From “The Energies of Words,” Peter O’Leary’s history of the famous 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry:
For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.
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.”
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