Dear Editor,

Thank you for the delightful humor issue, but you made a peculiar choice in assigning Kay Ryan to report on the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs [“I Go to AWP,” July/August 2005]. After all, she admits to having an aversion to “cooperative endeavors,” including conferences, especially AWP’s. Why send someone who despises conferences to attend one? That editorial assignment, like Ryan’s essay, was perversely funny. Poetry is a sadomasochistic art, written by the passionately erudite amid hordes of the semi-literate who prefer TV; Ryan’s essay puts that sadomasochism into some new contortions, some of which are unintentionally funny, and some of which are sad. As Charles Baxter has written, “The one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet’s poems.” Ryan seems to prefer self-immolation to the company of other poets. It’s as if she were declaring herself proud to be a miner while she prays for the shafts to collapse in order to preserve the purity of her labor.

If you devote yourself to poetry, you work alone in one of our nation’s smallest minorities. That’s a sad predicament, but Ryan suggests that isolation and more antisocial behavior is best if the poet wishes to protect her artistic soul. Well, of course: a poet makes verse in solitude—and not as a member of the kinds of teams that produce movies and other simulacra of art for a culture stupefied by celebrities and explosions. But many lovers of poetry, including poets, find happy relief, at the very least, in the shared company of those who love books; it’s a respite from a culture that usually mistakes the vulgar for the authentic. Oddly, Ryan enters the company of writers and finds only soul-destroying horrors. Her fears are bizarrely misdirected; and, in the end, that’s not so amusing.

These days, the best way to elevate one’s status as a writer is to pose as the rebel, maverick, iconoclast, transgressor, or lonesome independent. Academe and AWP provide convenient backdrops against which many have posed with a rebel snarl. A few of the Language poets especially have done this with hilarious success in their postcoherent styles, celebrating their outsider status, even while they remain safely close to their seats in the game of musical tenured chairs. Had you chosen a Language poet for your commentator, the fault lines of hypocrisy might have quaked with more laughter. As a more earnest and lonely outsider, Ryan could only deliver a quirky, More-Independent-Than-Thou diatribe.

Ryan joins Donald Hall, Joseph Epstein, Thomas M. Disch, and many others in complaining about the mass production of creative writing programs. Other critics, most notably Dana Gioia, have argued that academe has incarcerated poetry in a small elite, isolated from our culture at large. So academe, according to its detractors, has diminished audiences for poetry by providing it with hundreds of thousands of students and graduates and readers all over North America?—the “millions” Ryan facetiously says crowded into a grand ballroom for poetry readings by Anne Carson and W.S. Merwin?

Creative writing is taught at most of the 2,100 departments of English in North America; and, in these classes, books of contemporary poetry and the classics are introduced to many students along with elements of the craft of writing. While enrollments throughout the humanities continue to decline, creative writing is one of the few areas that enjoys rapid growth. Nonetheless, many critics have indulged in a hallucination that condenses thousands of far-flung public outposts into a single, remote, hermetically sealed ivory tower. At least Kay Ryan likens the AWP conference to a traveling circus attended by millions. That comparison provides a slightly less inaccurate view of AWP’s commitment to serving literature, writers, and the public.

The AWP conference does, indeed, contain multitudes. How glad many are to study an art that has become as pluralistic as North America’s peoples. Too bad that artsy-smartsy solipsism prevented Ryan from seeing that 1,500 people attending a poetry reading might be an encouraging sign, or that our presenting fine Canadian authors to US readers was a good thing, or that strong sales of poetry at the conference bookfair might be reassuring, or that our gathering of four thousand fiction writers, poets, nonfiction writers, teachers, editors, publishers, and book lovers can be profoundly useful, educational, and entertaining.

David Fenza
Executive Director
ASSOCIATION OF WRITERS & WRITING PROGRAMS
Fairfax, Virginia



Kay Ryan responds,

I would like to thank David Fenza for his characterization of me as “proud to be a miner while she prays for the shafts to collapse in order to preserve the purity of her labor.” This is something I have tried to express for myself, but it’s always so much more powerful when it comes from someone else.

Kay Ryan



Dear Editor,

Kay Ryan’s piece on AWP is a contrarian, hilarious, honest delight. I share many of Ryan’s feelings about the AWP conference, but I spent more time in my room than she did. Because everyone at AWP seems to be so frantically on the make, running around desperately trying to see as many people as possible, especially famous people, I always find myself in a dilemma. On the one hand, I try to feel superior and refuse to participate, while on the other hand, I feel like I’m missing out on everything, and everyone is having much more fun than I am. Probably they are.

Susan Wood
Houston, Texas



Dear Editor,

Kay Ryan’s take on the recent AWP conference in Vancouver was brilliant. Thanks for publishing it.

Barbara Croft
Oak Park, Illinois



Dear Editor,

Kay Ryan’s “I Go to AWP” is exactly the sort of piece on poetry that I want to read and can never seem to find... serious, smart, and funny. I’m curious: did you ask Ryan to go to AWP because you were planning a humor issue, or did you decide to have a humor issue when you read her piece? Either way: thank you, and more please.


Nina Lindsay
Oakland, California



Dear Editor,

I am absolutely horrified to find Loren Goodman’s contribution in this issue [“Traveling Through the Dark (2005),” July/August 2005]. Surely, changing one word in William Stafford’s famous and magnifi-cent poem is not cause for publication. What in the world are you doing? Who should be pushed over the edge, Goodman or you editors?

Sally W. Bryan
Baltimore, Maryland



Dear Editor,

So you think eating a puppy is humorous! [See “A Doggerel,” July/August 2005] Shame on you!


M. V. Pregenzen
Albuquerque, New Mexico



Dear Editor,

I’m bemused by the fact that, of hundreds, possibly thousands of poets he might have targeted, the two contemporary poets Michael Lewis selected to ridicule by name are both African-American [“How To Make a Killing from Poetry: A Six Point Plan of Attack,” July/August 2005]. I wonder why. I may speak for all of your African-American readers when I say that we are not amused.


Mary Nelson
East Haddam, Connecticut



Dear Editor,

Your recent humor issue was an absolute delight. The poems were wonderful—especially the “Sects” of R.S. Gwynn—but the crowning gems were the essays by Kay Ryan and Michael Lewis.

I would like for Lewis to know that I have done my best to become the Poet of Erectile Dysfunction, as exemplified by the following verse:

When editors reject you flat,
Write a poem about a cat.
If you still receive rejections,
Write a poem about erections.

—Advice to New Poets

I hope you will do another humor issue in the not-too-distant future. This one was a treat.


Gail White
Breaux Bridge, Louisiana



Dear Editor,

The next time I take myself too seriously, I’m going to crack open my copy of the Humor Issue. It’s beyond brilliant (and that’s a compliment), cover to cover. Thank you all!


Rebecca Dyer
Mesa, Arizona



Dear Editor,

When I read the three poems by Andrew Hudgins in the Humor Issue, I laughed my butt off. If more people wrote poetry similar to Hudgins, perhaps there would be a wider poetry reading audience.

Floyd Root
Lafayette, Indiana



Dear Editor,

Your humor issue is just the kick in the pants the American poetry scene needed. Thank you for doing it. And I also should thank you for identifying the Poems and the Commentary as such. One can never be too careful.


David Mason
Woodland Park, Colorado



Dear Editor,

D.H. Tracy’s damning review of C.D. Wright’s new book, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (“Ten Takes,” June 2005) took me by surprise: Tracy condemns the book for exactly the same reason I found it so rewarding, a form that offers “standalone morsels of wisdom that, given the book’s looseness, necessarily come out of nowhere.” Perhaps a background in Renaissance literature led me to conclude that Cooling Time operates like a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century commonplace book rather than a linear, narrative collection. Commonplace books of this era were typically bound volumes of blank pages, filled with verse, prose, sententiae, letters, recipes, lists, transcriptions of other people’s work, and so forth, peculiar to an individual mind. They were often circulated, and early modern readers were adept and comfortable with the aphoristic, repetitive, and idiosyncratic qualities of such miscellanies. Wright’s collection follows the spirit of these books.

Early on in Cooling Time, Wright observes that “the search for models in my terms becomes a search for alternatives.” Tracy’s review left me wondering whether we, as readers necessarily conditioned by our times, are always able to appreciate—or even apprehend—an “alternative” vision when we come upon it. Perhaps we simply have forgotten how to read such texts. Perhaps, when we dismiss such alternatives out-of-hand, we squander the opportunity to learn from a mind—and a voice—that outpaces our own.

Linda Dove
Skull Valley, Arizona



Dear Editor,

I was a student at the University of Chicago in the thirties, when the New Criticism dominated literary discussion everywhere. The Chicago variant was called the Chicago School of Criticism and included such stellar academic performers as Ronald Crane and Richard McKeon. Their ancestral guru was Aristotle.

I took a course in Practical Criticism with Ronald Crane in which we spent all of an academic quarter analyzing “Sailing to Byzantium” and concluded that the only useful criterion in judging a poem was its complexity. A poem was good or bad on the basis of a plot in which various elements such as image, idea, rhythm, emotion, etc., contrast or confirm and resolve. The tensions of which a poem was made constituted its worth.

I still think that the textual approach to criticism, espoused by the Chicagoans, is the best way to deal with an aesthetic object. In painting, a study of pigment and pattern in Jackson Pollock, for example, is useful. Unfortunately, much recent criticism in poetry is focused on contextual matters like the poet’s life, the poetic movement to which he belongs, the period of history he lives in, etc. These matters make for trivia, amusing bits of information, appropriate to “Jeopardy.” They do not help us to understand and evaluate poetry.

I think the reviewers in Poetry should consider revising their approaches to the art.

Stephen Stepanchev
Hastings-On-Hudson, New York



Dear Editor,

Vivian Gornick attacks Donald Hall, Nick Flynn, and August Kleinzahler for doing in their memoirs “what none of these writers would do if he was writing a poem: they stop short of creating the narrator whose presence makes the work larger than the sum of its parts” [“It’s All in the Art,” May 2005]. Here she’s off the mark, because a poem need not have a narrator per se. The range of compositional options and obligations for poets is not identical to those of prose writers. A poem may have a narrator, a speaker (or speakers), or neither.

While the Pritchett quote is indeed a well-chosen delight, Gornick’s conclusion (“The rules, he thought, for all forms of writing, were the same”) is clearly both true and not. There are real reasons for the existence of a variety of literary genres, and, even in this era of genre blurring, the unique freedom of the poet remains uniquely vast.


Mary Folliet
New York, New York



Dear Editor,

Nance Van Winkle makes the casual assertion that we’d agree that Rilke was a great poet (Letters, April 2005). No, in truth, I always found Rilke’s wisdom vague and unnourishing. “You must change your life,” some stoned fuzzy-wuzzy would intone and then pause with glassy eyes glistening, waiting for the epiphany to ricochet to revelation in my psyche. Ooga-booga. Even as these poets of the sixties narrowed their passionate “isms” down to only being faithful to academic careerism, and with a grim ferocity devoted their primary energies to making sure that their children were prepared to be successful yuppies, the notion that they’d changed their lives was a superficial illusion. If nothing changes, nothing changes, and these people never change. The successful poets of these times don’t confront the misapprehensions of the age but are content to self-embody and reflect the parochial misapprehensions of their class. Poetry, friends, is boring...

The idea of a personal, inward life, kept pure from your own bourgeois compromises in your daily affairs, with the object to write Great Poems, is desperate and absurd. The old ooga-booga “made new.” To use Dickinson’s reclusiveness and Rilke’s misanthropy as examples doesn’t succeed if the considerations are taken to completion. It’s a logic of rationalization and coping. The successful poets of my generation were not the sort of people who went to airports to spit on their peers returning from Vietnam, but were the sort of people who ignored that kind of thing. Whatever their tolerance of the moment might be, it’s fundamentally an indifference, and that is boring.

William Hathaway
Surry, Maine