Greetings from the Porch,

We are continuing to have a warm, dry fall. It makes for lovely weather in which to bike to and from work, but I'm hoping for some rain soon so the steelhead gathering along the shore of Lake Erie can migrate up the creeks.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about aliens, yearning, and alignment.

• Andrew Skabelund reviews a new book on forever chemicals: "They Poisoned the World is the story of plucky community activists who brought to light the extensive poisoning of their local water supplies with PFAS."

• Evan Petrohay wonders why we are so prone to applying a quick fix rather than addressing real problems: "Humanity has a dangerous love for band-aids and a perilous habit of avoiding root causes."

• Jacob Adkins considers what we might learn from suffering: "Longsuffering is a fruit of the Spirit. We receive it through means we would not have chosen for ourselves."

• Tim Colvin highlights what we should remember from the Anti-Federalists: "It’s important not to lose sight of the strangeness of the Anti-Federalists. They lived in a very different moral world."

• Elizabeth Stice argues that if teachers really love their students, they will uphold rigorous standards: "Higher education standards may not be up to standard themselves."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about sadness this week.

I’m leading an ISI-sponsored reading group this afternoon: Fifteen students and I will gather at a barn out in Amish country and spend the afternoon discussing Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems. Then we’ll enjoy a fine meal together at a nearby restaurant. These are always encouraging afternoons, and I’m sure Gioia’s poems will provoke good conversations. In preparing for it, I re-read several of his essays, including the classic “Can Poetry Matter?” In doing so, I was reminded of why I always try to be scrupulously honest in my book reviews; Gioia argues (rightly, I think) that the reviewer’s loyalty should be to a book’s prospective readers rather than to those who might one day blurb or publish or review your future book. (He’s writing about reviews of poetry books, but this applies more broadly.) I have discovered that authors and publishers don’t always appreciate honest criticism of a book, but Gioia insists that critical reviews are worth writing nonetheless:

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient." Or read Weldon Kees's one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser's Wake Island—"There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro