LETTERS
saying Watten's "interest in Shklov–
sky reflects the leftist stance that's
common among language school
writers," I was
not
making the ab–
surd generalization that
all
people
interested in Shklovsky are "leftists";
my implication, rather, was that in
the present case Shklovsky is being
made use of in order
to
create a left–
ist
pose.
I believe this distortion of
my point (and it was a point I made
in passing,
by the way) is dis–
ingenuous on Professor Perloffs
part, intended not to speak to the
question at hand (the boring and
pretentious character of the work
contained in the book I was review–
ing) but to give herself a convenient
platform for displaying her own ex–
tensive acquaintance with Russian
Formalism (and thus to imply my
ignorance of same, though in fact
her knowing about it hardly proves
I don't). This is simply rank-pull–
ing, and has about as much to do
with the issues in question as does
the length of my poems or the
significance of Yves Bonnefoy's hot
dog. Let's drop the snide innuen–
does.
If
Professor Perloff cares to
make some defense of the
literary
quality
of the "poetry" (long, short,
or toasted) in
In The American Tree ,
I'd love to hear it!
To the Editor:
Tom Clark
Berkeley, California
It was a pleasure to see Tom
Clark's essay debunking the tactics
and the essentially phony credo of
the language poets. Their methods
655
obviously are totalitarian. Instead
of threatening to withdraw financial
support from
Poetry Flash,
wouldn't
it be somewhat more morally
enlightening for them to be talking
about writing more vigorous and ir–
resistible poetry? Of course, before
they even set ink to paper, these
slaves to theology have already
rendered any significant poetry im–
possible by selling themselves to
what Edgar Allen Poe called the
didactic fallacy. One regrets the
tedium more than the wasted pos–
tage stamps these folks are responsi–
ble for.
Robert
L.
Greenfield
Goleta, California
To the Editor:
I wish to add a word to Paul
Schwartz's essay on the disputes in
West Germany occasioned over the
contemporary discussion of the
Nazi past ("Recent Public Trends in
West Germany"
PR
2,1987). I have
no argument with his criticisms of
Ernst Nolte, as well as with some of
Andreas Hillgriiber's book,
Zweierlei
Untergang: Die Zerstorung Deutschlands
und das Ende des europiiischen Juden–
turns (Double Collapse: The Destruction
of Germany and the End of European
Jewry),
but I would add the follow–
ing. It is, as Charles Maier noted in
The New Republic,
not an evil book,
"but it is badly balanced and opens
the way to apologia."
Andreas Hillgruber, however,
has not been a writer of unbalanced
or apologetic history. Quite the con–
trary.
It
was Hillgriiber who, more
