Best words, best place?

The latest entry in the ongoing harshest (yet possibly entirely justified) letter to the New York Times Book Review. How do you recover from opening up the paper and reading something like this?

To the Editor:

With regard to your review of Charles Wright’s new volume of poems, “Scar Tissue” (Sept. 17): I cannot bring myself to believe that I am the only serious follower of contemporary poetry who is getting sick of reading reviews by young literary nonentities posing as Randall Jarrell, and with cheap and superficial sarcasm standing in for genuine wit quoting out of context and generally manipulating the work of a master like Wright for the purpose of proving some artistic or prosodic theory of their own, usually one that has little or nothing to do with the book under discussion.

Wright is one of a very small handful of poets widely considered to have made, over decades, a significant contribution to the body of American literature in our time, and he long ago earned the right — regardless of any particular reviewer’s aesthetics — to be discussed, even to be disliked, with some degree of thoughtful reverence, as opposed to the still stylishly ironical and arrogant condescension to which even The New York Times Book Review unfortunately remains far too hospitable. Taking up space in a relatively brief discussion of a serious book to speculate, for example, on the state of the author’s keyboard (“I picture his comma key worn down to a nub and the period filmed with dust”) is simply pathetic, and makes me wish I could take that sharp stick the reviewer fantasizes poking Charles Wright with and giving him a good spanking — proof, perhaps, that stupid writing produces a stupid state of mind, in this reader and I suspect in others, just as surely as fair and profound writing tends to produce a serious and objective one.

I have a suggestion: Why not assign beginners to review other beginners, and when dealing with the work of proven contemporary masters like Wright, take the trouble to enlist the mind of someone capable of writing intelligent prose?

Franz Wright

Waltham, Mass.

The writer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2004.

Uncredited photo of Franz Wright via New York State Writer's Institute, SUNY. Uncredited photo of review writer Joel Brower via Saint Lawrence College.