Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

It’s a shame that Peter Campion chooses to focus his attention on one or two narrow and relatively unimportant rhetorical devices in his review of Tony Hoagland’s latest book (“Rhetoric, Music, America,” May 2010). Campion misses the intense liveliness that animates most of these poems. In a time when so much of American poetry is so flat and incomprehensible that it has managed to alienate most readers, it’s sad when a reviewer in a respected, widely-read magazine writes something that could turn readers away from that rare thing: a poet who has something to say in an understandable way about life, his times, and the society he lives in. No one writes with as much wit, imagination, and humor as Tony Hoagland does.