I found Judith Shulevitz's "Sing Muses or Maybe Not" an enraging and appalling piece both for her to have written and for the Book Review Section to have run. I was particularly stunned at the end, where after reading several thousand words about how uncomfortable poetry readings make her (Well, Judith don't go!-) she then slides into a riff on the superiority of recorded poetry over live readings and then rising like a grouchy parent, exhausted from ranting at her kids, she vindictively states: "Best of all, with recordings, you can always turn them off."

What's the sour grapes about? It seems to me that Shulevitz is peeved at her own lack of power in relation to live poets reading and so she richly takes her comfort where she can--on the end page of the Times Book Review. I mean, this is the ultimate lowbrow-posing-as-highbrow piece-one is treated to Shulevitz dragging in bits from Orwell's "Poetry and the Microphone" to support her point. Elsewhere Shulevitz has written to read Orwell is to admire him-to want to be him. Judith it's been done. And Orwell died in 1950. And the poetry he spent his life around was always live. Recorded poetry back then was a new idea, as was poetry on the radio. Live readings today represent something vastly similar. The happy meeting of live poetry with a very impoverished human need to hear any speech live, but particularly rhythmic speech is unstoppable. Judith, people just like it. They really do. They like to sit communally and hear messages that aren't tinkered with by the government, or intended to sell a product, or gauged to spin some denatured piece of information that's already been stripped of dangerous and alarming content. Poetry is and has been for a while where lots of citizen get the real and irregular news of how others around them think and feel. What is so discomforting about that?

Are we next going to be treated to how uncomfortable opera makes Judith Shulevitz feel-how about theater, performance art, live sports, sex, nature, travel-I mean why direct a 3000-word tut-tut at a vital and ultimately populist art form? It occurs to me that Judith Shulevitz's discomfort at these "speech acts" must have to do with an unexamined inability to experience another's experience of language without retreating to the score card--giving or withholding points. The excitement of measurable power. Judith, at its best the phenomenon you're observing is off the charts. There is so much out there. There's poetry shows on Broadway, there's the Eminem movie, 8 Mile, and Bob Holman's new poetry club on the Bowery, then there are slam teams and open mikes, and queer all-girl open mikes. And traveling all-girl open mike. There's actually churning life in the ever-expanding number of writing programs on college campuses, not to mention the chattering traffic in the official unofficial poetry world--the lining up and breaking down, and re-naming and disclaiming of the New York school, the language school, the ever getting-rediscovered beat school. The pleasure of meeting all this wealth of live speech simply requires a fearless listener. It invites some kind of aesthetic citizenry. Who will take the bumps as they go. Yet Shulevitz's praise of Allen Ginsberg's recorded reading of "America"-- describing it as "manic" and "one of the comic masterpieces of the beat era" is not so much wrong, as totally missing the larger point about Ginsberg and much of what followed him in poetry--that it was often uproariously funny, then sad, then biting, then incisive. To characterize Ginsberg reading "America" as merely comic is to separate the poem (and its reading) from its frantic power--to change powers. One of the achievements of 20th poetry is its labile nature-its meaning resides in minute shifts of scale within a single poem. I personally don't think there's such a thing as "political" poetry, but each transition--those genre-busting attention shifts are where the politics drips in, and why the people come. Poetry is for the public and we, the poets don't know who they are.

And, yes there are terrible readings, bad poets, awful reading styles. All of these things are entirely true, as they often are about everything, particularly in the neighborhoods of art because people there are always making something tentative. You might get there, you might not. How can you ever know. Poetry is like jazz, in that you go to watch it happen. The more it's predictable the more you do get "poetry voice," as Judith describes it. It's a poet putting a predictable rhythm on unpredictable speech. It's situation of someone getting into a car distractedly, closing the door on their own coat and then absently hearing its buckle drag for hundreds of miles. When people started to write in what Williams described as "the variable foot" they probably did often miss that he was advocating reading poetry in actual speech rhythms, not poetry voice. It's something in between that you're hearing, Judith, it's aesthetic failure. It happens. When you hear poetry voice you're hearing the poet's fear, and I agree with you, Judith, but, ugh, move on. Don't categorically pronounce that music sucks. I think you are going to the wrong poetry readings--probably ones selected from a menu of choices bound up entirely in your comfort-zone in terms of social group, access and appropriateness i.e. Louise Gluck is the only living poet you cite. Most art forms would suffer if they were only represented by this narrow a sampling. And yet you rant on like a specialists. Can you explain to me this know-nothing attitude towards poetry? Does the Times, say in the art section, print articles by writers who only like dead painters and the very sight of new work makes them want to barf. . . Do art critics parade their opinions across the front of Sunday Arts section telling the world how coffee table books are really the only way to experience art because-well, gosh, you can just close the book turn out the light and go to sleep. Good night, Judith, Good night, America.

Eileen Myles