Dental Panic12 Jun 2005

I think this is a very bad poem. It doesn’t hit hard, it hits the spot where the blow’s already been taken. And if it did not affect you, eleven years ago, this poem certainly will not change that. And how is it ‘emotionally involved’? It deals with the Rwanda genocide in a kind of moralistic tone of voice, the ‘we all are guilty’thing, and then, in the commentaries, it’s about sleep and dead and heap, blahblahblah, very abstract, technical, not personal at all – it should have known at least ONE name of a Tutsi family for it to become more then what it is now: simply a flat piece of socalled ‘involved’ poetry. So what’s your next piece about? Bosnia? Darfur? The famine in North Korea? The Cultural Revolution? Iraq, maybe? Kyoto?