SOURCE: “A Mind of Winter,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 162–80.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen offers a negative assessment of The Nonconformist's Memorial, deriding the collection as dull and “simple verbal manipulation.”

This is language poetry [in The Nonconformist's Memorial] supposedly at its best, attempting to make its ever-earnest points that words are “things” and that meaning is elusive, subjective, retroactive. Interestingly, Howe tries to do this with many of the same tricks that Albert Goldbarth employs. He crosses out words; she not only crosses them out, she displays them upside-down, on the diagonal and the vertical, and sometimes superimposed on other words or divided and conjoined in intricate pairings. In addition, she gives us overlapping lines, shadow lines, lines that reflect themselves like the mirrored shore in a lake. New Directions must have spent a fortune to set the type. Certainly, these poems cannot be...