My open (and terribly earnest) letter in response to some of David Baratier’s comments on the Buffalo POETICS list (which are archived here):

Since no one’s sprinting to our defense, I hope I can be forgiven for offering a brief response to David Baratier’s comments on recent issues of Chicago Review. (Though I write as a co-editor of the magazine, I don’t presume to speak for my fellow editors and staff members. The magazine is too small, too precariously assembled to tolerate a party line.)

I’d like to leave Mr. Baratier’s concerns about the Dorn issue to the side, since I wasn’t at the magazine then and can’t speak for Eirik, except to say his deep knowledge of and serious passion for Dorn’s work hardly qualifies him as a “dabbler.” And I can’t speak to whether our “entire tone has went to silence” or the poetry we publish “promotes inaction.” It’s true that we haven’t had any fan letters from the barricades, but I’m not sure that settles the case. For most people on this planet, the fact that we pay as much attention to poetry as we do would count as evidence for charge that we’re “out of step with the needs of the current age.”

What irked me, prompting this response, is that we’ve just come off a string of issues that tried to confront exactly the question of “why [and how] poetry can matter especially in the political realm.” The question of the relation of literature and politics (and it is a question, with no simple untroubling answer) was and is a central one for the writers we’ve featured in recent issues: people like CD Wright, Lisa Robertson, Kenneth Rexroth, Wu Ming, Andrea Brady, and Keston Sutherland.

Poetry isn’t going to make gas any cheaper, nor is it going to deprive the Bush family of their annual income. It probably won’t stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But this isn’t to say that I doubt literature’s possible relevance to politics. The tough questions, as always, are how and where and when that possibility can become actual. CR’s not going to publish agitprop, but we do publish, and will continue to publish, writers who give those questions serious thought and attention.

Whether or not that qualifies us as sufficiently engagé is not a question that particularly troubles me. As an editor, my conscience is clear. What does particularly trouble me, as a human being and as a citizen, is the havoc this government continues to deploy in my and my compatriots’ names and the degree to which I am complicit in that havoc. On that score, my conscience is deeply, and I hope permanently, troubled.

Robert P. Baird
Co-editor
Chicago Review