Like a response to Kenneth Leonhardt, who complained in a letter in the July/August SPR/SMR about my saying in a previous column that "Mary Veazy's stylishly-produced Sticks . . . has included work by Richard Kostelanetz and myself, so deserves mention here." This, said he, "is so blatantly pompous that he has blown all pretense of objectivity. However, with such a high opinion of himself, I'm sure Grumman will have no difficulty getting his views published in even more prestigious venues than SMR." More prestigious than SMR?! Where is this guy coming from?!

As for his quote, note the three dots. What I really said (mispelling Mary Veazey's name) was, "Mary Veazy's stylishly- produced Sticks like CWM, is more knownstream than otherstream but it has included work by Richard Kostelanetz and myself, so deserves mention here." Probably pompous but a sympathetic reader would observe that I was simply saying, however carelessly, that Sticks generally published knownstream material but also used otherstream work, such as Kostelanetz's and mine, for which reason it ought to be mentioned in a column devoted to otherstream zines.

As for my objectivity (and what connection that has to my pompousness is beyond me), that is irrelevant: what counts in a review is whether the reviewer has backed his views with concrete evidence or not. Ironically, because the column the quote is from was an overview, I provided NO concrete evidence that Sticks is the worthy magazine I said it was--except, of course, the fact that it includes work by Richard Kostelanetz, Mark Fleckenstein, X.J. Kennedy and *!ME!*, BOB GRUMMAN.

If you really want to see a specimen of bad reviewing, see Vince Tinguely's hatchet job on two John M. Bennett tapes in the third issue of Blazin' Auralities. Here's its second paragraph in full: "Coruscation Drain is a collabroation with the musicians of the Strangulensis Research Labs. On it, Bennett's text is clearly recorded so we can hear how clearly bad it is. On Autophagia, Bennett's words are buried under collaborator Mike Hovancsek's sounds. This would count as a blessing if the music weren't as monotonously unbearable as the poetry." Nowhere in the review is a sample of Bennett's poetry: that's why the review is crap, not because I like Bennett's poetry and Tinguely doesn't. (Nonetheless, I still think Blazin' Auralities a good place to go for reviews of spoken-word recordings.)

Also in the July/August issue of SPR/SMR, just waiting for me to pop off about it, was a notice that for $95 you can get the sub-mediocrities at Writer's Digest to consider your self-published book for some kind of prize. I wish I had enough influence to persuade all writers to boycott this competition, and all competitions that require a reading fee. And I don't want to hear any sob stories from small-pressers who just can't get by without reading fees: I say if you don't love literature enough to suffer poverty for it, get out of it.

Now to really cheat on this assignment, I'm going to quote from a letter I just wrote Luigi-Bob Drake, editor of Taproot Reviews (in which, as Kenneth Leonhardt will surely immediately note, I have a vested interest):

"TR looks as good as ever. Best thing for me was the cover (collages by David Levy) . . . I hope to start making reviews for the next issue soon  .  .  . I just wish I had new zines to review--I seem only to have new issues of the same old stuff. It's the same old good stuff, but  .  .  . Which brings me to my latest thoughts about how to make TR more widely appealing--unless it's true that while millions write poetry, only thousands read it, and only dozens read about it. Maybe. Anyway, here go my thoughts, many, perhaps all, I've already thrown at you other times, I dunno.

"First, I assume you've tried getting college libraries to subscribe? Maybe give them a discount? Otherwise, I have no marketing ideas. I do have some content ideas. One I know we've back-and-forthed on: it's to have more People-magazine crap, except at a higher level: articles, I mean, on personalities in the field. A second is a repeat of your own editorial philosophy: to cover a wider spectrum of poetry. TR is fine on my kind of pluraesthetic material; it's fairly good on language poetry, though the latest issue misses Susan Smith Nash's entries. With Oberc, mainly, but also Basinski, TR is doing reasonably well by the neo-Bukowski school. But there's too little on the dominant-mode--because you have no reviewers from the establishment (or do you?) Not that dominant mode poetry isn't getting more than its rightful share of coverage allwhere else, just that TR might gain a larger clientele by doing more by it.

"I guess we've discussed letters to the editors before, too. I think they give a worthwhile spark to a magazine. I think maybe surveys might work--but way too much trouble for the present staff, I should imagine. Here's one: "What's Language Poetry?"- -to be asked of all known language poets AND all academics, and, in fact, of everyone in poetry. Representative answers out of every main point of view reproduced and circulated among respondants for agreement/disagreement before results published.

Another: "Is visual poetry poetry?" Others: "Who are the best poets in English and Why?" "Is innovation important in poetry?"

"Who are the best poetry critics in this country and why?" "What good is poetry criticism?" "What prevents Taproot Reviews from being as popular as Harper's?" "What good is poetry?" "Is Bill Moyers helping poetry?" "Should average people be able to understand a poem?" Okay, all of this is impractical but is something along these lines possible?

"It'd be so nice if TR (or any serious magazine about poetry) had the value for the literate the NY Times Book Reviews apparently does, or the New York Review of Books. Impossible dream? I suppose so."

Readers' comments on any of this welcome, even from Kenneth Leonhardt and C. Mulrooney.