Dear Editor,

Happy as I was to read a conversation on contemporary poetry between two interlocutors as articulate as Michael Hofmann and William Logan (June-July, 2004), I found their exchange ultimately disappointing in its narrow range of reference and its lazy willingness to base generalizations on strolls through all-too-familiar poetic neighborhoods. Hofmann and Logan both deplore contemporary poetry's monoglot, heavily workshopped, and linguistically uninterested (and uninteresting) textures, and I nod to concur on that point. But there are more poetics under the sun than are dreamt of in these two writers' philosophies, and both ignore some of the obvious ghettos in which poets are taking chances with form and language as well as (or often, thankfully, instead of ) the revelation of intimate personal details. Two such back streets are pointed out in Logan's dismissive asides: "eccentric" poets, whom, according to Logan, Americans call "Language poets" and at whom they "throw rocks," and poets who write from the specific experience of a racial or ethnic identity (which Logan calls "the new privilege"). A closer look (and listen) reveals a more interesting and encouraging picture of poetry at the present time.

Michael Palmer, for example, offers up fascinating poems with roots in French Surrealism and a searching interest in how language works. Across the Atlantic, Denise Riley mixes pop and politics in compelling explorations of domestic spaces, artistic surfaces, and linguistic constructions of reality. Indeed, in both the US and the UK whole communities of poets whose practices might be traced back to Pound and Williams, to Prynne and Bunting, continue to write poems that repay a simple willingness to sit with them a while. The same is true of poets of color, many of whom write poems whose richness gives the lie to the caricatured "multiculturalism" often kicked around by Logan and others. In book after book, Carl Phillips mixes memory and desire in poems fed by the roots of traditional forms; Jay Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Thylias Moss in the US, David Dabydeen, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean "Binta" Breeze, and Benjamin Zephaniah in the UK, and Kamau Braithwaite along with Derek Walcott from former British colonies in the Caribbean, are all producing richly varied and compelling poems. The sad thing about this hand-wringing exchange between Logan and Hofmann is not that it demonstrates just how narrow the dominant taste in contemporary poetry continues to be, even as it masquerades as catholicity—Logan likes both Geoffrey Hill and Anthony Hecht!—but that it creates the appearance of a crisis where none exists. Readers should not share their worries. In both Britain and America, poetry is doing just fine for those with the will to look a little beyond the catalogues for Knopf and Carcanet.

Michael Thurston
Northampton, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

The reason poetry reviewing is in such a woeful state has nothing to do with the supposed famine of strong judgments, nor with the alleged feast of poetry-world bonhomie. It is due to a lack of sound and persuasive categories for assessment, as exemplified in David Orr's "Eight Takes" and Adam Kirsch's "Out of the Republic, Into the Madhouse" (August, 2004). What we get in even the best poetry reviews are drive-by witticisms that aren't very witty, sponsored by ideologies that are, even when veiled—especially when veiled—plainly obvious to all parties.

Orr's notion that "academic poetry" has "for the last fifty years" been "intelligent but dull" while "non-academic poetry" has been "dopey but exciting" is impossible to parse: is Lowell an "academic" poet, and if so, is he dull? Is Stevens a "non-academic" poet, and if so, is he dopey? These notions are just plain nonsense.

Kirsch's review of new prose anthologies makes the same amazingly shallow point that he's made ad infinitum in published work now for years—poets of our time have been "neurotically obsessed" with "the modern." Isn't this a little like saying that bicyclists have been neurotically obsessed with handlebars? Are there "un-neurotic" obsessions? "Patient Zero of this sickness," he writes in a tasteless metaphor, "was Ezra Pound." This point has been made so many times by so many critics, and yet Pound remains as startling to read now as he was in 1922.

Can we stop arguing over modernism and post-modernism, the academic and the dopey, the raw and the cooked, etc., and please arrive at new questions, interesting and probing enough to fasten the judgments that result to their objects? Are we really going to spend another ten years talking about whether John Ashbery is a fraud?

Dan Chiasson
Sherborn, Massachusetts



Dear Editor,

David Orr's review of Robert Wrigley's Lives of the Animals (August, 2004) is not only regrettable for its weighted cynicism, but grossly misrepresents the work of one of our essential poets. Orr's comment that Wrigley's aesthetic "has to do with primitive carnal urges and actions" seems to imply that such issues are not acceptable subject matter for poetry. One wonders what other concerns would be added to Orr's list as inappropriate. What is most inexcusable, however, is the reviewer's dismissal of the book's richly textured title poem by carelessly citing stanzas, which he claims are "representative," out of context. Orr's disservice here to the potential reader is that he wrongly trivializes what's at stake in Wrigley's poetry. Lives of the Animals compels us to examine our human vulnerability, and in doing so discover our inherent dignity. David Orr has failed to recognize this intricacy.

W. E. Butts
Manchester, New Hampshire



David Orr responds:

For a poet, Dan Chiasson sure seems like a literal kind of guy. I think it's clear that when I wrote "[a]cademic poetry is intelligent but dull; non-academic poetry is dopey but exciting," I was describing an overgeneralization that's been around since at least the fifties; I wasn't offering the overgeneralization itself as the sum of my own thoughts on the matter. As for Chiasson's comment about "veiled ideologies," I'm at a loss: I wish he'd clarified his veiled objection. In regard to Robert Wrigley's book, W. E. Butts claims that my review "seems to imply" that "primitive, carnal urges and actions" aren't appropriate subjects for poetry. They are among the best subjects for poetry. But I respectfully disagree with Butts about the extent to which they were transformed into good poems in Wrigley's book. I'm glad Butts enjoyed the collection, though, and I admire his passionate advocacy of Wrigley's work even if it doesn't change my view.

David Orr



Dear Editor,

In his otherwise illuminating review of two poetics anthologies, Adam Kirsch bizarrely concludes that criticism can aid our new century's poetry by helping it to "break free from the post-romantic dialectic that obsessed poetry in the twentieth century," the historical dialectic which led to our current horror: the "madhouse" and "babel" that "has not produced major poetry."

Kirsch is obviously simply presenting his own tastes here. Never mind whether there even is a teleology to the history of poetry or if it can be influenced: the essay's grand trace of theoretical evolution amounts to a wish to turn back the clock. By the essay's final paragraphs, old-timey Hardy, Frost, Moore, Larkin, and Lowell are praised as the good guys, relatively newer John Ashbery and Jorie Graham are cast as usual suspects, heralds of an apocalypse.

To think about a style will never make a style.

Understanding poetics, inventing poetics, writing poetics, etc., will never yield a poem, never mind the "great" poem. If there's anything that will help poetry, it will be to break free of criticism that formulates a poetics even before its poetry is written, that offers artificial solutions to confabulated problems. Kirsch's course of treatment for the supposed ruin of our poetic culture is to embrace what he terms "the pragmatic tradition of Aristotle," a poetics that nebulously values "accurate and subtle knowledge of the world and human life." What poetry, of any supposed poetics, doesn't aspire to such qualities?

Garrett Doherty
Charleston, South Carolina



Adam Kirsch responds:

Garrett Doherty raises the difficult question of just how criticism affects the writing of poetry. Certainly poets do not sit down to write with the intention of proving a theory. But the history of poetry shows that thinking about a style can indeed help to make a style—witness the French and Frenchinfluenced criticism that shaped English Augustan poetry, or the obvious effect of Eliot and the New Critics on American poetry in the forties and fifties. By creating a climate of opinion and a scale of values, criticism can and should contribute to the health of poetry. That the values of modernism continue to inform our poetry, and not always for the better, is amply demonstrated by Dan Chiasson's assumption that poets today must be as concerned with being modern as a bicyclist is with handlebars—a notion that would have made no sense to poets before the twentieth century.

Adam Kirsch