Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
At once deeply intelligent, broadly accessible, and a kick to read, Joshua Mehigan’s poem “The Orange Bottle” [February 2013], with its evocation of bipolar and paranoid states vivid enough to bring them to life even for those who have never known them — or, more accurately, to make us all aware that we have — such a poem would be a thrilling encounter in any context. In our own, it seems to me an apt metaphor for the plight of the contemporary American poet as well.
One unintended side effect of the success of writing programs is that they produce annually thousands upon thousands of poets who win degrees, awards, grants, publication, and teaching posts, yet have no real audience. The reason our poetry readings often feature numerous poets is surely so that even if only the performers show, there will be a crowd. Friends and relatives apologize for not coming, as if it were an obligation, like attending a hospital bed.
Such a climate, rife with smarmy praise and inconvenient truths, breeds self-doubt or, worse, delusion in the poet attempting to take her own measure. Like the speaker in Mehigan’s poem, the contemporary poet swings from self-aggrandizement to self-disparagement, never really knowing if she’s any good or not. The answer must be that she isn’t — not, anyway, as good as this.
Born in Ellensburg, Washington, poet Belle Randall earned a BA at the University of California Berkeley, an MA at Stanford University, where she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a second MA at the University of Washington. Her precise use of form and meter often shapes portraits of both observed life and interior states. She is the author of the poetry collections The Coast Starlight ...