Scene4 Magazine | letters to the editor

Great article. Poetry is not a dying art, but it does feel as though it's been pushed way off to the side. Audience sustains creation. The answer is not to just throw out a bunch of trivial repetitions or to totally reject them. Style is not the only issue, and bad poems in any style need to be called out. My idea is that the poem should give the reader an experience that is not available anywhere else, not even from another poem. That's like the great Dickinson saying that she knew it was poetry if it felt like the top of her head had been taken off. We practice an essential art, but our own weight condemns us to obscurity. Poets are not better people than non-poets. Our art is what it is. It'd be damn nice if people saw more of the heights and less of the flat plains of the "work". We, I, need/needs a true audience. Especially loved the idea of a good poem needing to be heard over and over. Hell yeah! It being in my blood/now yours.

Richard Benton

read David Alpaugh's article

Karren Alenier is a much cherished part of the Steinista tribe, indeed, and we agree quite happily to disagree. We all have a blind eye somewhere and Stein herself was the first to admit her political stupidity and inexperience: "Writers are not really interested in politics..." etc. To be on the record, this was the point of my detailed article in the Los Angles Review of Books, Was Gertrude Stein A Collaborator? (In a shorter version - Exclusive: Was Gertrude Stein A Hitler Fan?

An academic like Catharine R. Stimpson has begun to see Will's book with different eyes, as I was privileged to hear from herself. Others, like the great Stein expert Marjorie Perloff, have never been taken in. If you want a non-sensationalist account of Stein's war years, I refer you to the book by Dominique Saint Pierre, "Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre" -- an impeccable study by an historian, devoid of the inflated speculations in Barbara Will's book.

Renate Stendhal