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

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

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

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

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

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