Letters to the Editor
Letters to the Editor is a new section at JACK, culminating after we received feedback regarding a couple essays presented in Issue 4. We encourage suggestions, clarifications, criticism, rebuttals, and even praise from readers. Not all letters will be printed; much like the other contributions, letters should be well-written and relevant. It should be noted that authors freely express their own opinions, which may or may not be the view of the editors or the other contributors. We hope that JACK will be a dynamic magazine, one that encourages various ideas and welcomes debate--all in the spirit of remaining open-minded and accepting of differing viewpoints. If you would like your letter to be considered for publication here, e-mail us at editor@jackmagazine.com.
Regarding Mark Spitzer's "Transcript of an Ed Dorn Rant"
by Anselm HolloDear Michael,
Both of your e-mails and subsequent query in hand. My "first-thought" response to your question "What do you think would be a good way to deal with this?" would of course be "Just remove the piece from the magazine." Since that, however, would most likely elicit yelps of "censorship," these are my thoughts:
Spitzer is the author of a notorious character assassination piece on his erstwhile mentor. Published in the print edition of Exquisite Corpse while Edward Dorn was still alive, the "semi-fictional" opus provoked responses from other students and friends of Dorn's that ranged from the indignant to the outraged, including one from me that I suspect came close to the "outraged" end of the spectrum.
In his introductory note to the alleged transcript of a tape made Linda Tripp-style in a class taught by Dorn at the University of Colorado, Mark Spitzer says "I marked the tape '10-8-91' and threw it into a box which I pulled out ten years later."
Frankly, in his shoes, when "I pulled [the tape] out ten years later," I would have perhaps listened to it once and then put it right back into the box or the waste basket. But then I am an old fogey who still considers some things to be in poor taste (even though the concept of "taste" has gone out of fashion in much of present discourse). Whatever the case of "a student who had made a complaint about him" (whom Dorn allegedly "drove to leave the classroom, as well as the University") may have been, to present this transcript as somehow typical of Edward Dorn's performance as a teacher, years after his death, strikes me as in very poor taste indeed.
It is Spitzer's framing of the piece that I find most objectionable. The transcript, if indeed it is authentic, makes some valid points: a) that much so-called "political correctness" (ten years ago, as now) is either phony or misdirected; b) that it is a teacher's duty to instruct by sometimes provoking, i.e., playing the Devil's Advocate, in order to make the provokee realize what her or his beliefs really are, beyond his/her lazily adopted opinions; c) that academic freedom surely includes as much freedom of speech as this country's venerated Constitution.
Regarding Jesse Glass's "The Return of David Gitin"
by Frank ParkerSUNLIGHT
by David Gitin© Copyright 1998 David Gitin
Self-published, $10
David Gitin
PO BOX 505
Monterey, CA 93942
dgitin@mbay.netSunlight is David Gitin's ninth book of poetry. His work has appeared in hundreds of small magazines (when magazines were the happening thing!) and has been translated worldwide. Among his credits, he was co-founder of Poet's Theater in the Haight-Ashbury of the mid-60's and has been a guest at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He now teaches and lives in Monterey, CA.
Unlike most poets whose careers span years both on and off "the scene", Gitin has chosen not to publish a fat collection of every word he ever wrote. Instead, Gitin goes "deeper in the journey". Many of the individual poems have appeared in previous books and in former versions, however here, in Sunlight, Gitin attains the clarity of a fully realized vision. No mean feat for someone already known for his stunning clarity!
From the choice of Gold Skytone cover stock and title the reader knows he/she is entering a realm of "carefully selected perceptions in airy, delicate balance, unburdened by explication or description" as Carl Rakosi noted on the dust jacket of This Once, New & Selected Poems 1965-1978 by David Gitin.
Sunlight is composed of four parts: Sunlight, Passing Through, Woke Up One Morning and Journey.
The first poem of Sunlight introduces the reader to Gitin's uncluttered view:
eucalyptus outside the window
sunlight plays on the floor
yesterday's papers
motes of dust
Gitin resists explication with a poetry of statement. Michael McClure remarks that "Gitin is a master of subtle rhythms that ear and eye blend on the field of the senses ... Objectivist poets and Issa might converse in this world." A world like the fourth poem of Sunlight:
out
in the open
the shimmer
of light
where the blacktop
appears to end
curves
to continue
Gitin's poetry is like the sky to a fisherman. What seems so hard to get is the fact that what's worth getting is plainly visible. And Gitin captures all of the interplay in a moment's perception, space, light and its quality, color and the flow of energy, with the humility of song, song void of the kind of ego that draws attention to itself. Rather the reader is invited into the journey by the poems, not the author.
Publisher/graphic artist George Mattingly has called Passing Through, the second part of Sunlight, a masterwork. And for good cause. It is a sequence of five poems only a lifetime of careful attention could write that begins:
a feather
or a knifeat the crossroads
of memory and desirethis skin of earth
and firewater and air
layer after layerin touch
with the worldWoke Up One Morning continues the arc of a life through this book as does Journey, part four. All of the sections achieve what George Oppen said of Gitin's poetry, "Assembled 'against the wall' they spell out, and frequently with brilliant precision, 'what has happened.'"
David Gitin's books are available from Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com.
This Once, New & Selected Poems 1965-1978, David Gitin
Blue Wind Press, 1979
820 Miramar Avenue
Berkeley, California 94707 USAFire Dance, David Gitin
Blue Wind Press, 1989
820 Miramar Avenue
Berkeley California 94707 USADavid Gitin online:
@Frank's Home:
TRAVELS
http://users.montereyisp.com/frank/david.htm@Big Bridge: Vol. 2 No. 1 (archive)
Passing Through
Woke Up One Morning
Muir Beach Rockfest
http://www.bigbridge.org/issue5/po_gitin.htm
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