The Advocate

Enjoying the Advocate is all a matter of expectation. Those who expect professional competence or quasi-professional methods are almost always disappointed. The Advocate is, and must be, a place in which young writers can experiment. The ratio of losers to winners will therefore be extremely high so long as good writers are rare, good young writers rarer, and good young experimental writers are born only once in a century.

The Advocate's April issue contains one poem which is not merely an experiment, but is also a poem-for-readers. Richard Sommer's "Three Legends for Fishes" is the finished product of a competent craftsman, and makes the rest of the issue seem unusually amateurish. Although "Legends" would not deserve the American Academy Poetry Prize which Sommer has won in his second year of graduate school, the poem nevertheless shows a consideration for the reader which is conspicuously absent from the work of most younger writers, including the other three contributors to this issue.

Almost every young writer today is more or less obsessed with demonstrating the inadequacy of the categories through which we see things. But whereas Sommer exercises his ingenuity to subvert the reality principle, the others rip aside the workaday facade of sanity with even less regard for the reader's preconceptions than a genuine madman. They destroy the grammatical and conceptual continuities on which we base our hackneyed understanding without offering anything on which to hang a new vision of things, and the result is often mere anarchy.

For a poet such activity may be inevitable, and for Robert Johnston it is not completely fatal. The major function remaining to contemporary poets after the depredations of fiction, history, and science, seems to be the destruction of cliches. The struggles with words which characterize Johnston's newest poem may well be a significant poetic achievement.

In the case of the prose writers, the hostility is not so much to verbal arrangements as to our usual view of action and motive. No one would deny even young writers the right to manipulate point of view and form, but it should be obvious that this can succeed only when it is based upon a mastery of the realistic method. Finnegan's Wake comes after Dubliners, and King Lear after Henry IV.

In this context it is clear that at least one reviewer is not very happy with either the fragments of William Palmer's novel "Coyahique," or Edgar de Bresson's story "Down There Where It's Beautiful." The fragments of the novel never achieve any coherence, nor do their baffling lack of focus suggest any very obvious truth about the South American revolution which they portray. De Bresson's story, on the other hand, is not a fragment, but rather an epitome of sickness, a suitable inside for the hideous color combination of the cover. It is not that the story is bad, but that it is pathological without seeking a definitive diagnosis. The blind too often seem to be looking at the blind.

And yet--and yet--when you are done reading, the new Advocate is not so bad as its individual parts. It is, after all, free from many of the self-conscious stupidities and exhibitionisms which characterize collegiate prose, and it has the great virtue of few such efforts--it includes only the work of those seriously concerned with their art and their subject.