To the Editors:
The idea of dismissing the literary activity of a whole city would seem absurd, but this is apparently Stephen Schwartz’s approach to San Francisco (“Escapees in Paradise,” December, 1985). Nor does he mean to be ironic when he remarks, “Like all good poets, [Philip Lamantia] has turned to nature for his subject”; evidently Mr. Schwartz is not conversant with the English literary tradition.

My purpose here is not to debate taste in poetry; those who have read Shklovsky or Neruda or Ferlinghetti will not linger too long over Mr. Schwartz’s prose. But I do want to respond to some specific misrepresentation. Mr. Schwartz implies that George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, who he says “originally mainly concerned himself with topics derived from mathematical logic,” is not qualified to speak authoritatively about contemporary poetics and poetry. What Mr. Schwartz fails to mention is that Professor Lakoff is best known for co-authoring Metaphors We Live By, a book relevant to, and influenced by, contemporary poetry, and that he has spent most of his professional life working for a greater interaction between poetics and linguistics. There are few linguists more qualified to comment on the linguistic grounds of a work of poetics, which, in the instance cited by Mr. Schwartz, is what Professor Lakoff was doing.

Mr. Schwartz writes that Professor Lakoff was “enlisted” (his word for chose) to defend Barrett Watten after Tom Clark “sent a few humorous shafts in