SOURCE: “Class Poetry: Five Books from Curbstone Press,” in Fiction International, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer/Fall, 1986, pp. 202-9.

In the following review, Jacobson compares Dalton to Latin American poets Otto René Castillo and César Vallejo, and, although recognizing Dalton's power as a poet, reproaches him for being “intellectual,” and for what he sees as Dalton's tendency to criticize “bourgeois” institutions using “bourgeois” standards and means, rather than writing “from the perspective of the working class.”

“This machine kills fascists,” folk-singer Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar. Here was a cultural statement that was much more sophisticated than the Dadaistic displays of the 60s, the burning and smashing of instruments on stage, displays which were themselves more culturally advanced than the 20th century pessimism of bourgeois poetry Neruda characterized as dissolute. Imagine bourgeois poets burning their poems, or claiming that poetry is a machine that kills fascists. In fact...