Letters

Comments (0) Tuesday, Jan 28 2003

...continued from page 2

Anonymous
Soho

IN CLOVER

Re "End of the Experiment" [VLS, Fall 2002], on recent poetry titles by John Ashbery and others:

Joshua Clover may be a trifle tenfingeredblockchordarpeggios and too hip by twice, but it sure is a pleasure when the review is as rich as the music it plunders.

Thanks for pulling my coat to some poetry I could easily have missed.

Tom Patton
Phippsburg, Maine

GARDEN STATEMENT

Re "Close-Up on Bayonne" [January 15-21]:

I grew up there, and Josh Saltzman nailed the feel of the place; Bayonne somehow has always had a weirdly small-town atmosphere.

Classic Bayonne: On my grandmother's 80th birthday, we had a dinner for her at a local restaurant, the Chandelier. I went into the lobby a minute ahead, and was easily able to assemble a chorus of 15 complete strangers to sing "Happy Birthday" to her when she came in.

My ex-wife, from a much more repressed south Jersey town, thought I was insane, and courting rejection or worse. But a crowd of strangers wishing my grandmother a happy birthday was a quintessentially Bayonne moment.

Dave Ventre
Chicago, Illinois