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by Carey A. Horwitz?
I would give a dollar to know what is going on in Richard Brautigan's head while he writes his epigrammatic poems. They read like an urban renewal of an amalgamation of Zen Buddhism, William Carlos Williams?, and the stoned comic strips of R. Crumb; they are as provokingly puzzling as any poetry I know. In Brautigan's prose (the fine Trout Fishing in America, for instance), this naïve metaphysical clownishness can create a truly profound vision of our spiritual environment, but his verse, here as elsewhere, never develops any real solidity. It is too often precious, too often smug — at its worst, it is like a ritualized paraphrase of Gregory Corso?. But at times Brautigan's crazy metaphors do work, creating a new perception of reality that is at once comic and poignant. And even when he is bad, he is his own man, and interesting.
Virginia Quarterly Review 46
Autumn 1970: 134
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