Reading Mr. Brautigan's [Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt], I'm struck by the fact that [he] cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these days.

Brautigan's poems suggest his presence as an imaginative, sensitive, and unexceptional observer. However, they neither explore his personality nor offer a reader anything else on a very deep or elaborate scale. The poetry is not tense, not particularly noble, not, seemingly, aspiring to anything other than the presentation of somebody's reactions, clarified and reduced into tasteful bites. A simpler way of saying this is that Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt should be gulped, like a session of Laugh In, that Mr. Brautigan is attempting to be an entertainer rather than a Great Figure in Literature, and that from anybody's point of view the attempt is worth having around. After all, his emphasis on entertainment is his distinction; attempts at...