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Compiled by Geoffrey AndersenUpdated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:34 AM ET

(Continued from page 5)

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Varian fires back forcefully at O_Hellenbach's "Are we there yet?" approach that

represents ... all the impatient, largely irrelevant questions which should be answered in [times of] war: "as long as it takes." You've bought into your own antiwar propaganda to an extent that you don't realize that people like Hitch think that friendly control over the key state in the Mideast and hanging what may be an insurmountable defeat on the jihadists is well worth a few years and a few thousand troops (as much as we regret the loss of each one). That's what some of us commit to when we support a war. We don't expect every war to be a 6-week air campaign followed by 100 hours of ground fighting before we declare "victory."

The above is but an excerpt of the fiery volley between O_H and V. The full version can be found in the Fighting Words Fray. AC … 4:27pm PT

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007

Amidst the rush of current events and social trends, it's easy to overlook one of Slate's finest departments—Robert Pinsky's weekly Poems selection. Its corresponding Fray suffers doubly from unjust obscurity. Throughout the week, its regular contributors swap verse and run an ongoing poetry workshop. Most valuably, this merry band of literary die-hards do an excellent job of examining and explaining the merits of Pinsky's often challenging selections.

Uncharacteristically for the Fray, some of the strongest writing emerges in praise of the featured authors. Take Ted_Burke's appreciative critique of this week's poem, Death's Doorman, by Daniel Bosch:

It's a scene any introspective sort will recognize or feel empathy for; one is alone in a cold, dark room, staring out of the window, gazing at the stares and the spectral clouds passing over the face of full yellow moon, contemplating what there is beyond this existence. Is there something one goes to and finds an ironic eternity tailored by one's decided deeds on earth, or is there only dust, silence, a blank slate of non-being?

This isn't comedy for self-infatuation by default, but exactly the kind of exercise the mind plays at when there isn't the opportunity to engage with the world beyond one's own skin, and it's not uncommon to wonder, once one is done with the cerebral gymnastics to sort through their obsessions, loves and losses, to finally ask the variations on The Question: when does this all end? What will I say if there is someone /something waiting for me? What legacy will I leave? What will the consequences of what I chose to do and refused to do? […]

Death's Doorman by [Daniel] Bosch, turns this theme into a two voice theater piece, and it works, surprisingly enough, for such a gimmick-tending conceit. I well imagine the introspective sort I described earlier in the bathroom, late at night (although a sunny mid afternoon would do just as well) staring at the mirror , envisioning all sorts of after life scenarios, asking every question , poetic or merely dumb, that he or she can muster, trying to arm themselves with a knowledge where an unavoidable fate can be made tolerable. It's as if the interlocutor is trying to reserve the best seat on the last plane out of Hicksville. What returns , we see, are one word answers, like echoes coming from a long, deep cavern, warbling refractions of what he or she had just asked, the keywords distorted and changed. […]

This becomes a brief and bitter comedy, and is something Samuel Beckett would have written as one of his radio plays, the usual scenario of a character frozen in habit or ritual, redundantly trying to revive some earlier sense of coherence from situations or things. Bosch's second voice offers no inside information, provides no clues, but rather deflects the inquiries with accidental puns. This is a piece that doesn't so much end as stop, cold. It seems that this inquiry could go on indefinitely, right to the grave, as the peculiar narcissistic loop provides just enough variation in the malformed responses, the echoes, that one can proceed with it forever as if they were indeed closer to a Big Secret. Bosch is wise to leave the scene when he does, leaving us with a funny, if minor dramaturgy. One can, of course, seize upon any of the questions and their responses and find layers of implication and hence unearth every deferred meaning, but I think that's part of what makes the poem work so well. Bosch plays on the human brain's insistence on making utterances contain more than surface references, and it is a nice trick he's pulled. The character, the interlocutor , is trapped in infinite regress with his questions, and the reader, as well, might be compelled to parse each pun and skewed return. This might, then, be a comedy with two acts performed simultaneously.

MaryAnn zeroes in on the poem's blend of technique and impact:

I especially like how the sound of the truncated, abrupt short lines of the doorman throws me off balance, how it echoes the harsh reality of what he is saying.

I don't understand all of the "stanzas," but then death (and his doorman) are not comprehensible, are they? If anything, I would have preferred some scatological language from this smart-mouthed doorman. After all, isn't death ultimately an obscene thing? […]

This poem did have an emotional impact on me. It reminded me, in a very hard-nosed, postmodern poem, that there is no explanation for death, no way of learning about it except to push pass the doorman and go through the door.

Sometimes, the strongest responses are also the simplest, as with richrd's free-associative reply:

I once knew a doorman for a very chic club.
He'd get me in even though I was on the c minus list.
But he spoke with a heavy Irish brogue and I most of
the time I couldn't make head or tail of what
he was trying to say. Anyway he got fired and I lost my "in".
This poem reminded me of him.