What K. Silem Mohammed said in his recent post on houliganism on the web. And what Brian has said in email to Joan, and all the rest of you who agree with my take.

I'm rather weary of the debate. The reason I jumped to the defense of a poem published in Slope by an MFA student at Brown (maybe you should meet her, Henry) was because the critique of this poem was so unsubtle. I wanted to like the poem, to champion the underdog. To those who have said, well, it's still not a very good poem, I say, so what? What if I give a "B" and someone else gives it a "C-", that's not motive for scandal or outrage; it's just a normal disagreement between friends. Houlihan wanted to place it off the scale completely: you can't judge it at all, she claimed, because it doesn't play by the rules (her rules). My reading did not prove the poem was great, simply that the choice of words was not arbitrary in the sense being claimed.

There's something "off" about singling out a poem by a young, unknown person to attack. If I were going to target the SoQ (or whatever), I would choose Pinsky or someone else "famous," not some MFA student from Iowa publishing her first or second poem. Here the "so what" factor kicks in again. If I announced to the world I had found a mediocre poem in the Iowa Review I would be greeted with a chorus of yawns.