I go on the road for a couple of days & all heck breaks loose.

 

Specifically, I appear to have turned into a windmill. That at least is the only way I can interpret Leslie Scalapino’s tilting at my praise for her work here. It is, I think, impossible to misread this blog as an attack on either Scalapino or her father. It is patently clear that I did not call her father a right-winger. Indeed, I called him, accurately, a “cold war liberal” who took heat for his views against apartheid. I also called him a Vietnam war hawk, which is also accurate, and quoted a public comment he made in my presence at a meeting of the World Affairs Council. The complexity of these positions is real. But they hardly make the man a right-winger.

 

I also wrote that Leslie “notes, understandably, her displeasure at people, men specifically, who make assumptions about her predicated on her relationship to her father.”

 

It is sad enough to watch a poet flail at phantoms in public. But in addition to attacking me for things I never wrote, Scalapino’s email to the Poetics List also uses unnamed sources to attack another poet who has nothing to do with this. I thought that sort of behavior disappeared with the McCarthy Era. Apparently not.