RACE MATTERS
Dear Ms. Graves: Thank you so much for your article on black
children adopted by white parents [“Black Kids in White Houses,” Nov
27]. I am a white mom with a domestically adopted bi-racial (black and
white) son who is 2 years old. You hit it right on the head in so many
ways. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with people
important to me that have included the words “race doesn’t matter to
me.” I know they love my son, but they are doing him no favors. I’m
moved by what you’ve written and reenergized in this work by your
reminder of how much work I have to do to be the parent I want to be to
my beautiful boy. Thanks for your great handling of such a third-rail
issue.
Marisa Howard-Karp
POETS AND WRITERS
Hi Paul: Thanks for giving attention to the Poet Populist program
and generating a valuable conversation [“It Gets Verse,” Paul Constant,
Nov 27]. The whole long-ass thread (on thestranger.com) is more thorough, so
kudos for creating the forum, however misguided your critique. Some
notes:
•Candidates were nominated by organizations including 826
Seattle, ArtsCorps, CD Forum, Cheap Wine and Poetry, Jack Straw
Productions, Vital 5 Productions, and seven others. Your criticism of
“public poetry” as “almost always bad” is quite an indictment of these
organizations and their constituents, not to mention 2,500 voters.
• I’m glad you liked the work of candidates Elizabeth Austen
and Karen Finneyfrock; I hope you voted for one of them. You could have
also supported (or just reported on) their candidacy during the
election.
• How can public poetry get better? Artists should be beholden
to their audiences (as you correctly quote me). Your solution, by
contrast, is that critics interpret and promote incomprehensible
poetry. If an artist can’t communicate with his or her audience,
however, they don’t deserve a public audience for that expression.
Consider Tolstoy: “The business of art consists precisely in making
understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and
inaccessible in the form of reasoning. Good art is always understood by
everyone.”
• The goal of the program is not to support a medium or
mediocrity, but to cultivate a relationship between artists and
audiences. In effect, nurturing public art that means something. Too
bad you didn’t exercise your opportunity to be constructive!
Bob Redmond, Poet
Populist Program Director
MORE TOMATO
STRANGER: Re: “It Gets Verse”: It’s obvious that Paul Constant did
not witness the rare moment at the last Poetry on Buses reading on
November 7, 2007, when 3-year-old Augustine Tangas stepped up to the
mic, smoothed back her dress, and rocked the house. Mr. Constant might
not have liked the toddler’s poem because she was likely not well
published and only a “tiny amount of space” was permitted for her poem.
The 600 listeners who packed the Moore Theatre that night whistled and
stamped their feet after Tangas read. But maybe they overlooked “the
bland quality” of her work, were already dreading the “tragic visual
chatter,” the scraps of “misread headlines,” they would be sentenced to
looking at on their buses.
Yes, you said it best, to seek out poets and “poke fun at them would
be the most shameful kind of heartlessness.” Pillorying poems as you
did throughout this article is more tomato in your face than ours.
Naomi Stenberg
AN EXPERIMENT
To The Editor: Your latest foray into “action journalism” [“The
Inaugural Anonymous Review Squad,” Nov 27] is interesting as an
experiment, but all it really proves is that criticism, like any other
form of literary expression, requires some amount of practice and
“training” (for want of a better word) in order to be successful. A
couple of the reviewers here seem to have that basic grounding, while
at least one clearly doesn’t.
If you REALLY want to prove your point, it would be a much better
experiment to take other artists and have them critique work in other
media not in their area of expertise. Have a writer review an art
exhibit, have a painter review a theatrical production, etc. In this
way, the reader might get a sense of how each artistic discipline
influences not only the critical eye, but hopefully it might also
provide clues as to how artistic vernacular, that is, the language
artists use to describe their own work, might either enhance or
diminish one’s ability to express critical opinion about work not in
their chosen field, and how that influences the way a reader might
interpret that criticism.
Chris Comte