David Ignatow can no longer be considered "anti-poetic." American poetry in the last few years has finally caught up with what Ignatow has been working on for years, and the flatness of his idiom, the decided effort to write out of the here-and-now, the search for a commonality between poet and ordinary citizen can be found in hundreds of his imitators. For Ignatow's influence to be so late in coming (his first book was published in 1948), he had to be ignored for years. He was. Perhaps only the "discovery" of William Carlos Williams, to whom he willingly acknowledges a debt, allowed Ignatow, too, to be recognized in the 1960's.

[Facing the Tree] is no radical departure from the Ignatow tradition but a development of it. The poet can assume now that we understand his basic aesthetic; that understood, he can sometimes step beyond it. This poem ["Content"] from...