Subject: Reply to Comment (very late) on J.M. Smith's review of Dewdney

Dear Mr. Baglow,

I regret "lazy." I have no desire to throw my own supererogatory inner voice around, and so will gladly pledge to try never to use the word again in a review, even of an over-rated writer.

Anyway, I have to wonder about your letter. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t do more than cherry-pick the review, but it also seems to me that you didn’t read Dewdney’s book, otherwise you’d have more to say in the way of praise of it rather than of a Dylan Thomas poem we all know a little too well.

If you ever do get around to reading the (Dewdney) poem, I’d be extremely interested to hear what you think is good about the long passage from which you chose that one sentence. I wrote that it reads like the prose in a low-grade museum display, and then I pointed out the qualities that made it seem that way to me.

The critical issue, it seemed (and still seems) to me, is precision and power, not grammatical correctness.

It has occurred to me that maybe I misunderstood the whole poem. Maybe (in its Wilhelm Reich-like views of orgasm and evolution, for instance) it’s more intentionally funny and eccentric and slack than I took it be. Perhaps you can enlighten…

You will to have to do better, though, than praising its "ruggedness." (I’m guessing you momentarily confused the poem with the person.)

Speaking of the avenue ad hominem, it’s good you didn’t go so far as to accuse me of being in any way like a "physician." Then the gloves would really have come off.

J. Mark Smith