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Not everyone likes or even manages to respect the poetry of Richard Brautigan; and even its fans must feel the urge to withdraw their acclaim from at least certain of his pieces, if only in self-defense. For Brautigan's work is nothing if not charming, and to admit to being in charm's thrall is hardly in keeping with the temper of the times. Brautigan does not care, even if one reader's excluded poems are precisely the favorites of another, for ease of operation is his keynote and his method too. "Finding is losing something else./ I think about, perhaps even mourn,/ what I lost to find this," he writes — a typical poem in its entirety. If that is a poem, what about "Impasse": "I talked a good hello/but she talked an even/ better good-bye"? Found on facing pages, these two pieces exemplify the arguable strengths and weaknesses of Brautigan's output: the tendency to flatten into prose so familiar one cannot stifle his "So what?", and the ripple in the affections achieved by just the same means. The best of his works are coy little presences that won't go away, cute poem-pooches, while the worst are harmless neighbors of the first. But Brautigan is all that survives of the generation of young writers to come along in the California of the 1960s, and his readership is large enough to make ordering his titles an automatic gesture by most librarians — especially, of course, those at universities.
Choice
September 1976: 815
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