These letters to the editor ran in the next issue, following the appearance of The Poetry Judge.
The Poetry Judge
I found Garrison Keillor's "The Poetry Judge" (February Atlantic ) very funny and mostly all too true. His lampooning of Vietnam poems, however, seems gratuitously unkind by the third time his narrator returns to the subject. I wonder if Keillor is aware that the poet and Vietnam veteran Michael Casey has won the Yale Younger Poets Award, the poet and Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa has won both the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Pulitzer Prize, the poet and Vietnam veteran Walter McDonald has won both the George Elliston Prize and the Juniper Prize, and the poet John Balaban, who spent three years in Vietnam as a civilian, has won both the Lamont Prize and a National Poetry Series award. None of these awards is named for a lady with three names. I would also direct Keillor's attention to the poetry of the Vietnam veterans Doug Anderson, Kevin Bowen, D. F. Brown, David Connolly, Horace Coleman, Gerald McCarthy, Basil Paquet, Dale Ritterbusch, and Bruce Weigl, each of whom has taken true-life experience and transformed it into literature.
W. D. Erhart
Philadelphia, Pa.
"The Poetry Judge" speaks the funny, crushing truth about ersatz poetry and wannabe poets. With apologies to Joyce Kilmer,
I think that I shall never pen
a line of poetry again.
Elizabeth Weber
Ames, Iowa
Garrison Keillor's poetry contest was our poetry contest--St. Paul's AAUW. We in our basic bliss were thrilled to have him, the famous Garrison Keillor, as one of our judges. So generous was he to refuse any remuneration. So sensitive was he to the significance of such an effort. He seemed to understand how much it meant to those inspired, pathetic protozoa who submitted their absurd elegies to their dead cats, their odes to Vietnam buddies "blown away yesterday," their lyrics on wedding receptions, their memories of Duluth, and assorted other laughable "painful truths."
I and my colleagues--who have also judged poetry contests and who have taught poetry and who have tried to put a good face and some jaunty encouragement on laughable lines penned by earnest "poets" who would like not to be killed before they are born--regret that Keillor's tauntings in his fine story will long reverberate painfully as professional judgment on what these would-be poets submitted.
Joy L. Davis
White Bear Lake, Minn.
Garrison Keillor replies:
There are in America marvelous poets doing brilliant and generous work, but my story is about the state of amateur poetry and about the thousands of creative-writing classes operated by kindly teachers who, like Joy Davis, encourage bad writing. Ms. Davis refers to these amateurs as "pathetic protozoa." I look on them as ambitious, intelligent persons who deserve better teaching. Writing requires discipline, and it can be taught, but you don't find it in turgid poems about Bad Daddies and The Struggle to Be Me and all the other flat, morbid, narcissistic writing that is encouraged by bad teaching. The creative-writing industry is cranking out reams of stuff that nobody in his or her right mind would ever want to read. One genre it mostly ignores is satire and humor. It takes discipline to tell a joke.
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