19 May 2004. Orr's third paragraph, to go on with the essay-draft I began in yesterday's entry, reveals a main reason his review is of little value. Not that anything egregiously stupid about it jumps out. It is quite competent (and entertainingly written), in fact, actually going into explicit detail about Dennis's technique, with a quotation to support his view of it, as the use of a quasi-pentameter line, adherence to an informal but "reliable structure," a friendly, ordinary style using "clapboard plain" diction, and understatement. He implies Dennis's subject matter is quotidian. Certainly his quotation from Dennis indicates that: "These songs from the corner church,/ Wafting through the window this August morning,/ Lift the job of sanding my scarred oak bookcase/ From a three, on a ten-point scale "of joy,/ To at least a four. Not a bad grade. . . ." We learn indirectly from the quotation, and what Orr says, that Dennis is clever with the cliches of our time, too. So, why my condescension toward Dennis's paragraph?

Well, for one thing, he could have said what he had to say much more briefly by telling us Dennis writes standard Iowa Workshop Poems--effectively enough. My main problem with the paragraph, though, is that it tells us nothing new about poetry. This is Dennis's fault. His poems (apparently) are flat free verse. What could any critic say about them? The fault becomes Orr's, however--or the Times's--for choosing Dennis's book as the subject of this review. Orr could have changed this fault into a virtue by telling us about all the things Orr's poetry doesn't do, and giving us examples of successful uses of techniques Dennis never uses but ought to consider using, but Orr is a stasguard, so it would be absurd to expect him to do that, even if he wanted to try real literary criticism.

Orr spends most of the rest of it on Dennis's subject matter and outlook. He veers farthest from my outlook when he says, "Of course, more rebellious poets might say that this kind of writing spends too little time on pain, passion and injustice, and too much time reassuring droopy suburbanites. The real problem with Dennis's work, however, isn't that it intends to comfort anyone, but that, at its worst, it's incapable of doing so." Tomorrow, I'll reveal why that bothers me. And now I'm off to the fifth volume of the Harry Potter series, the only one I haven't yet read (with pleasure)!