Dear Editor,
I felt the delicious thrill of déjà vu after reading the two violently contrasting reviews of Garrison Keillor's new anthology, Good Poems, in your April issue. The fierceness of the debate brought me back to the early years of Poetry, which are fresh in my memory from the research I did for a new edition of Alice Corbin's Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. (Alice Corbin Henderson was Harriet Monroe's first associate editor and first reader of manuscripts.) Kleinzahler could stand in for Ezra Pound, in his condemnation of Keillor for having the temerity to stray from his middle-American, Lutheran "reservation" to inflict his "treacly" taste on the public. The more capacious Gioia could stand in for the tolerant Monroe, with his comment that Keillor "has probably done more to expand the audience for American poetry than all the learned journals in New England." Of course, there were those on the "regionalist" side of the early twentieth-century poetry wars who could be just as biting as the elitist Pound: witness William Carlos Williams suggesting in later life that the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land "wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it." Here's one more tidbit to add to the history of the poetry wars, from an unpublished letter sent by Marsden Hartley to Alice Corbin Henderson in 1918: "Margaret Anderson sent me six copies of the ‘Little Review' yesterday. They are certainly spreading the pointillism of James Joyce and the pounds and pounds of Ezra's so caked and crusted erudition. The poor genius! How he does pity poor America and us ignorant ones."
I felt the delicious thrill of déjà vu after reading the two violently contrasting reviews of Garrison Keillor's new anthology, Good Poems, in your April issue. The fierceness of the debate brought me back to the early years of Poetry, which are fresh in my memory from the research I did for a new edition of Alice Corbin's Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. (Alice Corbin Henderson was Harriet Monroe's first associate editor and first reader of manuscripts.) Kleinzahler could stand in for Ezra Pound, in his condemnation of Keillor for having the temerity to stray from his middle-American, Lutheran "reservation" to inflict his "treacly" taste on the public. The more capacious Gioia could stand in for the tolerant Monroe, with his comment that Keillor "has probably done more to expand the audience for American poetry than all the learned journals in New England." Of course, there were those on the "regionalist" side of the early twentieth-century poetry wars who could be just as biting as the elitist Pound: witness William Carlos Williams suggesting in later life that the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land "wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it." Here's one more tidbit to add to the history of the poetry wars, from an unpublished letter sent by Marsden Hartley to Alice Corbin Henderson in 1918: "Margaret Anderson sent me six copies of the ‘Little Review' yesterday. They are certainly spreading the pointillism of James Joyce and the pounds and pounds of Ezra's so caked and crusted erudition. The poor genius! How he does pity poor America and us ignorant ones."
Boston, Massachusetts
Originally Published: October 30, 2005
Letter to the Editor