Panel discussion. Persky had been invited to give a reading but proposed instead this panel discussion. He started off with a long polemical charge that the poet must be wedded to the political cause of Marxism. Bowering and Stanley answered with their own poems, but Blaser exploded in an eloquent refusal to defend himself, attacking politicos whom he characterized as opportunistic power seekers and offering an inspired definition of what it is to search for poetic truth.

Digitized documentation of “The Relevance of Poetry” is available through Western Front Archives upon research request.