academic’s dismissal of Gilbert Sorrentino as being “just” a writer. Thus,
Darragh’s censuring letter was a salutary if painful reminder of my primary
af¤liation. It was very much like being a Jew who has never been subject to
anti-Semitic slurs and who hence does not think of herself as different from
anyone else, ¤nding herself suddenly in a situation where that Jewishness be-
comes a relevant fact that must be acknowledged. The absence of any overt
objection to the Darragh protest in a setting—Small Press Traf¤c—in which
I had thought I felt at home, momentarily made me withdraw and recognize
that, after all, I am not a poet and at a certain point my af¤liations have to
be elsewhere. And it made me recognize that I am more “academic” than I
had probably thought, since I do ¤rmly believe in reasoned discourse. In
other words, I felt that argument is one thing—and I would have been happy
to engage in public debate with Darragh on what I had said—but that name-
calling is another and is something that the rules of our profession make
more or less impossible. Think of the conferences you attend and the articles
that you read, and consider how little straightforward accusation or even di-
rect attack there is.
Perhaps, I thought, I had gone too far in the other direction, siding with
the poets against the academy. Perhaps I had written one too many blurbs,
praised one too many poets, and invited too many of them to give readings
at my university. Oddly, I now found myself pulling back with a measure of
enormous relief! I wanted to do nothing so much as to write on dead poets
and artists, on historical movements and trends. When, by coincidence, I was
asked a week later to do an omnibus review of Rilke translations, including
William Gass’s fascinating new book on what translating Rilke means, I was
delighted!
This, then, was my lesson in the aporias of af¤liation. The poetry com-
munity to which I felt I belonged turned its back on me and I responded in
kind. But, as I have remarked, only for a moment. For whatever my own
situation, I persist in believing that my poet friends are more interesting and
often much better read (at least in modern literature) than most of my col-
leagues, and that poets, despite some of the misguided forays I have men-
tioned, have the potential to be the best critics. I know that by saying this I
am putting myself and people like me out of business, but just as Sir Philip
Sidney wrote one of the best poetic treatises of the sixteenth century, just as
Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces to Shakespeare are much greater Shakespeare criti-
cism than that of the professional critics of his day, just as Baudelaire’s Salons
are much more profound works of art criticism than that of the Goncourt
brothers, and just as Eliot and Pound put forward poetic principles that are
still with us at the beginning of a new century, so I believe that the ¤nest,
266 Chapter 14