The November Advocate closes with an aimless apologia which shrilly proclaims that young writers exist in the world, admits they don't go to Harvard, and wishes they would get in touch with the Advocate. The editors complain that: (1) potential contributors would rather shoot for big money from national magazines than write for local audiences, and (2) talent, like nature, can't be forced -- no one can squeeze pieces out of writers when they're doing things like picketing the White House.

The Advocate has quite a bit to be neurotic about. The November number is scrawny and bleak. It has twenty-eight straight pages of existential lamentations, with ads for variety. No doubt, as the Advocate claims, "the best 'young' writing being done in the community will stand comparison with the work of the more nearly established"; but it's a sorry thing that the magazine has to depend so much on the "community." The current number boasts only three writers from Harvard or the 'Cliffe. The Advocate will continue to lean on post-B.A. literati as long as undergraduates don't bother to contribute.

But the editors protest too much. Their latest offering is not an embarrassment. This time there are no gimmicks, no reprints of the adolescent Wallace Stevens. And quite a bit of talent has returned from the recent past. At least people like Dawson and Meyers wail their angst tolerably well.

Although Robert Dawson ignores regular metres, his sounds and images form gracefully ordered verse. Color motifs and imperfect, desultory rhymes help to hold his stanzas together. In place of extended metaphor Dawson uses sharp, emphatic verbs to pin down the sensations of a tragicomic family trip.

Shoehorned in Grant's back seat,

we grabbled my grandma's girlhood. Betty was six ...

she tagged the rearview window ledge and ducked

in grandpa's Merc, which quavered like a bat ahead of us

Poet Gerald Meyers strives for a precision and a richness of diction that tends to disturb the flow of his lines. Wordy images help to convey complex impressions of "Benton Harbor," but at the same time they mince his stanzas into goulashes of striking sentences and phrases. But the infection is local. At the poem's end he serenades his subject with moving simplicity:

... child of the evening,

heir of the slowly moving

twilight and wandering star that comes to charm

the day and sun away, to sketch in silver

a solitary yacht, tacking down the river.

There's some other poetry too. Marianne Moore's "In Lieu of the Lyre" is a parody of Cambridge pedantry, I think. Doris Fendel ponders the elusive essence of a marriage partnership in "Prothalamium," without encouraging results: