Dear Editor,

I agree broadly with the three premises of Tony Hoagland’s essay, “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment” [March 2006]: that non-narrative modes and narrative modes are not enemies, that non-narrative modes are in fashion, and that many of fashion’s followers are often thoughtless poseurs. I think any observer without an axe to grind, whether friendly or antagonistic to non-narrative modes, will be able to agree with those.

But the essay I keep hoping to see on this subject, the one I think would most fruitfully deal with these prevailing contemporary trends, would be the essay that tells us not that the “associative” modes are the true future of poetry or the end of its history, but simply how to discern the worthwhile from the wasteful—the innovators from the imitators.

If one truly believes that associative modes are not the enemy of narrative, then determining the relative merit of particular practitioners would seem to be the critic’s most basic duty. The duty would be the same if the current fashion were formalism or narrative epic. Hoagland admits that “every style has ... its narcissistic cul-de-sac” and, I think, would grant that plenty of formal or narrative writing begins and ends in empty posturing. But if that is true, then merely pointing out the existence of a particular style’s particular cul-de-sac accomplishes exactly zero. Pointing out the weaknesses (or strengths) of a style qua style does not suffice, for style does not equal art. Contrasting it with surrealists or comparing it with l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry also does not suffice. Such aesthetic profiling is, sadly, nothing less than a refusal to read, even if Czeslaw Milosz (on a bad day?) gives in to the impulse. Even an essay that vehemently despised all non-narrative poems but demonstrated why some were more or less vile than others would be preferable to one that felt duty-bound to pass a judgment, positive or negative, on them as a class.

Chloe Joan Lopez
Somerville, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

I won’t mince words here: thank you, thank you, and thank you again for Tony Hoagland’s on-point, hallelujah, preachin’-to-part-of-the-choir essay. It is always such a relief to find that one is not crazy, or at least not alone in one’s craziness. As someone whose choice of reading material consists of ninety percent poetry, I have lately thought myself out of the loop or uncool as I tried my damnedest to understand/enjoy the influx of disconnected, disjointed, above-it-all, you-just-don’t-understand-me poetry. No more will I waste my time attempting to nurture a poem into illumination or indulge in self-loathing for not getting it. There is too much satisfying, linear, hit-me-where-it-hurts good stuff to get to.

Tina Schumann
Seattle, Washington



Dear Editor,

I often don’t grasp the non-narrative style of contemporary poetry discussed in Tony Hoagland’s article. But I do understand enough about it to know that it customarily lacks thematic depth. Look at the history of poetry, going back thousands of years. A narrative-influenced poem has a chance to resonate with the casual poetry reader, partly because narrative offers a fertile ground for associative depth within a poem. As best as I can tell, nonconnective poetries are typically almost always only surface. Will a poem with no depth be enduring to us readers? Good luck.

Keith Wyche
East Halmouth, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

While I agree with much of Willaim Logan’s characterizations of critics or criticism [“The Bowl of Diogenes,” February 2006], I do not agree with his characterization of the book reviewer’s role. Shouldn’t we give reviews a separate status, apart from criticism? The reviewer can only report on the birth of a book, while the critic has the luxury and perspective of time to look at a book’s more developed history. The realm of the reviewer is not the world of criticism, but that of literary journalism. As Christopher Ricks believes, reviewers and critics have different responsibilities, and these responsibilities stem from their tasks and differing perspectives: as poetry correspondents, reviewers should report in a way that is informative to their audience and provide a useful description of the book’s contents. Once tempers have cooled, honeymoons have ended, and the impartial witnesses have had their say, a critic can begin to argue properly for or against a poet’s work.

James Sitar
Brookline, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

William Logan’s otherwise entertaining essay is marred by his apparent confusion of obscurity with depth and accessibility with shallowness. As examples of the foolishness of avoiding obscurity, he uses several clumsy attempts to translate Elizabethan English to render it comprehensible to modern readers, forgetting to mention that neither Shakespeare nor the King James Bible was considered obscure in its own time. In fact, Shakespeare was wildly popular with a long string of hits, and nobody accused him of shallowness.

Logan blames the unpopularity of poetry (as so many before him have done) on its lost readership, essentially saying that the public is too lazy and obtuse to appreciate the pearls we cast before them. The problem of difficulty in poetry is a subject worthy of discussion and debate, but this oft-repeated ritual insult of the reader is nothing but sour grapes—untrue and self-defeating, not to mention arrogant, elitist, mean-spirited, and exceedingly tiresome.

Neth Hass
Anna, Illinois



Dear Editor,

The art critic Dave Hickey calls criticism “the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar.” I think William Logan has just proven that it can be the strongest if you are willing to take a stand. Like many book reviewers, contemporary art critics often abdicate the singular requirement of all criticism, that a judgment be made and a cogent explanation for that judgment given. The purpose of criticism today appears to be an ostentatious display of the critic’s erudition but not of his taste; it’s easier to discuss an obscurantist French philosopher than defend your subjective preferences. The reader is misled by assuming that the very existence of a review is sufficient evidence of the critic’s interest, the only encomium required, since reviewers never write in the negative or attempt to rank an achievement. When the artist is treated as if he or she were an endangered species needing a disclaimer like the one so often placed during movie credits, “no actual artists were harmed during the construction of this review,” the reader is left unenlightened. As both reader and writer, I am delighted to see the important turn criticism has made in the pages of Poetry.

Michael Salcman
Baltimore, Maryland



Dear Editor,

Thank you for placing William Logan’s essay between the essays of Mary Kinzie and George Szirtes. Kinzie and Szirtes illustrate a critical weakness in Logan’s comment; he lacks consideration for the counter argument.

Szirtes’s essay made its case for formal poetry without detracting from those who choose a seemingly formless method. Szirtes even states, “To mount a defense of them [the ideals of form] on what seem to me still-valid grounds is not to launch an attack on any other kind of verse.” In this statement, the author strikes me as the rational parent at a basketball game, the one who is able to cheer for his child without berating the refs or the other team.

Similarly, while I understand Logan’s implicit aversion to reviews that may seem too flattering, I glean a deeper credence for the words of an essay like Kinzie’s, which recognizes the destructive effects of a negative (and, as Kinzie notes, inaccurate) review. After all, what long-term harm is caused by misappropriated praise?

William Neumire
Baldwinsville, New York



Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Mary Kinzie’s essay “How Good to Hear You Singing” [February 2006]. It was refreshing to hear a critic’s self-criticism, and it is rare to find a critic with the acuity to realize that what may seem critical generosity is in fact as near objectivity as human beings can come. Her perceptive reading o Eleanor Wilner (“she shows there is still a place in poetic art for Shelleyan fervor”) is a brilliant example, as is her perspective on Julia Randall, which has inspired me to take another look at Randall’s work and to find myself enchanted.

Robert Thomas
South San Francisco, California



Dear Editor,

Thank you for publishing George Szirtes’s eloquent meditation on the possibilities of poetic form in your February issue [“Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern”]. It’s unfortunate that the prejudices and misconceptions regarding traditional forms remain so entrenched that contemporary poets who use them feel the need to justify themselves, but that’s the case. Some, understandably, react defensively, or take the offensive by bashing free verse and making formalism into a battle flag—they indulge, that is, in the sort of partisanship that makes political discourse so poisonous and divisive. Yet Szirtes manages to defend without being defensive, to advocate without being adversarial.

It’s hard to persuade young poets that it’s worth their while to do the woodshedding necessary to master such things as meter and rhyme, since the attempt requires taking several steps backward: the fruits of their early labors will no doubt be worse—often much worse, often laughably bad—than whatever they were already writing. Nor are they easily persuaded that certain kinds of constraints can liberate, rather than constrain, the poetic imagination. And, after all, who in their right minds would believe such an outlandish thing without experiencing it first? Readers of Szirtes’s marvelous essay just might.

Geoffrey Brock
Tucson, Arizona



Dear Editor,

The readers of Poetry deserve critical thinking a good deal more sophisticated than George Szirtes’s. One might have started an equally slanted article by stating these six opinions “frequently put forward regarding ‘form’ in poetry”:

1 Traditional forms are signs that what is truly valuable in art is its power to sustain universality and cultural continuity;

2 Rhyme, form, and all other such devices are signs of a rich respect for the authority of the past, without which poetry falls into anarchy and barbarity;

3 Versification is a form of the muscular, authentic, and straight; avoidance of traditional versification reduces poetry to the crudities of the great unwashed;

4 Versification is a form of male intellectual power, and, despite the achievements of Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marilyn Hacker (all of whom had strong masculine features), no woman poet has achieved the levels of Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe;

5 There are few rhymes in English, so rhyming indicates a linguistic and intellectual resourcefulness that separates the men from the boys;

6 Versification, particularly meter and rhyme, are spurs to the imagination, and without them poetry becomes lax, muddled, and forgettable.

Both Szirtes’s list and the one above are straw dogs that ought to be put out of their misery. Can’t we get away from such posturing either from the right or the left? Why does Poetry perpetuate such crude thinking by publishing such drivel?

David Bergman
Baltimore, Maryland



Dear Editor,

In his fine and important essay on the valuable qualities of formalism in poetry, George Szirtes discusses the phrase “the music of what happens.” Though he says, “it’s roots are certainly Celtic,” he does not note what seems to be the first use of the phrase in the chronicles of the Celtic chieftain Fionn McCool, translated by John Montague as follows:

Once as they rested on a chase, a debate arose among the Fianna-Finn as to what was the finest music in the world....
“Tell us, chief,” one ventured, “what do you think?”
“The music of what happens,” said great Fionn, “that is the finest music in the world.”

Ghita Orth
Shelburne, Vermont



Dear Editor,

While Dean Young’s two poems that open the February issue wander off course quite a bit, they both display a formidable breadth and depth of reference and imagery, and the first poem, a portrait of human frailty, is quite beautiful as it lingers in the mind. But one of its mysteries can be easily solved, the one contained in the lines “and the new nickel/with Washington hard to recognize.” That’s because it’s Thomas Jefferson.

Al Hudgins
Basking Ridge, New Jersey



Dear Editor,

As the biographer of composer-poet Ivor Gurney, I was pleased to see Rosanna Warren’s insightful profile of him in “Enthusiasms” (March 2006). I hope that readers of Poetry will now read his poetry and seek recordings of his music.

I would like to clarify one point. Gurney was not schizophrenic. He suffered from severe untreated manic-depressive illness that began in his mid-teens. The notion that he was schizophrenic dates from the late seventies when William Trethowan, a professor of psychiatry in England, drew that conclusion without doing a proper case study. Gurney’s first biographer, Michael Hurd, believed Trethowan’s explanation and thus it was accepted as fact.

Some sources still claim that Gurney was a shell-shocked victim of war and that the war destroyed him. This is not true either. Gurney thrived during the war, finding his voice as a poet while writing his first volume, Severn and Somme, composing songs regarded as masterpieces “within sound of gunfire,” and carrying on an intense, often brilliant correspondence numbering many hundreds of letters. He was a good, dependable soldier who on occasion felt an “unholy joy” at all the “artist’s material” war was supplying for him. He never suffered shell shock. When overworked army doctors making assembly line diagnoses could not determine what was wrong with him, they assumed he was experiencing a delayed shell shock (he hadn’t been near a battlefield for six months). He had actually suffered a breakdown triggered by the failure of his relationship with a nurse.

Pam Blevins
Brevard, North Carolina



Dear Editor,

First, I’d like to say how much I’ve been enjoying Poetry. I love the poems but have to admit I always turn to the back first. The book reviews have been great—people with opinions!—as have the essays. The Mary Karr and Garry Wills pieces were terrific, as was Adam Kirsch on Robert Lowell. I look forward to the magazine every month.

That said, I was stumped by the “Exchange” in the January issue. Is there such a thing as women’s poetry? You couldn’t have possibly asked that question seriously; its premise is just too silly. Was it posed as a way to needle your readers (and generate a lot of letters to your inbox) or do you really want to know? Any sophomore lit survey would show you that there is such a thing, so my money is on the former. I appreciate the thoughtful answers to your question, but I hope you’ll use the space to ask insightful questions about women’s writing instead of ones that go over such tired ground.


Joelle Biele
Ellicott City, Maryland



Dear Editor,

Perhaps David Orr did not finish reading Karl Shapiro’s “Manhole Covers,” the first line of which he quotes in his take on the Library of America’s selection of the poet’s work (“Eight Takes,” December 2005). That would explain Orr’s underestimation of the poem and his overall shortsightedness in his evaluation of Shapiro. “The beauty of manhole covers—what of that?” asks Shapiro. “Good question,” retorts Orr. But Orr’s mocking reply could be taken seriously when one considers the poem’s theme. Shapiro does indeed pose a good question; he goes on to describe just how and why manhole covers are beautiful.

On the literal level, manhole covers are far from beautiful. There is little about their design to make them attractive, and their being associated with reeking sewers does not help our perception of them either. But what Shapiro does in his poem is what many poets before him have done: he takes the ugly and ordinary and raises it to the level of beauty by looking at it in a different light. In the hands of a skilled poet like Shapiro, a manhole cover becomes a “Mayan calendar stone” and a headstone that marks “the grave of the iron-old world.” The manhole cover is at once an emblem of endurance and decay. What more could Orr ask for from a poet? Good question. One that perhaps even Orr cannot answer.

Michael Pope
Wilmington, North Carolina