Dear Editor,

Parnassus may be a place of many mansions catering to all different aesthetic persuasions, but behind the surface politeness, it has always been messy (see “Ambition and Greatness: An Exchange,” March 2005). The notion that great art embodies trans-historical essence, everywhere and always the same, but that that essence only comes to light in the working out of history, is a notion I'd like to believe in ... but on most days, I can't: my experience of art is so particular that I can't extrapolate beyond a certain point of abstraction. But what I know is false is to identify this trans-historical essence with any one style: Malevich wrote in 1917, “the only meaningful direction for painting is Cubo-Futurism.” “True art like true life takes a single road,” said Piet Mondrian in 1937. “The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing,” said Ad Reinhardt in 1962, firmly convinced that his paintings—black, matte, square—were what art essentially is.

Clement Greenberg was wrong when he insisted that all art is essentially abstract. Greenberg's claim that “the imperative [to make abstract art] comes from history” and that the artist is “held in a vise from which at the present moment he can escape only by surrendering his ambitions and returning to a stale past” didn't keep Philip Guston, an abstract painter who went back to figuration, from painting cartoon boots that trod all over Grand Statements like Greenberg's. And in the realm of poetry, no matter how often poets dismiss the work of other poets in the name of their politics, ideologies, or jealousies masquerading as principles, these credos and manifestoes fall prey to the same fallacy as the grand historical scheme that identifies history with a chosen people, or class, or part of the world. This nugget from Hegel, one of Greenberg's main men, is pure fool's gold: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, undeveloped Spirit.”

The historical migraine of feeling that there is an authentic and inauthentic mode of being, one pointing to the future, the other stuck in the past, loses its grip when you abandon the notion of some grand, historically mandated scheme. Likewise for the notion that there is a historically favored form pitted against an outworn mode. But it's a rare soul who can do without feeling that one's art isn't going to be ratified by the future: I suspect that even the most enlightened among us still hold to the myth of the future as the place where we'll be accepted and understood, if only as a useful goad for us to keep on writing—but why should we imagine that our formal preoccupations should be enshrined or elevated to the heights of a universal poetics, or that our style is the one style that will escape the history of styles? It's easy to talk pluralism, hard to live it. And besides, no matter how exclusionary our aesthetic structures are, or how fiercely we espouse our ideas about what art should be, the poems we write are something other than those structures, and they may even repudiate those structures: they exist beyond us and our intentions.

Tom Sleigh
Cambridge, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

Does the existence of the present-day, expanding “bureaucracy of poetry” (Jeredith Merrin's phrase) make it more difficult for genuinely bold and vital poetry to achieve recognition today and in the future? It is a reality, certainly, which Stein, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot, Auden, and even Bishop and Hayden did not have to consider. How does this difficulty, social and historical in nature—how does any difficulty, suffered personally, or socially, or historically—affect the poet's ambition to make the poem? I am reminded of an observation made by the German poet Gottfried Benn in an essay from Double Life, “Future and Present,” written in 1950. Benn was sixty-four. I quote from E.B. Ashton's translation:

How many good starters were seen to fall by the wayside! At first, big avant-garde, some indeed divinely gifted—and at forty they take the family tramping through Andalusia and detail the bullfights, or they discover Hindu introversion on a Cook's tour. What breaks them, according to my observations, is premature fame, allowing themselves to be typed by critics and admirers. Only if you break yourself again and again, if you forget yourself, go on and pay for it, live under burdens, let no one talk you into occasions to write, but make your own reasons for writing—then, perhaps, then, if a great deal of disappointment and self-denial and forced abandonment is added—then, eventually, you will perhaps have advanced the Pillars of Hercules by a few worm-lengths—perhaps.

Lawrence Joseph
New York, New York



Dear Editor,

It is the mission of the Poetry Profession to turn the word “great” into a near obscenity and make certain (by controlling all the highly visible mechanisms of publication, recognition, and reward) that if there are great poets among us they never achieve what the profession so deeply fears—readership.

The last thing professionals want is for any poet to rise above the calculatedly competent, politically correct, but ultimately throwaway poetry nurtured by creative writing programs via the workshop/conference system. Hundreds of salaries of $60,000 to $175,000, supplemented by juicy prizes, fees, and traveling fellowships, are at stake. Keep your ears down, don't rock the boat, and everyone can end up selling 300 copies of that “award-winning” book from a university (or otherwise subsidized) press.

Daisy Fried is right that “bad poetry doesn't chase out good.” More pertinent to the debate, however, is Alan Williamson's closing line of a talk he delivered to a roomful of poets in Berkeley a few years back: “And always remember: the good poetry drives out the best.”

David Alpaugh
Pleasant Hill, California



Dear Editor,

The four poets who participated in Poetry's colloquy on ambition and greatness said many good things but perhaps not the obvious thing: a poet's proper ambition is to astonish the reader, and great poets astonish readers again and again, and in every generation. Not that anyone sits down with pen and paper and thinks, “What shall I write that will astonish people?” Rather, something has astonished the writer—something that is mirabile dictu—and this is the inspiration for the poem.

Often the inspiration is another poem or poetry itself. The former was the case with Keats when he wrote that astonishing poem about astonishment, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.” Or consider Milton's “On Shakespeare”: “Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,/Hast built thyself a livelong monument.” When poetry itself is the inspiration, the resulting poem is often charged with powerful linguistic effects—verbal pyrotechnics—that may astonish the reader. In my experience, however, the astonishment wears off with repeated exposure unless the poem also offers psychological insights. I still love “Jabberwocky” but find it a charming rather than a great poem. (Charm is not negligible.)

Then there is the astonishment that the world and self supply—“emotion recollected in tranquility,” perhaps. Whether the fact is small or great—a moose emerging from an impenetrable wood or finding oneself in a dark wood in middle age—is not important; it matters only whether the poet's telling of it stabs us in the eye or ear.

I recall a conversation from twenty-five years ago (and the quotation that follows is therefore inexact) between Charles Wright and Howard Moss, in which Wright was extolling a younger poet, Sherod Santos, because he was ambitious: “not ambitious for himself but for his poems,” Wright explained. There is no need to apologize for ambition. The poet who is not ambitious for his or her poems is a dilettante.

Daniel D'Arezzo
New York, New York



Dear Editor,

D.H. Tracy writes with style, and I've enjoyed reading his criticism for its wit and seriousness of intent. His review of Claudia Rankine's book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely (“Ten Takes,” March 2005) disappointed, however, as it fastened its teeth on matters that seem considerably beside the point. Criticizing the book for how Rankine uses whole pages for section breaks is rather like measuring the white space in Mallarmé with calipers, and complaining about the total relative to text: it's the critic's will-to-be-distracted as supposed evidence of the work's inherent aesthetic weakness; the only weakness here, however, is the critic's, for indulging a false notion. By asking the rhetorical question of why Rankine simply doesn't turn off her television in order to put an end to her mass media malaise, he suggests she watches TV opportunistically as it provides her with a miserable subject. Such cynicism precludes entertaining the book on its own terms—on any of its own terms; it's as a convenient maneuver to avoid thinking about what the poet is trying to achieve.

In any case, Tracy's suggestion that Rankine is voyeuristically trauma-slumming is unjust: the poet is involved at every moment in a struggle to regain some ground for authentic being. The book clearly annoys Tracy to no end, a sure sign of which is the vigor he musters to attack ... the notes—in other words, the book's secondary textual matter. This is the last resort of an academic pedant. He would have preferred they be sprinkled in the body of the work, preferably on the section-marker pages, rather than appear as endnotes: he really hates those empty pages, it seems. Is this really passing for serious criticism?

One of the reasons I'm interested in Rankine's work is that she by turns corroborates and challenges my notions about poetry—what it is, how it sounds, what it's for, how to write it. She keeps me from taking things for granted. I thought I could take for granted a certain standard of response in Tracy's criticism, but this time I was wrong.

Joshua Weiner
Washington, DC



Dear Editor,

As I remember, the editor who founded Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe, and poets like Eliot and Pound who sometimes served as guest editors, prided themselves on having a narrowly defined aesthetic, and on being, in this sense, exclusive. Nowadays, it's just the opposite, of course. The magazine is determinedly inclusive, or so it seems from reading the “Comment” section. The idea seems to be to include every point of view and to elevate none, resulting in a veritable Tower of Babel, with every one speaking a different language, all “full of passionate intensity,” and no one to reconcile them. It depresses me every month.

Perhaps being given a lot of money and the responsibility it implies has made the editors feel an obligation to become more inclusive, but I'd ask them to remember that the magazine to which the money was given was valued for its adherence to an aesthetic—a perennial, centralized, but relatively narrow one. It's time to stop apologizing for having an identity.

Belle Randall
Seattle, Washington



The Editors respond:

Because of space limitations, we have had to edit Belle Randall's excellent letter, which balanced her critique of the back half of the magazine with praise for the poems. We're grateful for both, the criticism and the praise. In point of fact, though, Poetry has always prided itself on being inclusive. Harriet Monroe herself set the tone for the magazine with her “Open Door” policy, which appeared in the second issue. Besides making clear that the only standard for the poems would be excellence (and much of what she published was not at all “modern”), she explicitly stated that the back half of the magazine would not be “confined to one set of editorial opinions.” Indeed, she encouraged and often contributed to an atmosphere of intelligent and mostly well-mannered clamor. She thought it a sign of literary health and vigor, as do we.

The Editors