is possible that some of what is published in these pages will not, shall we say, attain immortality. A third reaction is to claim an adjective for the poetry found here. "But this is serious poetry," or "academic poetry," or the like. Now we're getting somewhere: the nature of the claims made when people bewail, say, the declining popularity of "serious" poetry may be evaluated more clearly, especially when contrasted to the wild popularity of hip-hop poetry and its brethren. I think that until we get some more adjectives, these discussions will remain cloudy at best and disingenuous at worst.

Barry Brummett
Austin, Texas