Dear Editor,
Vivian Gornick attacks Donald Hall, Nick Flynn, and August Kleinzahler for doing in their memoirs “what none of these writers would do if he was writing a poem: they stop short of creating the narrator whose presence makes the work larger than the sum of its parts” [“It’s All in the Art,” May 2005]. Here she’s off the mark, because a poem need not have a narrator per se. The range of compositional options and obligations for poets is not identical to those of prose writers. A poem may have a narrator, a speaker (or speakers), or neither.
While the Pritchett quote is indeed a well-chosen delight, Gornick’s conclusion (“The rules, he thought, for all forms of writing, were the same”) is clearly both true and not. There are real reasons for the existence of a variety of literary genres, and, even in this era of genre blurring, the unique freedom of the poet remains uniquely vast.
Vivian Gornick attacks Donald Hall, Nick Flynn, and August Kleinzahler for doing in their memoirs “what none of these writers would do if he was writing a poem: they stop short of creating the narrator whose presence makes the work larger than the sum of its parts” [“It’s All in the Art,” May 2005]. Here she’s off the mark, because a poem need not have a narrator per se. The range of compositional options and obligations for poets is not identical to those of prose writers. A poem may have a narrator, a speaker (or speakers), or neither.
While the Pritchett quote is indeed a well-chosen delight, Gornick’s conclusion (“The rules, he thought, for all forms of writing, were the same”) is clearly both true and not. There are real reasons for the existence of a variety of literary genres, and, even in this era of genre blurring, the unique freedom of the poet remains uniquely vast.
New York, New York
Originally Published: November 1, 2005
Letter to the Editor