My treatment of Mitchell Glazier’s “The Gazing Ball” (Poetry, May 2025) wasn’t fit for purpose because it came across as testy and dismissive. I’m not equipped nor disposed to be a poetry critic, only a consumer with thoughts. And my thoughts were unruly.

A standard I try to uphold if I’m to sound off is to take a writer seriously. Doing so entails allowing myself to be roiled and provoked by what’s pleased to call itself a poem, having cleared the bar of editors pleased to call themselves poets. It’s not my remit to mock or satirize or deride a text which I find inscrutable.

Approaching a poem confrontationally is to mount resistance to ostensibly impervious utterance. Trying to articulate to myself how or why it gets under my skin implements a working assumption that getting under a consenting reader’s skin is what poetry’s meant to do. It’s easy to lose sight of this premise, because reading aggressively is strenuous and time-consuming. You and I have only the precious moments allotted to us. 

Negativity is indifference, not indignation. I have found that sometimes, when I’ve incurred the sunken cost of wrestling with an infuriating text, I’ve begun willynilly to internalize one or more aspects of it, to reach what I call an accommodation, paying it at least a grudging respect.

Just to revisit Glazier’s poem for a moment, I uphold the potential of these utterances to linger in my head, perhaps become memorable:

Absence roughs up / My dead dog in the blood / Of babysitters
Little porcelain / Poppet, hand / The tureen of blood / Now to papa
I’m a gentleman / Dressed in pink paper / Ballooned assless chaps

“Assless chaps,” by the way, are an accoutrement of the working cowboy. The following line is “Float the violet quarry,” which I let stand subjunctively on the model of “Cry the beloved country,” exercising reader’s discretion when the text itself isn’t dispositive.

What I have still failed to do is extrapolate a framework in which the elements of “The Gazing Ball” cohere in the service of a unitary message. That may not be an expectation the writer intends to meet or which I’m entitled to have.

I’m stuck with the bias that reading what I call “verse objects” when they’re refractory and I don’t know (or care) if they’re poems or not sharpens my faculty for recognizing, processing and assimilating newness. The only person who need care what I make of the objects is me. Anyone else who does is surpassing kind and someone I want to know.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved