Poetic licence. (Letters).

To the Editors:

I wish to thank William Logan for the time and effort expended in his review of my recent book, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest ("The real language of men," December 2002). However, the review contains a few factual errors that I would like to correct.

He says that my previous book, The Art of the Lathe, was "praised for its sentimental account of working life." Actually, it was praised for its "UNsentimental account of working life." This was the common theme that ran through the reviews and awards statements here and in England. He also comments that "there's nothing wrong with making noble figures of factory workers" and proceeds to speak of communist boilermakers, coal miners, and shepherds. There are no factory workers in this book or any of my poems. Mr. Logan has confused a factory with a machine shop, and the difference is profound. Historically, factory workers have generally been unskilled laborers performing the same task repeatedly in a production line. The workers in a machine shop--in particular the oilfield machine shops in which my father worked--are highly skilled laborers engaged in repair work of a frequently complex nature. They are capable of heroic acts of craft (I once saw my father and two apprentices put together an entire oil rig from spare parts, certainly an heroic act, if one knows anything about such work) and of physical courage and endurance, which I also witnessed on numerous occasions.

It would certainly be possible for that deskbound critic in whose consciousness a factory is indistinguishable from a machine shop and all working people are pretty much alike to think that to speak of such acts truthfully is simply to "romanticize" the labors of a factory worker performing repetitive tasks. Mr. Logan refers in passing to the "deskbound poet whose nearest brush with hard labor comes, these days, from what he sees in the movies." However this may ...