Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

In his review of Thomas Lux's new book, The Cradle Place ("The Point of Access," May 2004), Peter Campion has a certain amount of fun with the word "accessible," which he uses with the same tone that he uses "poo," meaning "cow-pie." He writes that these days the word "can send twitters around poetry circles." The complaint seems to be that accessibility dumbs down a poem; it is one of the ways a mediocre writer can play to the least sophisticated within his audience, like the use of humor, which Campion also criticizes, that Lux "has no qualms about such crowd-pleasing." Reading Lux, he writes, is like "watching the re-runs on Comedy Central." Campion's aesthetic judgment seems skewed. If one takes the word "accessible" not as a code word for "dumb," and "humor" as not antithetical to the seriousness that Campion would persuade us that he admires, then surely accessibility and humor have been there from the start—Homer, for instance, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the whole gamut of dead white guys. In contrast to Lux, Campion seems to hold up the modernists as poets suitably obscure and dry, but "Prufrock," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and other of Eliot's poems are full of humor, while Stevens was always chuckling and slapping his knee. The contemporary poets who mock accessibility are far more like the late symbolists, and, like those poor unfortunates, will also pass unnoticed into the ether.

Lux has written all sorts of poems. His idea of accessibility is that the poem should be an act of communication, while the comic elements in his poems are often employed with great seriousness. Campion has some other intention in skewering Lux. He begins his review by writing that The Cradle Place is Lux's nineteenth book as if to suggest the poor fellow will never get it right. But more than half of those books, as Campion knows perfectly well, were chapbooks later incorporated into full-sized books. Thus with his very first sentence Campion jettisons his credibility. He becomes small.