SOURCE: "Vital Assurances," in The Chowder Review, No. 14, Spring-Summer, 1980, pp. 64-7.

In the following excerpt, Clewell favorably reviews Dybek's Brass Knuckles and calls Dybek a "multi-talented, generous imagination."

There is a certain presence in the world of contemporary poetry that I like to think of as the "hermetic poem." This type of poem is almost always "well-crafted," riveted and tempered in all the right places so there can be no mistaking this object as poem. These poems would have us know that their makers are conscious, careful technicians well-versed in poesy. But the poem itself, for all practical purposes, is insulated and sealed; it is effectively impervious to any and all forces from the outside. Sometimes we are given certain clues to follow: the sky may be "cracked porcelain," a "someone" may be in a room "somewhere," as if a deliberate fuzzing of time and space inherently enhances...