SOURCE: “A Man with a Small Song,” in Parnassus, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1975, pp. 211-22.

In the following excerpt, Lavenstein finds fault with Ignatow's writing in Facing the Tree, Selected Poems, and The Notebooks of David Ignatow, accusing the poet of “intellectual slackness.”

Over thirty years ago David Ignatow proclaimed himself “a man with a small song.” Now, many years and several books of poetry later, it remains a slogan of accurate description, a motto of modesty which, even as a banner (and how our poets love them), bespeaks a man nervous and uncertain, worried about the dynamics of lyric rather than length, asking finally to be judged gently by individual acts of poetic effort and their inevitable by-product, sheer accumulation. And so for several decades David Ignatow has tenaciously continued to sing, building up that storehouse of songs which every poet hopes will rescue his single works from the...