Dear Editor,

Woe is I! Ange Mlinko uses the "I" as a lens through which to judge the worth of six very different books ["More Than Meets the I," October 2007]. In her opening paragraphs she indicates her criterion for judgment: "language is always larger than the poet." The reviews that ensue are both predictable and programmatic. Mlinko subjects each book to an "I" exam: if the author under consideration does not subjugate the "I" to language in a way that adheres to Mlinko's aesthetic, then he or she is accused of a variety of poetic crimes, namely, a "confessional" voice, anecdotal free verse, epiphanies, or a belief in an "authentic" self. Mlinko repeatedly, one might say obsessively, blames a single arch-villain, Robert Lowell, for the proliferation of these crimes.

But Mlinko's bias against the "I" is so forceful that it leads to insults and misreadings. To take a single statement from Henri Cole's poem "American Kestrel"—"No one has what I have:"—and call it narcissistic is to ignore what comes after the colon: "my long clean hands, my bored lips." The "I" here is ironic, despairing, far from self-admiring. This fourteen-line poem, unrhymed but with a sonnet's structural logic, culminates with the poet's struggle to find ground somewhere between the "I" and language, as the speaker tries "to create something neither confessional/nor abstract." Clearly Cole has heard the news that the "I" is partial, overdetermined, constructed, fluid, multiple, etc., and that the confessional voice á la Lowell has its limitations. But this is old news, and any serious poet writing today has heard it. Even Lowell was aware that his "I" in Life Studies was artifice, a self-conscious invention, a fiction.

As she reviews book after book, Mlinko relentlessly puts the "I" on trial. However, she does not feel the need to subject the "I" in her own review to the same scrutiny. "I offer these propositions . . . as a foundation for judgment," Mlinko declares unironically at the beginning of the piece. In applying her myopic critical framework to render not only aesthetic but moral verdicts, she relies on the authority and the unity of the "I" she would deny the poet. Mlinko is not telling us that her opinion is one of many, or that her viewpoint could change according to context, or that her stance is undergirded by the institutionalization of a certain aesthetic. On the contrary, she takes an authoritarian position on the "proper" relationship between the "I" and language and then belittles the poets who don't conform. In the end, the review had this reader wishing her "I" were in quotes.

Lauren Watel
Decatur, Georgia



Ange Mlinko responds:

I'm surprised that my praise for books as different as David Shapiro's, Rae Armantrout's, and Jay Wright's could be construed as "predictable and programmatic." In fact, the books I praised are as different from one another as the books I criticized were similar. This similarity constitutes the status quo. I don't expect to find genius in the status quo, but a little vitality goes a long way. My interpretation of "American Kestrel" doesn't rely on any notion of the authenticity of the speaker: the redundancy of the self speaking of the same self, page after page, is bound to make an intensely monotonous read, whether ironized or not.

Ange Mlinko



Dear Editor,

A trifle, to be sure, but in the interest of intellectual property rights, please note that "nothing human is alien to me," quoted by Ange Mlinko and attributed to Montaigne, became "his" aphorism only after his reading of Terence's second-century BCE play, The Self-Tormentor.

Stan Leavy
Hamden, Connecticut



Dear Editor,

In "Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook" (October 2007), Adam Zagajewski misrepresents the career of French poet and statesman Saint-John Perse. Perse was a leading advocate in the French foreign office for the use of force against Hitler from the remilitarization of the Rhineland through the Austrian Anschluss to the Munich debacle, but was overruled by the political leadership, chiefly the Radical Party of Laval and Daladier. To lump Perse with the advocates of appeasement is a travesty. After the fall of France, Perse was forced to flee Vichy, France and found refuge in the United States through the assistance of Archibald MacLeish, then librarian of Congress. I was dismayed by Zagajewski's disregard of the facts and calumny of a great poet and statesman who, from the start, perceived the danger to civilization posed by Hitler.

James O'Keefe
Albany, California



Dear Editor,

George Szirtes's "Missing Dates/Sleeve Notes" (October 2007) wisely argues that "the selves that inhabit poetry are imagined selves" and that we should temper our urge to read poets' biographies into their verse. It may follow that "poetry is useless as evidence," but I did a double-take when Szirtes adds that, to his knowledge, "no poem has ever been adduced as evidence in court."

The trials of Oscar Wilde confute Szirtes's statement but also support his broader argument. A poem by Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, Wilde's "homme fatal," was introduced by the prosecution as evidence of Wilde's "unnatural tendency," as were letters by Wilde to Bosie that Wilde defended as "poems in prose." ("Those red rose lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses.") Bosie's "Two Loves" was published in The Chameleon, a gay underground literary magazine where Wilde had also published in 1894. The prosecution in effect was trying to establish guilt by association. While perhaps not meriting canonicity, "Two Loves" is nevertheless remembered for its terminal line: "I am the love that dare not speak its name." When the prosecution asked Wilde to explain what this meant, he gave his best defense from the witness stand in all three of his trials, invoking Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, and earning applause from the courtroom.

The judges in Wilde's trials, however, ultimately instructed the jury to ignore literary evidence (not only the poems in question, but also The Picture of Dorian Gray), on the same grounds that Szirtes sets forth when he declares that a literary work "does not conduct us into the world of cause and effect, the world of biography."

William Craig Rice
Evanston, Illinios



Dear Editor,

The Indian Portfolio (September 2007) presented a good perspective on contemporary Indian poetry. In a nation whose tradition of poets extends thirty centuries, we are faced with a significant neglect of voices and local languages. The intellect and erudition in India are measured by the mastery of English language and literature. Subramanyan's "Situation," translated from the Tamil, which mentions how Pound leads us to Tagore, Eliot to the Upanishads, and Max Muller to ancient texts, is quite representative of the state of affairs. Except for the poets who have become lyricists and pen songs for Bollywood movies, we have neither the recognition nor rewards fit for our bards.

At the same time, since most of us grow up using English as the primary language for our education, we emote and versify in English as easily as in our mother tongue. While novelists like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita and Kiran Desai, and Vikram Chandra are household names, the poets have not yet found an audience. Nissim Ezekiel, Agha Shahid Ali, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Jeet Thayil, and Keki N. Daruwala are poets who have not reached the masses in the way classic poets used to do. Outside India, unfortunately, most people express surprise at our ability to grasp English, and, thinking that English is our second language (our accents don't help), dismiss Indian prosody as second rate or unequal to verses by native English speakers.

I looked at the "Indian Issue" of Poetry from 1959 and noticed Vinda and Amrita Pritam featured there as well. I was somewhat amused by this coincidence. Perhaps it tells us what we already know. Hindi poets like Dinkar, Mahadevi Verma, Bachchan, Nirala, etc., will remain unknown to the West and East alike, unless someone translates their work. Their poems are a delightful mix of the Indian tradition of poetry and myths and the Western poetry movements of the twentieth century. The wealth is there. We just need plunderers to seek it out and show it to the world.

Vivek Sharma
Atlanta, Georgia