SOURCE: Baker, David. “Smarts.” Poetry 159, no. 5 (February 1992): 282-98.

In the following excerpt, Baker faults Doty's poetic style in Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, claiming that Doty's voice lacks “dramatic significance” and laments the attempts to instruct readers at each poem's conclusion.

Poets these days want us to think they are smart, it strikes me as I read much of the poetry written in the last few years. If the decade of the Seventies favored the shorter lyric and the Eighties became a decade of narrative extension, then the Nineties are shaping up as an age of discourse, of poetry infused and sometimes laden with obvious smartness: the Poem Thinking. That's certainly a preferred rhetorical method, one of the most common stances, among poets currently. I think, therefore I instruct.

This should not be an altogether surprising development, given the circumstance of a dramatic number of poets these days. They...