6 Responses

1. Campbell McGrath

   May 25, 2008

   Dear Robert:

   Thanks for taking the time to review my most recent book, SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS, in Book Forum. There are indeed many kinds of “frustration” in Poetry Land, and being ignored is one of them. Another, of course, is being mis­un­der­stood or mis­rep­re­sented, but those are the perils of the craft.

   In gen­eral, I thought your review was level-​headed, and could be sum­ma­rized as saying “this book isn’t intel­lec­tual enough for me; this dummy doesn’t even know there is such a thing as irony!” (Note excla­ma­tion point!) This, too, is a fair enough opin­ion, though it raises the ques­tion of how con­ver­sant you are with my work. I was par­tic­u­larly struck that you ref­er­ence my book PAX ATOM­ICA rather than the better-​known and more apro­pos SPRING COMES TO CHICAGO as an exam­ple of work toward which you are more favor­ably dis­posed– work, that is, dis­play­ing the req­ui­site level of intel­lec­tual ironi­ciza­tion. Have you read SPRING COMES TO CHICAGO, and if so, why did you not cite it as the log­i­cal coun­ter­point to SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS? The two books are in dia­logue with each other—7NBs is, in short, a year in the life of the body, while SCTC is a day in the life of the mind—and sev­eral of your more intem­per­ate pro­nounce­ments about my “hopes” and “capa­bil­i­ties” might have prof­ited from the com­par­i­son.

   For instance, you express dis­com­fort with my inclu­sion of var­i­ous “intellectual” quo­ta­tions in the second sec­tion of 7 NBs, but seem unaware that such cita­tions are a pri­mary fea­ture of “The Bob Hope Poem.” Even more “iron­i­cally,” “The Bob Hope Poem” is essen­tially a book-​length inves­ti­ga­tion of irony—cultural, eco­nomic and epistemological— and was cred­ited by the Judges in their cita­tion for the Kings­ley Tufts Prize for having pio­neered the genre of “Ironic Romanticism.” I don’t actu­ally agree with that label, but it merits consideration—in fact, I believe I dis­cussed it when I last vis­ited the U of C, and gave a lec­ture on—what else?— irony in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can poetry! (Note excla­ma­tion point!) By the way, if “dap­pled’ and “cerulean” don’t reg­is­ter at all on your irony meter you might want to check the set­tings.

   Anyway, none of the above would nec­es­sar­ily have changed your view of SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS as “nar­cis­sis­tic” and “myopic”—but it might have raised a cau­tion­ary flag about artis­tic inten­tion. That is, having already writ­ten one book in the myopi­cally nar­cis­sis­tic tra­di­tion of FOUR GOOD THINGS, I might at least have received due credit for work­ing in an alto­gether dif­fer­ent tra­di­tion of myopic nar­cis­sism this time around. Then again, as a “newly middle-​aged author” what do I know about nar­cis­sism? Heck, I don’t even have a blog! (Note excla­ma­tion point!)

   “Sin­cerely,”

   Camp­bell McGrath
2. Bobby

   May 25, 2008

   Dear Camp­bell,

   Just the other day I was read­ing some­thing by Wyatt Mason, a critic whom I admire per­haps more than any other work­ing today. He was address­ing–and dis­put­ing–the idea that “we” (the great magazine-​buying unwashed) are con­fronted with a dearth of seri­ous crit­i­cal atten­tion to lit­er­a­ture, and specif­i­cally novels. In the course of his argu­ment he wrote:

   To begin, if a nov­el­ist should receive a dumb review of his book, my belief is that he should feel not merely at lib­erty but honor-​bound to respond intel­li­gently, in public, in writing.

   It was a state­ment with which I found myself then (and find myself still now) in whole­hearted agree­ment. And so, at the start, let me say thanks for respond­ing so calmly and seri­ously to my review, which I’m sure could not have been much fun to read.

   I’m afraid, though, that I don’t rec­og­nize any­thing like my reac­tion to Seven Note­books in your sum­mary: “this book isn’t intel­lec­tual enough for me; this dummy doesn’t even know there is such a thing as irony!” So as long as we’re in the busi­ness of cor­rect­ing mis­read­ings–and on a blog no less! the ironies com­pound–I hope I can explain myself a little more thor­oughly than I could in the Book­fo­rum review.

   But first things first. For what it’s worth—and I’m actu­ally and hon­estly not sure how much it is worth—when I was assigned your book for review I did go back and read all six of your pre­vi­ous books, includ­ing of course Spring Comes to Chicago. You’re cor­rect in sup­pos­ing that I didn’t pick up on the life-of-the-body/life-of-the-mind con­nec­tion between the books, though I think those are prob­a­bly struc­tur­ing prin­ci­ples that are less obvi­ous to a reader than you might believe. On my read­ing, both books have plenty of bodies and minds involved through­out. Pick­ing just one sec­tion of SCTC at not-quite-random, I find lines like:

   My ears throb.
   My hands are numb already.
   My body cries out against the cold.

   That said, of course I rec­og­nized that the use of quo­ta­tions in Seven Note­books was not new to your work. But I don’t think that com­par­i­son with “The Bob Hope Poem” does the new book any favors. You write that

   “The Bob Hope Poem” is essen­tially a book-​length inves­ti­ga­tion of irony—cultural, eco­nomic and epistemological—and was cred­ited by the Judges in their cita­tion for the Kings­ley Tufts Prize for having pio­neered the genre of “Ironic Romanticism.”

   And that descrip­tion seems to suit the poem (and the book in which it appears) well. The quo­ta­tions in that poem are quite obvi­ously (and some­times too obvi­ously, I’d say) ironic, as when Braudel’s obser­va­tion that “[money and credit] make up a single lan­guage” is fol­lowed by your lines, “Money talks. / It coughts, cries, whis­pers, screams, wee­dles, boasts, exhorts…”

   But that’s all a little beside the point, isn’t it? I wasn’t review­ing “The Bob Hope Poem”; I was review­ing Seven Note­books. My com­plaint about the latter was not that you don’t know what irony is, it was that the kind of irony I was hoping for, a kind that would com­pli­cate and under­mine the com­pla­cency of the book’s speaker, is almost nowhere to be found. In fact, in saying that “Seven Note­books shows few signs that the author of Pax Atom­ica (2004) remem­bers the price of his peace” I meant to hint at the fact that your ear­lier word did appre­ci­ate ironies like the one con­tained in the phrase that titled that book.

   You say I missed the irony of “dap­pled” and “cerulean”–which is fair enough, I sup­pose, though I assure you I tried my best to find it. (Like most people, I hate to miss a joke.) But since you’re here, per­haps you can tell me: how should we under­stand that pas­sage as ironic? Is the irony sup­posed to be that a person like you would use words like that to describe an out­door shower? If that’s the case, then I just don’t find it very con­vinc­ing; words like that creep up through­out the book, and some­times they read as ironic (as in the “raw ochre, p-p-pink!, savage tan and old bone” of “August 21”) and some­times they don’t. Here, I obvi­ously thought they didn’t.

   Or to take another case I men­tioned in the review: is the poem titled “Now” sup­posed to be ironic? Is the Chakrabarty quote that faces it sup­posed to pro­vide some kind of ironic coun­ter­point? Maybe I’m just too dull to see it, but it seems to me like the line “The trees remem­ber their claim on the land” is in com­plete agree­ment with Chakrabarty’s notion that “the archaic comes into the modern, not as a rem­nant of another time but as some­thing con­sti­tu­tive of the present.” And if that’s the case, then it seems a fair crit­i­cism to say that a not very inter­est­ing line of poetry is hoping to make itself more inter­est­ing through its depen­dence on the quote.

   And that intro­duces my response to your other point. It’s the rela­tion­ship between the poems and the quoted pas­sages–in which the poems rely on the quotes for intel­lec­tual grav­ity or expos­i­tory sup­port, rather than play­ing off them in ironic or at least unob­vi­ous ways–that both­ered me about the quo­ta­tions. I frankly don’t care if poems are intel­lec­tual or not. Sure, I like a good poem that makes me think, but I also like very many poems that don’t have any­thing much to do with think­ing at all. But if a poem is going to make intel­lec­tual claims on a reader, I think it fair, at the very least, for that reader to respond to the ways in which the intel­lec­tual claims work (or don’t work) in the con­text of the art. That’s what I was trying to do, how­ever imper­fectly, in my review.

   In any case, I’ve now exceeded the length of my orig­i­nal review, so I’ll stop here. I can’t imag­ine that this will be a sat­is­fac­tory reply, but here it is nonethe­less.

   Thanks again for writ­ing,

   Bobby
3. Campbell McGrath

   May 26, 2008

   Bobby:

   Why wouldn’t a writer take his reviews seri­ously, as Wyatt Mason implic­itly asks, in the inter­est­ing quo­ta­tion you pro­vide? Espe­cially this kind of review? A few thou­sand people will ever set eyes on SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS, while a some­what larger circle—tens of thousands?—will encounter a review of it in some lit­er­ary jour­nal, grant­ing review­ers a strangely mag­ni­fied pres­ence in the life of a book. I share his notion of respond­ing to cer­tain reviews, though it seems to me that truly “dumb” reviews are not worth the trou­ble of response. Your review is intel­li­gent and artic­u­late, but unfor­tu­nately also con­temp­tu­ous, patron­iz­ing and dis­mis­sive. There’s no law against that, and I’ve read dis­mis­sive reviews before in which I felt the reviewer was more or less unas­sail­able. But I happen to take issue with your read­ings of the poems, and have even more dif­fi­culty with your readi­ness to jump from such rel­a­tively brief text-​based analy­sis to mind-​reading pro­nounce­ments about my hopes, inten­tions, desires and capabilities— this is always the kind of rhetoric I object to in reviews, even when the pro­nounce­ments are pos­i­tive. Your review ends by won­der­ing “some­what cru­elly” if the world would not be better off had the book never been writ­ten, and the com­pla­cent author swept away in the metaphoric flood­wa­ters before bur­den­ing the reader with its con­tents. (I’m guess­ing that you will try to deny that this is what your final sen­tence pur­ports to say, but I’m going to dis­agree in advance with your denial: that is what it says.) While I think review­ers should always avoid the for­mula “One wants so badly for this book to x…., but sadly not”—it comes off as extra disin­gen­u­ous when employed so shortly before wish­ing the book out of existence—it comes off as, to para­phrase, “I wanted so badly for the ship-​wreck sur­vivors to live, but in the end I put them out of their misery by run­ning them over with my yacht.”

   Anyway, since cru­elty is a moral rather than an intel­lec­tual fail­ing, and not likely to be cor­rected through tex­tual exe­ge­sis, let me just tell you where I dis­agree with your analy­sis. Also, by way of an apol­ogy in advance, let me admit that this exchange is really focus­ing a lot of fire­power on rel­a­tively minor issues, but now that we are dis­cussing it we might as well con­tinue. I have also come to believe since our last post­ing that your errors (as I see them) are those of youth­ful enthu­si­asm rather than intel­lec­tual mere­tri­cious­ness, though the effect of your review for SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS is the same in the end.

   My “prob­lems begin” in para­graph four, right where yours begin with my work. Where is the irony in “dap­pled” and “cerulean?” Well, you’ve already quoted from the same poem once before, at the end of para­graph three, though you don’t con­nect them in your review. “Tell me….how shall I express my grat­i­tude for the good for­tune of this life?” So the poem is, at one level, explic­itly about seek­ing a vocab­u­lary to address quo­tid­ian joy—it is a poem about com­pla­cency and about writ­ing about com­pla­cency! Does that make “cerulean” and “dap­pled” good writ­ing? No, it obvi­ates the ques­tion by explain­ing their place in the poem as “stereo­typ­i­cal” bucolic adjec­tives —it announces the poet’s aware­ness of their status and puts them in invis­i­ble quotation-​marks. It may or may not be a good poem—it may or may not even be a poem— but it is not (as you later claim) “fatally” “crip­pled” by “a lack of self-​awareness.” A poem “about” smug­ness can’t actu­ally be smug, since smug­ness implies that lack of self-​awareness you are eager to pin on me. An entire book self-​consciously about “account­ing” for domes­tic con­tent­ment can’t hon­estly be described as “self-​satisfied” and “nar­cis­sis­tic” since those states also imply lack of self-​awareness. It could be banal or bathetic or badly writ­ten, but not unaware of its inten­tions.

   Fur­ther, the two words you elide from the above quote (“Tell me, old master, how shall I…..”) leave a yawn­ing gulf in our abil­ity to under­stand the poem—that is, the fact that it is writ­ten to (and titled) Po Chu-i. “Dap­pled” and “cerulean” there­fore also res­onate against a tra­di­tion of Chi­nese land­scape poetry, which comes into col­li­sion, in the very next sen­tence, with a con­tem­po­rary con­sumerist vocab­u­lary, in the form of “Home Depot.” Again, per­haps not good writ­ing, but not lack­ing in self-​awareness, or in an ironic coun­ter­play of dis­parate rhetorics.

   At a larger level, in terms of your review, where did Po Chu-I go? One would never guess, from any­thing in your review, that SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS is in near-​constant dia­logue with a series of poetic “mas­ters,” more or less one per sec­tion, includ­ing Neruda, Rilke, Basho, Po Chu-I and Whitman—to say noth­ing of Robert Hass. You never address the book’s formal con­struc­tion as a series of dis­tinct notebook/sequences, with highly varied poetics—from prose to haiku—and leave the impres­sion that its form is a hap­haz­ard “diary-​like” gush. The book may be about com­pla­cency but its formal energy is any­thing but com­pla­cent: it is a rest­less inquiry into the appro­pri­ate poet­ics of bour­geois con­tent­ment. Note again that I am not argu­ing that the book suc­ceeds, just that you have mis­rep­re­sented it.

   Your very next cita­tion (para­graph four) is par­tic­u­larly galling in this regard. You quote some prose/line frag­ments on which you assert I have “big polit­i­cal hopes” riding—but wait, that poem, as you fail to men­tion, is about Pablo Neruda! Those “weighty phrases” are not laden with any hopes, polit­i­cal or oth­er­wise, of “my” own: they are a crit­i­cal response to Neruda’s poet­ics. The poem accuses Neruda of pri­or­i­tiz­ing rhetor­i­cal generalizations/ideology over spe­cific images/individual human lives—and finds an anal­ogy between his poetic prac­tice and his Stal­in­ist apol­o­gism. The poem pro­poses Basho as a coun­ter­point to Neruda in both arenas. But the poem is not about “me”—it’s not about “my hopes”—it is not even (pri­mar­ily) about “my” pol­i­tics or poetics—and this seems like an egre­gious over­sight not only in your response to these four lines, but to the book as a whole.

   The next cita­tion is even worse. You might really hate the poem “Now,” and I wouldn’t even try to argue with you, but you mis­rep­re­sent it entirely. The poem is a fable, almost nursery-rhyme-like in its rep­e­ti­tion of simple nouns. It does not respond to Chakrabarty; it renounces not only past and future but the rhetoric of intel­lec­tual inquiry. I have writ­ten many poems that could have been writ­ten by an under­grad­u­ate rock band and this cer­tainly is not one of them. Point me towards a band you think writes song like this and I will listen/read them with great inter­est.

   OK, so much for your cri­tique of actual poems. I hon­estly find myself in dis­agree­ment with pretty much every one of them—I think I’ve touched on them all here. The rest of your review resorts to a tone of sum­mary crit­i­cal dis­missal, as if, having mis­rep­re­sented a poem about Neruda as being my best attempt at coming up with some­thing useful to say, you had earned the right to assert that “McGrath has never been a ter­ri­bly deep thinker.” By saying “never,” of course, you’ve laid your­self open to rebut­tal if I can demon­strate even a single instance of deep think­ing on my part. While I can’t recall any at the moment, I’m sure there was one.

   “Myopia”? I can’t dis­prove it, though I think I’ve sug­gested why I dis­agree. But your use of Hass and Pinsky as a counter-​example is, I think, a real mis­step; the book is, if any­thing, overly-​dependent upon Hass, as he would cer­tainly agree. If you had said: McGrath seems to have pro­duced an over-​blown rewrite of HUMAN WISHES I would have a much harder time mus­ter­ing a defense. (As a side­bar, the crit­i­cal argu­ment you allude to here—“Vietnam” being the key word- is one I dis­agree with intel­lec­tu­ally. In my day the argu­ment was used to exalt Polish and Irish poets over poets like Hass and Pinsky purely on the basis of “national suf­fer­ing.” This is exactly the kind of rhetoric I accuse Neruda of indulging in, and I think this “iden­tity pol­i­tics” approach to poetry is entirely mis­guided.)

   Moving for­ward, I’m not sure I under­stand your issue with the “Surf­ing” metaphor—is it just a dumb metaphor, or are you read­ing into it some grand mes­sage about global iniq­uity? The line doesn’t seem to merit the con­dem­na­tion.

   Finally, no!, there is not only “one place” in the volume where “the poet recognizes….that there might be a uni­verse out there not auto­mat­i­cally pre­dis­posed to love him.” You know that’s inac­cu­rate, so you shouldn’t say it. You are now indulging your own Neru­dan moment of rhetor­i­cal over-​kill, and you don’t need to: you can still con­sider the book dumb, and make a strong (though mis­guided) argu­ment to that effect, with­out resort­ing to such hyper­bole. To take only one of many exam­ples, the longest poem in the book is “Sep­tem­ber 11,” and I think you noticed it because early in your review you deride my “Whit­manesque exu­ber­ance” as “forced” and “coer­cive.” Oddly, that’s how I describe Whit­man in “Sep­tem­ber 11,” when I cat­a­logue his ver­sion of com­pas­sion as being “unique, coer­cive, actively embod­ied.” I would read­ily believe that you might dis­like the poem, for its mys­ti­cism and free­wheel­ing lack of rigor, for instance. But in so far as it is a deeply mis­an­thropic poem about polit­i­cal vio­lence and the insuf­fi­ciency of art it is cer­tainly not an exam­ple of a poet who fails to “recognize….that there might be a uni­verse out there not auto­mat­i­cally pre­dis­posed to love him.” Agreed?

   Do you really wish the “flood­wa­ters” had swept this book away before you were bur­dened with the task of read­ing it? I doubt it. It’s not as bad as you make it out to be, though it’s flaws may be in the direc­tions you point. That you fail to admire its com­pen­satory abun­dances is also your right, though they might be worth re-​examining over time. (Or not.) I had some very vis­ceral resis­tances to HUMAN WISHES when it first appeared, and it took me years to under­stand that Hass’ “task” in that book was nei­ther what I wanted it to be, or now under­stand it to have been.

   Having reached crit­i­cal overkill on my end, I leave to you the final word of this exchange. Thanks, again, sin­cerely, for both­er­ing to read and think about SEVEN NOTE­BOOKS.

   Best,

   Camp­bell
4. Bobby

   May 26, 2008

   Dear Camp­bell,

   I’ll take youth­ful enthu­si­asm over intel­lec­tual mere­tri­cious­ness any day, though on second thought, if we wanted to be pedan­tic about it, mere­trix intel­lec­tu­alis prob­a­bly isn’t a ter­ri­ble Latin trans­la­tion for “book critic” after all.

   I’m going to try to respond to as much of what you wrote as I can, but I can almost assure you I won’t be suc­cess­ful. I’ll start with the ques­tion of inten­tion­al­ity. You write:

   I happen to take issue with your read­ings of the poems, and have even more dif­fi­culty with your readi­ness to jump from such rel­a­tively brief text-​based analy­sis to mind-​reading pro­nounce­ments about my hopes, inten­tions, desires and capabilities— this is always the kind of rhetoric I object to in reviews, even when the pro­nounce­ments are positive.

   From a cer­tain, very lit­eral per­spec­tive, I admit that you’re right. There’s noth­ing that guar­an­tees (for me or any other reader) that what you write on the page has any­thing to do with your inner­most “hopes, inten­tions, desires and capa­bil­i­ties.”

   But I have to say that this sounds a bit like spe­cial plead­ing. For one thing, the book is nar­rated by a fairly coher­ent first-​person “I” char­ac­ter who shares a number of bio­graph­i­cal details with you, includ­ing a name, a wife named Eliz­a­beth, two boys, a home in Florida, and so on.

   The other point has to do with review­erly con­ven­tions. Book­fo­rum’s read­ers are smart enough to know that when I use your name I’m refer­ring to a kind of ide­al­ized author pro­jected by your book (and all your other books). Of course I can’t be sure that you went straw­berry pick­ing with your family at Rain­bow Farms in Jan­u­ary, but Seven Note­books gives us read­ers no reason to doubt it, just as it gives us no reason to doubt that your con­scious­ness coin­cides with the expressed con­scious­ness of your speaker. (In other words, in con­trast to a novel like Roth’s Plot Against Amer­ica, noth­ing seems to be at stake in decid­ing how much of the first-​person char­ac­ter of Seven Note­books cor­re­sponds to your actual life.)

   And so I have to say that I have a hard time accept­ing this protest:

   You quote some prose/line frag­ments on which you assert I have “big polit­i­cal hopes” riding—but wait, that poem, as you fail to men­tion, is about Pablo Neruda! Those “weighty phrases” are not laden with any hopes, polit­i­cal or oth­er­wise, of “my” own: they are a crit­i­cal response to Neruda’s poetics…. [T]he poem [“Jan­u­ary 22”] is not about “me”—it’s not about “my hopes”—it is not even (pri­mar­ily) about “my” pol­i­tics or poetics—and this seems like an egre­gious over­sight not only in your response to these four lines, but to the book as a whole.

   You can’t really mean this, can you? The fact that the poem is about Neruda doesn’t pre­vent it from being “about you” as well. If it’s not about you, then to whom does this refer: “The more I read Neruda the more I am drawn to him and the less I under­stand him as a person and a poet.” Or whom does this state­ment belong to: “The trans­for­ma­tive magic of lan­guage is pre­cisely its abil­ity to reveal or deny, to lay bare or dis­sem­ble, to unlock our shack­les or par­tic­i­pate in our enslave­ment.” I sup­pose I can’t rule out the pos­si­bil­ity that you wrote these things some­thing in the manner of a dra­matic mono­logue, but if that’s the case, how are we sup­posed to know that? Where are the hooks that let us in on the secret?

   You charge that I’ve mis­rep­re­sented the book, argu­ing that it is “it is a rest­less inquiry into the appro­pri­ate poet­ics of bour­geois con­tent­ment.” Near the open­ing of the review, I say that “Seven Note­books is in large part a record of McGrath’s many plea­sures.” I think there’s less light between these two descrip­tions than you sug­gest, though I would obvi­ously agree that they’re not iden­ti­cal. I’d pro­pose that our real dis­agree­ment is over your word “rest­less.” As you say in your last post, you think the poems have a “formal energy [that] is any­thing but com­pla­cent.” I dis­agree, in part for the rea­sons I men­tioned in the review and in part for rea­sons that it’s not nec­es­sary to go into here. In any case, our dif­fer­ences on this point seem to have more to do with dif­fer­ing crit­i­cal judg­ments than with any kind of crit­i­cally irre­spon­si­ble “mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion.”

   Next, you call my invo­ca­tion of Pinsky, Hass, and McMichael a “real mis­step,” which is a little odd given your com­plaint that I don’t men­tion Basho or Rilke. But the point of invok­ing the first group is, I think, the oppo­site of what you take it to be. On the one hand, I used them to note my accep­tance of the propo­si­tion that there can be such thing as an “appro­pri­ate poet­ics of bour­geois con­tent­ment,” a propo­si­tion that is not self-​evident and one that sev­eral poets I know would prob­a­bly reject out of hand.

   On the other hand, I intro­duced them to give some con­text for your poetry. As I note at the start of the review, I read you as work­ing very much in their tra­di­tion. There’s noth­ing in that judg­ment that would con­tra­dict the notion that your book is “overly-​dependent upon Hass.” The dif­fer­ence, though, and I still think there is a sig­nif­i­cant one, is that while both you and they write about lives of domes­tic con­tent­ment and even tran­quil­ity, they are con­stantly remind­ing us how con­tin­gent and excep­tional those states and phases of life are.

   With respect to “Po Chü-I” you say that

   the poem is, at one level, explic­itly about seek­ing a vocab­u­lary to address quo­tid­ian joy—it is a poem about com­pla­cency and about writ­ing about complacency!…A poem “about” smug­ness can’t actu­ally be smug, since smug­ness implies that lack of self-​awareness you are eager to pin on me. An entire book self-​consciously about “account­ing” for domes­tic con­tent­ment can’t hon­estly be described as “self-​satisfied” and “nar­cis­sis­tic” since those states also imply lack of self-​awareness.

   And here I simply have to dis­agree. A poem about com­pla­cency can very easily be com­pla­cent, just as a book about nar­cis­sism can also be nar­cis­sis­tic. Fred­er­ick Seidel knows per­fectly well that he’s smug, but that doesn’t stop his poems from being smug. (What saves them is his formal genius and his abil­ity to shock us.)

   On the other side of that coin, a poem can address quo­tid­ian joy with­out itself being com­pla­cent. Let me take an exam­ple from Human Wishes, which you men­tioned. Hass’s “Misery and Splen­dor” opens with a per­fectly “ordi­nary” pic­ture of bour­geois con­tent­ment:

   Sum­moned by con­scious rec­ol­lec­tion, she
   would be smil­ing, they might be in a kitchen talk­ing,
   before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
   the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
   embrac­ing. He holds her as tightly
   as he can, she buries her­self in his body.

   But by the time it’s through, we’ve been car­ried to an entirely dif­fer­ent view of the couple’s sit­u­a­tion alto­gether:

   They feel them­selves at the center of a pow­er­ful
   and baf­fled will. They feel
   they are an almost animal,
   washed up on the shore of a world—
   or hud­dled against the gate of a garden—
   to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.

   This poem, for me, is a good exam­ple of the “invig­o­rat­ing com­plic­ity of micro- and macro­cosm” that I also appre­ci­ated in some of your ear­lier work. The poems of Seven Note­books, by con­trast, rarely seem to see out­side the cos­seted per­spec­tive of its nar­ra­tor. To describe the “myopia” I men­tioned in other terms, let me try this: I can’t remem­ber find­ing any­thing like that alien world or garden of Hass’s poem, or even any­thing like that phrase “they can’t admit,” which so torques the per­spec­tive of his last line. Instead your poems give us “har­monies of ful­fill­ment” and I just don’t think those har­monies make for very inter­est­ing or honest poetry.

   Which sug­gests the next point: the prob­lem I have with the ocean simile is really pretty simple: your poem asks us to imag­ine the “ocean-​rocked babies” as a metaphor of cer­tain kind of tender romance. I don’t at all object to the romance, but anyone who con­jures the image sug­gested by the phrase has to rec­og­nize that ocean-​rocked babies are babies in seri­ous peril! That unmen­tioned peril, which serves as a gen­eral metaphor for all the perils that your poems push from their field of vision, some­how went miss­ing from this book, as it did not in ear­lier work. I think if you want to deal hon­estly with the “poet­ics of bour­geois con­tent­ment” you can’t do with­out some con­sid­er­a­tion of it.

   Your “Sep­tem­ber 11” poem: I don’t think it’s very suc­cess­ful on its own, but it’s true that there, at least, you ask, “And beneath the still sur­face, / what depths?” And so, yes, I admit a bit of hyper­bole on my part. But what makes me dis­trust the poem–and an ear­lier draft of the review talked about this–is the aes­theti­ciz­ing ten­dency, which the poem ques­tions, yes, but which it also doesn’t suc­cess­fully resist. What’s more, what­ever recog­ni­tion of the out­side world is accom­plished by the poem dis­ap­pears again as soon as the next poem comes along. In “Order and Dis­or­der” we’re back to lines that have put the unset­tled world back on its axis:

   Out of form­less­ness, order.

   Against the dark­ness of the void, bright figures.

   And finally, no, I don’t reject your read­ing of the last line of my review. I don’t fre­quently find myself in the habit of wish­ing books out of exis­tence, espe­cially poetry books, but that’s for prac­ti­cal rea­sons, not prin­ci­pled ones. (It’s not worth the effort; the cul­ture at large seems to enforce the near non-​existence of poetry pretty well.) In any case, I don’t think such wish­ing is a great moral evil. Books are not people, and implied authors–in this sense, the moral sense, at least–are not the same as flesh-and-blood writ­ers. It’s “some­what cruel” to wonder if a person should have writ­ten a book because it’s an insult to the time and energy they put into it. But it’s like­wise “some­what cruel” to wonder if a real­ity TV show should have been filmed or an ill-​made meal should have been cooked, and those are judg­ments I make all the time. (I used to wonder at the over­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Marx­ists among artists until I real­ized, from my own expe­ri­ence, how attrac­tive the labor theory of value is for an artist. How badly we want every­one to know that it took thirty-​eight drafts to get these four­teen lines in this order! But with the excep­tion of very rare cases—The Diving Bell and the But­ter­fly, maybe—it’s just bad crit­i­cism to allow the effort of an author to stand in for the effect of a book.) At the very least I can say that if I do change my mind about the book I won’t be sad for it. If it came to a choice I’d much rather have good books to read than to be right in all my opin­ions.

   That last para­graph is a pretty harsh note to go out on, so let me end by saying that I don’t doubt that you have more and better books in you. And also that I really do appre­ci­ate your will­ing­ness to dis­cuss things here. As I said before, I can’t imag­ine it was fun read­ing my review, and if I were in your place I might very well have resorted to a less polite (but pos­si­bly more expe­di­ent) form of rebut­tal. I hold it entirely to your credit that you didn’t.

   All best,

   Bobby
5. Campbell McGrath

   May 27, 2008

   Bobby:

   OK, I will weigh in one more time, briefly, and mostly to say that I hereby yield the bat­tle­field and con­sider you the victor.

   First, to clar­ify slightly, the stuff about “autho­r­ial inten­tion” is not meant to dis­en­gage the nar­ra­tor from the “I” at all levels, of course; in fact, if you simply sub­sti­tute the new quo­ta­tion from “Spec­i­mens” about “The trans­for­ma­tive power of language….” for the one you began with, then your argu­ment against the poem can go for­ward. The one you did quote in the review, “Against rhetoric…” does not apply, as it is not a voic­ing of the narrator’s “own” thought, but a sum­mary or con­clu­sion to a line of crit­i­cal think­ing within the poem; so you could say it was stupid, but not that “I” had “hopes riding on it” as a polit­i­cal state­ment. If I say “2 + 2 = 5” in a poem you can jus­ti­fi­ably say “McGrath can’t add” but not “McGrath har­bors grand aspi­ra­tions as a math­e­mati­cian.” I’m not sure you quite believed me that my argu­ment was not with your dis­taste for the poem/thinking, but for mis­read­ing its rhetor­i­cal pos­ture, but it is. Also, you are cor­rect that there would be no way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate “secret mono­logues” from some other form of lyric address, and that would be an impos­si­ble burden for a critic.

   •The “rest­less­ness” I refer to is formal; I have no issues with your rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the book’s sub­ject matter.
   •I don’t agree about Seidel.
   •I think your Hass quotes only illus­trates that Hass is much smarter than me, and that—to return to my orig­i­nal paraphrase—you prefer more intel­lec­tual poetry.
   •“Order and Dis­or­der” ends on a para­dox­i­cal note, not an obliv­i­ous one: the “order” appear­ing “out of form­less­ness” in those last lines is the hur­ri­cane, which com­mences a new cycle of dis­or­der, etc.
   • As to the “unmen­tioned perils” of bour­geois con­tent­ment, I remem­ber writ­ing a poem in grad­u­ate school about a farm auc­tion in North Dakota, and being crit­i­cized for ignor­ing the plight of Native Amer­i­cans. Art makes choices and cannot please every­one.
   •I refuse to process your asser­tion that you would will out of exis­tence any poem or work or art, as this would be an even greater moral fail­ing than cru­elty and/or youth­ful enthu­si­asm. Cul­tural arti­facts pro­duced for com­mer­cial rather than artis­tic rea­sons are not cov­ered by this policy, so real­ity TV can still go.

   If you need me to respond again or fur­ther I will—that is, if you see me as evad­ing some essen­tial point or pro­mul­gat­ing base false­hoods. Oth­er­wise, I sur­ren­der.

   Best,

   Camp­bell
6. Bobby

   May 27, 2008

   Dear Camp­bell,

   I hope you’ll believe me that I’m not after vic­to­ries or sur­ren­ders. I took your charge of mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion seri­ously, and I wanted to defend what I wrote (which I assume is prob­a­bly not far off from your moti­va­tion as well). On the points you bring up in your last post I’m afraid we’ll just have to dis­agree, even on the last one. (Though I will say, with respect to your com­ment there, that I do believe there’s a sig­nif­i­cant moral gulf between wish­ing and will­ing.) I don’t think there’s any­thing I can add that would bring us any closer to agree­ment, so I think I’ll bow out here. But thanks again–really–for the dis­cus­sion.

   All best,

   Bobby

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