Dear Editor,
I have to agree completely with Judith Kitchen in her assessment of your reviewers whose work often seems “like the work of cheeky young narcissists,” and, judging from your editorial in the same issue, this is exactly what you’re after. On behalf of poets and writers over the age of forty, I resent the notion that productivity equals plodding, boring, dull work, as you conclude. I also challenge you to prove your outrageously unsubstantiated statement that “it’s the young who most consistently identified the best . . . poetry of their time.” Really, I quit making facile statements like this when I was nineteen. Young poets, like young reviewers, are just that: young. Unripe, unformed, inexperienced, and, yes, narcissistic. Age, in poetry as in wine, is a good thing. As long as the poetry world continues to value its youth at the expense of its elders, poetry will continue to fade from the public view.
I have to agree completely with Judith Kitchen in her assessment of your reviewers whose work often seems “like the work of cheeky young narcissists,” and, judging from your editorial in the same issue, this is exactly what you’re after. On behalf of poets and writers over the age of forty, I resent the notion that productivity equals plodding, boring, dull work, as you conclude. I also challenge you to prove your outrageously unsubstantiated statement that “it’s the young who most consistently identified the best . . . poetry of their time.” Really, I quit making facile statements like this when I was nineteen. Young poets, like young reviewers, are just that: young. Unripe, unformed, inexperienced, and, yes, narcissistic. Age, in poetry as in wine, is a good thing. As long as the poetry world continues to value its youth at the expense of its elders, poetry will continue to fade from the public view.
Elk, California
Originally Published: December 31, 2005
Letter to the Editor