Dear Editor,

I enjoyed the prickly exchange in the January issue on the social function of poetry; an opinionated panel with diverse points of view is the best kind. But the panel also seemed tacitly to agree that the social function poetry once performed in Western civilization no longer obtains. Major Jackson alluded to the djalis and griots of West Africa who are the voices and repositories of tribal wisdom, but such a function is one to which contemporary American poets can only dreamily aspire. The question of whether poetry has a social function is asked because that former function is gone.

Or is it? None of the four poets on the panel mentioned poetry readings as having any social function, when, in fact, they are social functions. Jackson talked about teaching poetry to his students, and surely it is a societal choice to have poems in the curriculum. I tested Stephen Burt's proposition that different poets and poems have different social functions by applying it to the poems in the January issue of Poetry. I couldn't locate a social function in any one of them, so I must agree with Emily Warn that Burt's approach doesn't answer the question.

Daisy Fried, who invokes Keats, would probably agree with Burt that poems with a palpable design on the reader are not great poems; but there is no reason to believe, as it seems she does, that great poems can't also provide solace and teach us about ourselves and others and how things happen, without having a palpable design. Furthermore, there are lesser poems that perform a useful social function by making us laugh or reminding us of some dimly remembered truth.

The distinction between "good" and "bad" poems, which Daisy Fried raised, is really the crux of the matter. There seems to be a fear among Poetry poets that bad poems will drive out the good, but who among us started off writing good poems? Let us have more of them, more doggerel in the Times and haiku on the Web. The more bad poems there are, the more there will also be good ones.

Daniel D'Arezzo
New York, New York



Dear Editor,

I doubt that Nazim Hikmet, whose poems led to his arrest and twenty-eight-year sentence in 1938 for inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt, would question if poetry has a social function. Nor would Osip Mandelstam debate this question, since he was imprisoned and sentenced to five years of hard labor in 1938 for reading a poem aloud to eleven people. In 1982, Irina Ratushinskaya was charged with "authorship of poetry" and sentenced to seven years of hard labor. In the labor camp at Barashevo, Ratushinskaya scratched poems on a bar of soap, memorized them, erased them, and eventually published them (Beyond the Limit, Northwestern University Press). This doesn't happen in the US, you say? Let's not forget that Howl and Other Poems was put on trial in 1957. If poetry has no social function, why would those in government be concerned enough to imprison someone for writing it or, as Laura Bush did in January 2003, to cancel a symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" when it became clear that the event was turning into an anti-war protest?

Muriel Rukeyser, perhaps the greatest American poet of social and political engagement since Walt Whitman (and thankfully present in Emily Warn's comments), threw down the gauntlet when she left material comfort behind and traveled—to Scottsboro, Alabama; Gauley Bridge, West Virginia; Barcelona, Spain; Washington DC; a jail in South Korea—in order to write socially, politically, and aesthetically significant poems. In an early interview, Rukeyser stated that "the actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry." Carolyn Forchà once traveled to El Salvador and used her experiences to write one of the most socially significant books of poetry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In contrast, today's American poetry often has the sheen of having been written within the comfortable confines of privileged American households. Even in today's climate of war and environmental destruction, American poetry too often embodies our peculiar need to drain politics out of our art. Yet the social is political. When we collectively recognize that, we will no longer debate if poetry has a social function or not.

Richard Tayson
Briarwood, New York



Dear Editor,

The lively exchange in your January issue has resonance for me here in Costa Rica, where I'm building a house in a "green" community and seriously considering expatriation.

This morning I sat with my coffee at sunrise, watching a small troop of monkeys in a nearby tree, and wondering how a nice middle-aged lady from Connecticut could have gotten to the point of feeling more at home, more "functional," as Major Jackson put it, in this place. Here, the words "Soy poeta" (I am a poet) are met with smiles of welcome and recitations of verse. As one whose life is outside the academy, I'm grateful for the welcome.

Leslie McGrath
Guanacaste, Costa Rica



Dear Editor,

Evaluating a quatrain by A.E. Stallings, reviewer Peter Campion writes, "Maybe it seems persnickety to fault Stallings for small missteps" ["Eight Takes," January 2007]. But if that particular quatrain is the best example of what he also terms "fuddled passages," his point seems more than persnickety—it seems misguided. It's his jumping-off point for a stale diatribe (in the next paragraph) against the New Formalists, followed by this: "A.E. Stallings is too good to be lumped with these muggles." If that's the case, then why is Campion lumping them together? Because he wants it both ways—i.e., he's tarring Stallings with something we might call (in good ideological fashion) "New Formalist tendencies." Here's the quatrain in dispute :

Odysseus, recruiting, in disguise,
Set out for sale a range of merchandise,
Stuffs no princess easily resists—
Fine brocades, and bangles for the wrists.

Campion suggests that the use of "for sale" and "merchandise" (or "bangles" and "wrists") in the same phrase is redundant, an example of formal stylization at the expense of "felt texture." His authorities here are Pound and Williams in their pure Imagist mode, expostulating against "moth-eaten Romanticism," fusty Edwardians, any deviation from that Imagist dictum: no extraneous verbiage, no mere ornamentation.

But this dictum was always an oversimplification. Campion praises Pound and Williams as "supreme formalists," forgetting that such nostrums of verbal economy were responsible for a large percentage of the drabbest, dullest, most inert poetry of the twentieth century. His persnickety judgment on this elegant little quatrain reflects the puritanical and prosaic aspect of that Modernist tradition.

Henry Gould
Providence, Rhode Island



Dear Editor,

In his take on A.E. Stallings's Hapax in the January issue of Poetry, Campion takes brief snippets out of context. For example, in discussing "The Village on the Lake," he points to "the unnatural phrase 'those who swish on water skis.'" He goes on to say that "fish" exists merely for the rhyme. Even a perusal of this short excerpt makes it clear Stallings is describing an artificial setting: "It is not a natural lake..." Doesn't the very fact that Campion describes the phrase as "unnatural" tell him anything? Can't he hear the connection between sound and sense in this phrase, as well as in "those who swish/On water skis"? Or the flat cadence at the end: "It's stocked with fish." Not to mention the irony? Or the onomatopoeia?

In his discussion of "Visiting the Grave of Rupert Brooke," Campion once again takes small extracts out of context. First, he points to the phrase "set out for sale a range of merchandise," complaining that "if it's a range of merchandise, isn't it already ‘for sale'?" He likewise takes issue with "bangles for the wrists," declaring "if it's a bangle isn't it already ‘for the wrists'?" Even if his fault-finding were valid, it would constitute the utmost in nitpicking. However, it turns out he's wrong. My dictionary defines "merchandise" as "goods, esp. manufactured goods; commodities." So it is not necessarily already for sale. Similarly, bangles: "a bracelet or anklet in the form of a ring"—enough said.

Peter Campion uses his review as a springboard for yet another tired diatribe against contemporary formal poetry. However, in supporting his case, Campion either demonstrates a lack of understanding, a desire to preach, or a tin ear. Perhaps all of the above.

Marion Shore
Belmont, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

I think Peter Campion's take on Louis Zukofsky was too cursory. Few poets wouldn't pale in comparison to Williams, or even Pound, and to dismiss Zukofsky as a cold formalist is an injustice. His poems certainly lack the kind of "wholesome seediness" Campion finds appealing in Williams's verse, but this is replaced with a calculated musicality that, at its best moments, arrives at startlingly effective implications through that very same attention to form. Consider "A Song for the Year's End," the tangential approach of "With a Valentine (the February 12)," or his buoyant translations of Catullus. I simply don't see how anyone could read these poems, especially the last, and see them as nothing more than "copy-work." Of course, from the long view, Zukofsky will always end up playing second fiddle to poets like Williams. That shouldn't stop us, though, from appreciating his work on its own merits and marveling at his gift for tuning language.

Dan Corrigan
Baltimore, Maryland



Dear Editor,

What do any of us really gain from the "clever" last lines of Peter Campion's review of Mark Strand's new book ["Strand is to Stevens what Olive Garden is to fine Italian dining: reliable, easy, popular, at times better than expected, but rarely the real thing"]? Isn't it possible to be critical of something in a more tasteful and judicious manner? How does Campion's attempt to use his intellect so aggressively contribute in any positive way to poetry?

Joshua Bodwell
Cape Porpoise, Maine



Dear Editor,

I think the alleged conflict between poets and philosophers, dramatized in Durs Grünbein's recent essay ["The Poem and Its Secret," January 2007] is a hoax. It should be viewed as an instance of the familiar spectacle in which two relatively powerless groups of people are bamboozled into blaming each other for their problems, in spite of the supreme absurdity involved in holding someone even more marginal than yourself responsible for your marginalization. Sure, Plato did his best to make poets look bad; but philosophy has always been far too socially irrelevant to have had much influence over the cultural fate of poetry.

Western society has long been obsessed with commerce and conquest; it has had little time or patience for difficult and dangerous reflection. This is why both poets and philosophers feel so alone. We should stop bickering over scraps and put up a united front.

Isaac Piel
Chicago, Illinois



Dear Editor,

Christina Pugh's "Humor Anxiety" [December 2006], a valiant effort at explicating the absence of humor in poetry, ultimately fails. She has missed the forest for the trees if she believes "humorous poetry remains something of an oxymoron." True, there is a genre of poetry that dares not speak its name—light verse, a term found nowhere in her piece. Years ago, Dana Gioia referred to "light verse and children's poetry" as inhabiting a "cultural demimonde." And so they do. But it must take great pains to write about a subject and miss the target so conspicuously, unless, like Pugh, one is a purist who believes that "verse" is unconnected to "poetry."

The poetic examples that make Pugh "laugh aloud" are laughable. John Ashbery? Well, OK, humor is in the ear of the beholder. Happily, she quotes X.J. Kennedy, the funniest poet now writing, but where are the other masters of wit and humor who have found commodious shelter in the redoubtable Light Quarterly? R.S. Gwynn, John Updike, Tom Disch, Richard Moore, Edmund Conti, Joyce La Mers, Richard Wakefield, and many others have been writing humorous poetry/verse for years. But the response of high-minded poets on the subject of light verse is, both literally and figuratively, "You can't be serious." More's the pity.

J. Patrick Lewis
Westerville, Ohio



Christina Pugh responds:

Unfortunately, J. Patrick Lewis fails to understand the most basic argumentation at work in "Humor Anxiety." First, Lewis quotes me out of context by stating that I believe humorous poetry is an oxymoron. The full sentence from my article reads as follows: "In short, humorous poetry remains something of an oxymoron in our increasingly hermetic literary landscape." The phrase in question describes a cultural assumption (and moment) that I am critiquing, not what I am arguing for. Lewis's fundamental misunderstanding is a perfect example of the willful blindness that he wants to attribute to my article.

When Lewis accurately names John Ashbery and X.J. Kennedy as poets who make me "laugh aloud," he himself is demonstrating the disparateness and inclusiveness of my humor repertory—the very opposite, in fact, of the "purism" he attributes to me elsewhere. And for that matter, how can one appreciate X.J. Kennedy and not appreciate what Lewis terms as "verse"? Thus Lewis's own examples from "Humor Anxiety" disprove his larger assertions about my biases.

Christina Pugh



Dear Editor,

Clive James's glib remark in regard to Charles Olson's poetry—"I can't believe it was very hard to do"—is an easy one to make, especially when leveled against a portion of a poem that is in turn only a portion of Olson's much larger work, The Maximus Poems. [see "Listening for the Flavor: A Notebook," December 2006].

Poetry is easy when parsed down to its constituent parts, James is right. Any child in school can make words with relative ease. Heck, even those children not of school age can form simple rhymes. Using James's method, one can just as easily take a portion of a poem by Frost and hold it up as an example of his laziness and barbarity of language. "Toward heaven still,/And there's a barrel that I didn't fill" is a fine ditty, easily formed by anyone acquainted with simple rhyme. To fall in line with James's criticism of Olson, one could say that Frost's poems are simpleminded and formed only from easy rhymes. Frost's reputation, however, was not formed on such a fragmentary reading of his work, and neither was Olson's.

Michael Marcinkowski
Chicago, Illinois



Dear Editor,

For Clive James to extract "Song 6" from "The Songs of Maximus" and exhibit it as a stand-alone poem, which it is not, is petty and picayune. "Song 6" makes perfect sense in the context of what precedes it.

Mark Sargent
Sparta, Greece



Clive James responds:

The Frost fragment that Michael Marcinkowski quotes might look easy to him, but it doesn't look easy to me. In other words, I think it was harder to do than it looks, as real poetry always is. The Olson fragment I quoted, on the other hand, strikes me as easier to do than it looks, like almost all bad poetry written since the first modern generation of poets whose ambition outstripped their talent learned that they could get by with a show of advanced technique. Mark Sargent is quite right to say that the Olson fragment makes perfect sense in the context that precedes it. But since the context is a semantic vacuum, his point seems petty, not to say picayune. The best reason not to say "picayune," by the way, is that it means "petty." People who think that the same meaning grows more definite by being repeated in different words have been reading the wrong poets.

Clive James