Letter from Poetry Magazine



	
Letter to the Editor



	

			
Letter to the Editor
		




	

					
	
					by  Michael  Dickman 			





	

	

				


Dear Editor,


What a deep disappointment Michael Robbins’s so-called “review” was. Reading it was like being trapped at a cocktail party after a poetry reading in Chicago by, well, Michael Robbins. Full of the undergraduate spitefulness that we’ve come to expect from young white male poets given a soapbox and a deadline, it gave me the distinct feeling that I was reading a blog. But I wasn’t reading a blog, I was reading Poetry. It is clear that Robbins has not “lived and loved” (as Heaney says) that which he writes about. His snarky, whiny, self-satisfied tone is the Top 40 hit of his generation. I can only hope that Robbins will turn his attention away from criticism and back to his own PhD studies. And I will turn mine to the brilliant Clive James essay in the same issue.
		
Princeton, New Jersey
	


	

		Originally Published: November 1, 2010	


	
		
	
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This prose originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Poetry magazine


		
			

				
						November 2010
				
			

			
		

			
		


		

			
		


	








	
		
			

				

				
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Biography

							
Born in Portland, Oregon, poet Michael Dickman grew up with his mother and twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman, in Lents, a suburb of Portland. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and an MFA at the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.
  
 Dickman’s elegiac free verse poems explore the difficult, often violent spectacle of personal memory; voice, in Dickman’s work, is a character unto itself, at once . . . 

							
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Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.

		
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