Friend’s New Book

My friend’s new book may actually be marginally better than I think. I didn’t read it in a very generous way— I let myself get disappointed sooner rather than later: three or four frumpy poems and pffft I was turning sour. In point of fact I didn’t read the whole seventy-page book; I slipped into the old I-can-tell-at-a-glance mode because frankly my friend’s unthrilling tendencies can be spotted a mile away.

Apparently someone else will have to be the loyal, supportive, unconditionally devoted friend to my friend. Meanwhile I am this brave new-Randall-Jarrell kind of guy, this lone ranger of honor who never toadies or coddles, this lonesome unthanked upholder of the art’s potential, this hero with love in his heart but ice in his eyes! And I am this far more deeply than William Logan. So I am sending a long e-mail explaining—with sudden strokes of wit!—the salient weaknesses of this book (such as the utterly predictable music-is-redemptive stuff and the complacent I-am-thinking-in-this-café stuff) and some day when the vapors of ego have dispersed my friend will say “Thanks for the bracing critique!” and not be so stuck in the self-mud of self-illusion. I’m not a jerk, I phrase my critique diplomatically, saying, “I could be wrong,” though frankly that seems titanically unlikely. After all, the number of poems in the book that I didn’t even glance at is not more than eight or nine. Maybe ten. And I don’t really imagine that in those there might all of a sudden be anything as impressive as what I achieve

in the stirring unwritten poems I all but compose while driving skillfully across my dream of Ohio.