An email this morning from my Argentine correspondent Laura Scarano. We take opposite sides in the debate over "realism" in Spanish poetry of the 1980s and 90s. She defends it, I attack it. As scholars we are somewhat above the fray, she much more than I, I'm afraid. I tend to react emotionally, get myself worked up into a fervor. I love controversy.

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I was never too interested in chance generated works. Randomness is a human invention. There is no perfect pair of dice or computer in nature to generate truly random numbers. Thus there is no getting around the intentionality of the poet. I like the Cage of "How to improve the world (you'll only make things worse)" more than the Cage of the mesostics.

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Who is Arthur Sze? I read a poem by him in Conjunctions that knocked the breath out of me.