AFTER years of printing nothing or nothing but the juvenalia of great poets and the margenalia second-water ones, the Advocate has this year turned its attention back to the local community and our generation. So even if one refused to acknowledge any other virtue in the present issue, its editors would still have to be praised for continuing this happy policy of relying on undergraduate contributors. Nor, in fact, is the issue without other merits, notably a poem by Rachel Hadas and a short story by Alice E. Dorcas (the pseudonym for a sophomore in Lowell House).

Too many of the pieces, though, are simply mediocre, and mediocre in the same ways. For besides the nominal unity conferred on an anthology by covers and critics; the material in the Advocate manifests a troubling coherence. Many of the pieces are acts of prudence. In the best of them this becomes a systematic, if not willful, deference to modernity in choice of theme, form and language. In the worst it appears as the author's profound unwillingness to make himself responsible for his work. These failings, moreover, seem to be endemic to the Advocate. An issue of the Lion Rampart, also published this week, was bolder on every level.

The pattern of irresponsibility is presented with metaphoric clarity in "Hot Dog," the first of three prose poems by Molly Jones:

Sand, sea and sky are an essay in greys, the water blackest. Syllables flow from our throats, ours and mine, but I am shamed by the distant hot dog man whose trousers reach almost to the armpits. He has no chest or stomach, in fact, no body.

"Come to the Point."

The language is wretched but was it meant to be? Whatever we decide Miss Jones has the best of it. Her self-deflation, ponderous and abetted by a bit of typological cuteness, is nonetheless successful, and we are left to wonder whether it was diction or sexuality or both which fretted her. such antics, like self-criticism in general or romanticism in general lead only to an adolescent recognition of self--which is the beginning not the end of investigations.

Prudence can achieve its ends in a less dogmatic fashion by treating the creative act as a purely intellectual one, an exercise in homeopathism in which noxious vapors are conducted into the chambers of the healthy to produce in them in mild form the symptom of disease. Poetry becomes not the hallucinations of passions or wishes but the hallucination of having wishes or passions. The most awful themes can thus be considered with a grotesque and unfaltering sincerity. Observe Elise N. Rosenhaupt on the hobby-horse of the mind-body duality:

Wax doll, outside of it

Must pull back, don't react.

I a doll, made of wax

--people paper, celuloid--

I am wax and humanoid.

Doll, I am alive in paper

Laugh when others laugh, then freeze

Move outside and see them squeeze