Dear Editor,

I realize this is playing into your hands, but in the cause of something more important than mere controversy, and in the interest of a better Poetry, I need to express some concern. Over the past several months, I’ve begun to wonder just how you perceive the role of a poetry reviewer. I’ve noticed a tendency toward (no, a fad for) negative reviews, each just a little wittier, a little nastier than the month before, culminating in your June issue with reviews that seem written with no other purpose than to prove the cleverness of the writer. In their own spirit, I need to say that they seem like the work of cheeky young narcissists who elect negativity at the expense of informed analysis, substituting shallowness for depth, attitude for understanding. It seems odd to spend the first half of your journal promoting the work of poets you admire and the other half tearing down the work of poets who deserve, at the very least, respectful attention to what they are trying to accomplish. A thoughtful review brings a vision larger than the self to the task of assessment. Harriet Monroe looked to Pound for just such assessment, and—curmudgeonly as he could be—Pound was also a generous and enthusiastic sponsor of work he appreciated.

Judith Kitchen
Port Townsend, Washington



Dear Editor,

First, a disclosure: Maxine Kumin is my friend and mentor. When I read D.H. Tracy’s review of her Jack and Other New Poems, I was horrified. But putting friendship and allegiances aside, I can’t understand how Tracy got it so wrong. He portrays Kumin as an upper-middle class feminine equivalent of the gentleman farmer, whose life is “rich with incident and modest stakes,” which she uses as fodder for her poems—none of which, he complains, “encounters any psychic resistance.” Tracy claims familiarity with the whole body of Kumin’s work but seems to have allowed his assumption—that an intellectually sophisticated woman couldn’t possibly live a rural life—to get between him and the reading. Kumin’s poems tell the truth about her life on the New Hampshire farm, and those who have visited her there know that she hasn’t merely acted out a part. She and her husband Victor have labored—a labor of love, to be sure, but labor nevertheless—for decades now raising horses, mowing hay, mucking out stalls, planting and weeding the garden.

Tracy complains that Kumin “is enjoying the blessing of being happy and stable, and suffering the curse of not being able to turn this into a writerly asset.” The theme of Jack is aging and death, and there’s plenty of darkness in the poems. Kumin has suffered enough for several lifetimes (see her memoir Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery) but she doesn’t bore us with self-pity or griping. Her wisdom is that she understands her place in the natural world—a world full of animals and vegetables and, happily, oblivious to the silliness of critics.

Lee Robinson
Comfort, Texas



Dear Editor,

Albert Goldbarth’s Budget Travel through Space and Time is his best book so far—which is saying a good deal, since Goldbarth has published more than twenty books of poetry, four collections of essays, and a novel. So it was dismaying to see this major achievement dismissed in your pages by a callow reviewer who obviously hadn’t even read the book all the way through, let alone closely and carefully.

It isn’t true, as your reviewer says, that “There can’t be any meaning in the connections the poems draw when it’s practically a premise that connections can be drawn between anything.” Beyond the sloppy grammar (between anything?), the connections Goldbarth makes are surprising, but never random or arbitrary. Rather, they operate with laser-like precision to illuminate and connect apparently disparate elements—a metaphorical vision found at the heart of all great poetry.

Your reviewer is also far off the mark when he says that “Gold-barth’s work amounts to a poetry of lists.” No. Goldbarth’s work could more accurately be described as extended meditations on the broad topic of what it is to be human, and within that what it is to love, what a human life can—and cannot—mean, the infinite shadings of human thought and emotion. One of the great strengths of the poems is that these questions are always grounded in particulars—the specifics that the reviewer mistakes for lists.

These poems are brilliant, moving, consoling. It’s ironic that your reviewer says that Goldbarth writes in part for “our adolescent delectation,” when the reviewer is the one with an adolescent sensibility—no attention span, no ability to see beyond the surface, no concept of history—and Goldbarth the wise, funny, generous grown-up.

Sharon Bryan
Port Townsend, Washington



D.H. Tracy responds:

I agree with Sharon Bryan that Albert Goldbarth, both in Budget Travel through Space and Time and in his work generally, is funny, generous, and (after a fashion) wise. Her characterization of the poet, though, as it emerges in her two principal objections to points in the review, diverges from my accumulated impressions. Bryan would make a case for Goldbarth as a portraitist of the subtleties of our inner lives, one whose metaphorical imagination operates carefully, deliberately, and precisely. This composition makes him sound like a descendant of Henry James, when it seems to me that Goldbarth is the last man you would call to sort out the emotional undercurrents in the drawing room. Goldbarth’s virtues, like Whitman’s, are exuberance, abundance, and the audacity to make a mess. It is in the limitations of these virtues, in their failure at certain extremities, that I found reason to hesitate.

It is certainly true that the connections Goldbarth draws between disparate elements are surprising; it may also be true that they are neither random nor arbitrary. What is most characteristic about them, however, is that they are not content with a given level of invention—the greater the disparity they overleap, the prouder they are of themselves. They have something of the stunt about them. Stunts are by nature escalatory, and, after repeated exposure to them, one may feel that the need to surprise is taking the place of the metaphorical vision that Bryan refers to.

“Poetry of lists” is a category which Bryan regards as pejorative. I do not, or not to the same degree. Whitman’s poetry, which I treasure, is also one of lists. However I adore it, though, an honest appraisal of it must reckon with its limitations, among which is that a wide-ranging attention has the counterintuitive effect of flattening one’s subjects. Yvor Winters raised this concern with regard to Whitman; in Thomas Parkinson’s paraphrase, “Whitman had no way of discriminating between one type and quality of human experience and another,” so he can attain, at best, “an indiscriminate celebration of energy.” It is this indiscriminate celebration in Budget Travel in Space and Time, and the continuing danger of it, that I wished to draw attention to. These problems having beset great poets, their mention in reference to Goldbarth’s work is not to be regarded as dismissive, glib, or unduly deprecating.

Enid Shomer and Lee Robinson take to task my review of Maxine Kumin’s Jack and Other New Poems for resting on guesswork, poor assumptions, and sophistry. The review pivots on the idea of psychic resistance, and both Shomer and Robinson believe, I gather, that the concept is drivel. This sort of makes further argument moot, but I will do what I can to answer their objections and clarify matters. It is my hope that nothing in the review be construed as an attack.

I confess I cannot find in Enid Shomer’s comments the circular reasoning mentioned. And, for the record, the review does not call Kumin a widow. Shomer states that I conclude that Kumin has not brushed close enough to madness to write great poetry, but this reading is not quite correct. Kumin has not brushed close enough to madness or other dislocating crisis (it appears, that is, on the evidence of her body of work) to lend force to the gestures of affirmation and repudiation in the book. If, in fact, she has struggled mightily, this does not enervate the argument, as the struggle finds no enactment I can discern, in Jack or out of it.

Robinson finds in Jack significant consideration of aging, death, and darkness, unattended by self-pity, culminating in the poet’s understanding of her place in the natural world. Jack seems to me to be at least as concerned with its place in the moral and historical worlds, but apart from this I do not contest the summary. But just as Kumin’s industriousness is not in question, neither is the presence of darkness or suffering in the book. What is missing is the traversal of that darkness that gives us some approximation, as readers, of experience. What is missing is the danger.

The rub in Jack is subtle, or at any rate unusual. Articulating it requires making inferences—not guesswork or assumptions, but educated inferences, based on close reading—about the poet’s state of mind. Robinson and Shomer have bridled at these inferences, but to disallow them, to censure their application when they prove inconvenient, is to bore a rather large hole in the ship that all of us—writers, readers, critics—are standing on. One cannot simultaneously claim that the poems “tell the truth about her life” and dismiss the interrogation of that truth—understanding its formulation, its applicability, its underpinnings, and validity. I have no desire to make the point autocratically or presumptuously, but the point needs to be made: an art that announces its arrival at Point B not having conducted us from Point A, an art that declares victory without having enacted struggle—not mentioned struggle, but enacted it—has come up short.

D. H. Tracy



Dear Editor,

I am puzzled by Dan Chiasson’s reluctance to engage any of the stronger or more representative poems of Jack Gilbert’s most recent book, Refusing Heaven (“Eight Takes,” April 2005). Chiasson’s review indicates neither a thorough and close reading of Gilbert’s poems, nor a larger understanding of the poet’s body of work as it informs his most recent publication. Not only does Chiasson misrepresent the title of the longest passage he offers as evidence of Gilbert’s work—the title of the poem is “A Kind Of Courage,” not “Trying To Sleep”—but he misreads the poem as an example of “the moral consequences of vanity.” Clearly Gilbert is drawing our attention to our strange or paradoxical capability for joy, “singing and dancing/and throwing down flowers nevertheless,” in spite of our specific knowledge of the suffering of others. Chiasson’s comment on craft and the proximity of certain lines—“'coat’ runs right up against 'she was raped’ as though the two were comparable, or a coat might have protected her”—is almost laughable in its misperception of Gilbert’s intent, or overly sarcastic and without critical merit.

Chiasson also believes Gilbert’s work in this book is “practically armored against new experience.” What Chiasson fails to mention is that Gilbert will turn eighty this year and that any writer of this age might be best understood in that context first. Gilbert is in fact wrestling his past life into the perspective he will greet death with. And Gilbert does not shy away from conversations with death. One only need read “Bring in the Gods” to encounter the fierce Gilbert, as fierce as he has ever been in his work, when he says near the poem’s end, “I am hungry/for what I am becoming.”

Jonathan Blake
Fitchburg, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

Dan Chiasson throws down the gauntlet in his pronouncement on Derek Walcott (“Eight Takes,” April 2005). Not that I’m going to be among those rushing to bolster Walcott’s standing in the canon—the work will speak for itself. What concerns me more is Chiasson’s apparently cavalier dismissal of poetry’s relation to its sister art: “People who like Walcott think poetry ought to be 'musical,’ which, to my thinking, makes about as much sense as saying music ought to be 'poetical.’” So. In a neat reversal Chiasson nixes six centuries of lyric tradition? (I’m speaking only of the lyric in English, from Chaucer on: the line of course extends to Anacreon and Sappho.) What’s wrong, one wonders, with thinking poetry might bear some analogous or mutually fructifying relation to music—or to painting, or to dance for that matter? Our best thinkers have thought so; as our best poets have had, for the most part, musical ears. Chiasson quotes one, Yeats, a “musical” poet if ever there was one, who adamantly thought “poetry ought to be 'musical,’” and whom Pound said had the best ear of his generation (never mind that Yeats was tone deaf). And Pound is a fine example, now that we’re quoting Pound again, of one who built upon the analogy of poetry to painting, dance, and song: recall his delineation of “three kinds of poetry ”—phanopoeia, logopoeia, and melopoeia—that latter treating poetry’s “musical property.” These notions need not be considered quaint or outdated; they are real, verifiable, and, to a responsive mind, imaginatively potent.

Todd Hearon
Exeter, New Hampshire



Dan Chiasson responds:

Does Jonathan Blake really think that a fine poem could celebrate “our capability for joy” despite others’ suffering? What a mean little idea! To my mind, Gilbert’s gravity stems from acknowledgment of, in Eliot’s words, a “thing ill done and done to others’ harm.” I wasn’t being “sarcastic” when I praised Gilbert’s provocative adjacencies: it’s a great pleasure to read poems so unsparing in their remorse. My review was mostly positive, though Gilbert’s fans apparently expect hagiography.

I was happy to provide Todd Hearon with a chance to display his erudition, though actually it was Keats I quoted in my review, not Yeats. I mean no offense to Anacreon (or Hermes or the tortoise who gave his life for the lyre) by suggesting that the word “musical” does not conjure the deep analogies between poetry and music described by Hearon (nor did I mean to dismiss those analogies). “Musical” means a poem with a lot of mellifluous effects, probably one in regular meter, probably pentameter. I wish I didn’t connect that kind of contemporary writing with intellectual murkiness, bombast, pomposity, sentimentality, etc.; but Walcott’s example, among several others, makes it hard not to do so.

Dan Chiasson



Dear Editor,

Christina Pugh criticizes the middlebrow demand for “lived experience” in poetry (“No Experience Necessary,” June 2005), which so often leads to trivial recounting of familiar anecdotes and banal “life-lessons.” However (taking a cue from some of the New York School poets), she in turn trivializes the concept, locating it in “a shared sense of humanity,” or “the mind-numbing burden of domesticity,” or life outside the university, or simply “manual labor.” As examples of so-called experience, these are equally banal and stereotypical.

One of the special virtues of poetry is its capacity to match vivid language with the particulars of sense experience. This power to represent actuality, as a fusion of intelligibility and sensuous immediacy—felt, seen, heard, and understood, all at once—is what poetry (unlike more abstract forms of discourse) does best. In T.S. Eliot’s terms, poetry’s synthetic “wit” counters “the dissociation of sensibility.” And it would be a mistake for poets simply to reject the possibilities of poetic realism—the fine rendering and interpretation of actual experience—on the basis of such a limited concept of the term.


Henry Gould
Providence, Rhode Island



Dear Editor,

For Christina Pugh, “experience” is an anathema. She questions what exactly it is and cleverly asks, “Is experience quantifiable? Does it drive a red Ferrari, or is it a rambling pedestrian with a long white beard?” She wants a poetry, apparently, less directly tied to life’s events, more related to the particular occasions (she makes a very useful distinction between “experience” and “occasion”) that inform the writing life.

My OED (shorter edition) lists, among the several definitions of “experience,” two that are relevant to this discussion. “Knowledge resulting from observation or practical acquaintance, or from what one has undergone.” And: “the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, the human race, etc.” In this sense, virtually all poetry comes from experience; where else can it come from?

Often, experience is pitted against imagination, but even the human imagination grows out of the life we’ve experienced. The complaints Pugh refers to about poets in the university is not that these poets don’t have experience, but rather that when you “professionalize” a field, as poetry has been professionalized in our time, you create a class of individuals whose experience is very similar. They have all gone through the same certification process, they all end up with similiar jobs at similiar institutions. What we need in our poets is not more experience or less, but a wider diversity of experience.

Fred Moramarco
San Diego, California



Dear Editor,

I much appreciated Christina Pugh’s essay, not only because it was the first mention of my name in Poetry magazine, but also because she got at exactly what I was making fun of when I wrote in the bio on my website, “He divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen.” I have never liked flapjacket blurbs, and what I like even less are those mini poet bios that say so-and-so divides his time between “San Francisco and Paris” or “New York and Mobile.” What’s the implication? That the poet has two families or two lovers (one for the warm seasons, one for the cold); that he is an itinerant bohemian (crashing on the couches of other poet-friends); that he is rich and deserves the NEA grant in the next line of his bio; or, that since he regularly travels across great stretches of land, sea, and air, he has important things to say in his poems?

Experience is a wonderful thing. But the experience of a poem and the experience of “lived life” are not the same wonderful thing. Writing poems should not be thought of as a process of translation, if only because that idea leads too many readers to wonder, “Those were some pretty words about [love, mother, porcupines, etc.], but what really was the experience [antecedent, story] behind the poem?” The experience of a poem is to make the reader experience both language and life, but mostly language!

Mark Yakich
Mount Pleasant, Michigan



Dear Editor,

Christina Pugh’s thesis cannot be properly understood, much less evaluated, without first clarifying two basic types of human experience. Human beings are biological organisms with certain inherited reflexive responses to stimuli—this is experience [1]. But “experience” also refers to and includes the range of our responses to our own reflexes—call it, experience [2]. If by “experience,” we mean the former, then perhaps Pugh is correct in saying that it cannot be the “litmus test for poetry.” But surely we more often mean “experience” to include both the senses I have given here. And in that expanded meaning, experience not only underlies meaning in literature, it is its font, its fundamental source.

Pugh invokes Wallace Stevens as an example of a poet of limited “experience.” Yet his experiences, as I have defined the notion, are not at all limited. Indeed, his life was optimally designed to provide him with experiences in the full sense as I have outlined it: he guarded the space and time necessary to respond to his inherited reflexes, yet he remained engaged in a complex set of social interactions through his work as an insurance executive.

This combination of detachment and involvement remains through time a remarkably potent cocktail for artists. Both Dante and Shakespeare were fully engaged in the social milieus of their own times, and both had periods of seclusion or isolation from society that are seen as crucial to their development as artists.

Zara Raab
Berkeley, California



Christina Pugh responds:

If the category of “experience”—as defined by the inchoate expectations of many readers and reviewers of contemporary American poetry—really did encompass everything that Henry Gould, Zara Raab, and Fred Moramarco think it should, then my essay would not have needed to be written. But those who fault poets for a lack of “experience” are almost never criticizing the felicity with which discrete sensory impressions are rendered on the page. Neither are they looking to the life of Stevens as a template for the sort of experience they want to see reflected in a poem. And they certainly aren’t going to the OED to see if their stock definition of “experience” might be widened (admirable and enlightening though this endeavor may be). Instead, those who come to poetry looking for “experience” are really looking for a foothold in the narrative of the poet’s biography, for biographical “event,” and, yes, for a way to identify with the work.

I agree with both Gould and Raab that such a definition of “experience” is indeed impoverished and trivialized. But neither writer seems to have understood the intent of my essay. It was neither a trashing of extra-literary experience nor an exploration of the multiple definitions that “experience” might have if we tried to rehabilitate the term as a viable descriptor for what really does matter in any poetic endeavor (this is, in fact, exactly what Gould, Raab, and Moramarco seek to do in their letters). Instead, I was arguing against what has become, in some circles, an unarticulated cliché of literary expectation as well as an excuse to tear down poets in the academy. This is certainly not to say that every poet in the academy should be celebrated, but rather that his or her work should be judged by criteria other than the life experience of the writer.

Of the four respondents, only Mark Yakich realizes that “experience,” in the context of my essay, cannot be understood without quotation marks around it. His mock-bio note about dividing time between the kitchen and the bedroom delightfully sends up the fetishized, Procrustean “life experience” that we often see in poets’ book jacket biographies. It also opens up a very provocative question about the unspoken role of class and money in the “experience” debate (since poorer poets, after all, do not have the option of “dividing time,” i.e., maintaining two places of residence). I appreciate his comments, as well as those of the other writers here.

Christina Pugh



Dear Editor,

Imagine my chagrin: as a new subscriber, reading Peter Campion’s excoriation of “finding one’s voice” (“Grasshoppers: A Notebook,” June 2005), and remembering presenting a workshop with that very title in my innocent little North Carolina town. That chagrin prompted a little soul-searching and other memories: how, younger, I wished to write like Phillip Larkin, then Amy Clampitt, then Wallace Stevens. At mid-life I know that I do not envy the facility of Billy Collins but rather the breathing spirit in Robert Bly’s Morning Poems. I think the concern with voice fades as we grow to understand that poetry must be what Wallace Stevens called “the poem of the mind.” Yet, initially, there has to be a voice for us, and we must find it. It has to be living, and it has to be “the speech of the place” (in every sense of that equally problematic term) where we are.

As one who works with young people every day, I do not wish to encourage any more solipsism, but I do want to help them be heard over the maddening and toxic white noise of the culture in which they are drowning. I take it on faith that they must find their voice in order to lose it.

Those who listen carefully to their own voice and read assiduously to study the skilled voices of others will grow into riper understanding of the craft. Noxious, obnoxious, and precious grow up together at first; the wheat and the tares will be separated at the harvest. Please don’t send the crop dusters.

David E. Poston
Gastonia, North Carolina



Peter Campion responds:

Thanks to David Poston for his eloquent and levelheaded response. I find little to disagree with in his comments. Despite our difference in emphasis, we seem to share a sense that getting “voice” into poems involves both finding and losing.


Peter Campion



Dear Editor,

Health and vigor, undeniably, to pull a phrase from your response to a letter to the editor by Belle Randall in the May 2005 issue. Thanks to you and your staff for continued improvements in the magazine: the covers are striking, and the letters and forums continue to be a welcome addition. I’ve been reading Poetry for more than thirty years, and I’ve always believed its editors to have a wide taste base, which is not to say the magazine’s editors lack a discernible aesthetic (Randall’s complaint). I’d suggest that Poetry has always acknowledged the possibility of diverse but significant aesthetics within this large country and beyond its borders to all poetry written in, or translated into, English. When I was a younger reader, I went to the magazine to find out what kinds of poems were being applauded by the oldest poetry journal in our country. If I discovered a powerful poem by someone new to me, I looked at the contributors’ notes to find out where else I could locate other work by that writer. And then I followed this lead to the library or the bookstore. I still do.

Andrea Hollander Budy
Mountain View, Arkansas