Audience: 1 & 2

Poetry magazines are not very strange phenomena in college communities. But Harvard's youngest, Audience by name, is in some ways unique. It costs a dime and appears every other week. And it has an aim unusual for a literary magazine. Assuming that discussion will bring interest, and perhaps awareness, Audience tries to produce controversy about local poems and poets. The danger in this assumption is clear: noise doesn't always imply knowledge. So far this year, however, Audience has steered a successful path between the two.

The magazine's most significant critical contribution to date has been a lively discussion on the work of Edwin Muir, this year's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer. In his first issue, editor Ralph Maud charged that Muir's ineffective allegory and poetic diction produce a kind of poetic chastity. The main value of Maud's essay was that it evoked a highly articulate and sympathetic defense of Muir's poetry from Dr. Harold Martin, director of General Education Ahf.

Another controversy that Audience's second issue provoked centers around a thirteenth century Provencal poem by Girault de Bornelh. Graduate student Stephen Orgel claims that Norman Shapiro's recent translation in "a Cambridge literary journal," leaves out the final, and crucial, stanza. To his amusing remarks on the poem's translations Orgel adds, "as a pendant to Mr. Shapiro's translation," his own spirited rendering.

The poetry in Audience's first two issues comes from established poets like Richard Wilbur, John Heath-Stubbs, John Holmes, and David Ferry. The most notable of these poems, Wilbur's Looking Into History, displays the same grace and care that characterized his work at Harvard. Although most of the other poems do not meet Wilbut's high standard, there is much that will reward the careful reader. While Audience's assumption that controversy implies awareness is, perhaps, debatable, it is strengthened by both he poetry and the criticism that have appeared in the first two issues.