Conspicous

A reader sent me the following email. We both had the initial reaction that, hey, maybe we're over-reacting, should we really be mad about this. And then... -hell yes. This review of Gunn is conspicuous in what it doesn't say. Come on!

The reader writes:

In the Apr/May issue of Bookforum, David O'Neill writes in his column Pub Dates about a new collection of Thom Gunn's poetry and concludes his little thumbnail with this:

"Revered in his native England, Gunn moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s, where he began writing Elizabethan verse with a modernist tinge, chronicling Californian counterculture for nearly five decades."

That's certainly true but "chronicling Californian counterculture" is a little like saying Issac Bashevis Singer chronicled immigrant experience or Toni Morrison chronicled minority experience. The POMO desire to avoid the absolutizing of categories results oddly the equal sin of universializing, to say nothing of just not being very informative.