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.”
[Read more]