David Ignatow can no longer be considered "anti-poetic." American poetry in the last few years has finally caught up with what Ignatow has been working on for years, and the flatness of his idiom, the decided effort to write out of the here-and-now, the search for a commonality between poet and ordinary citizen can be found in hundreds of his imitators. For Ignatow's influence to be so late in coming (his first book was published in 1948), he had to be ignored for years. He was. Perhaps only the "discovery" of William Carlos Williams, to whom he willingly acknowledges a debt, allowed Ignatow, too, to be recognized in the 1960's.

[Facing the Tree] is no radical departure from the Ignatow tradition but a development of it. The poet can assume now that we understand his basic aesthetic; that understood, he can sometimes step beyond it. This poem ["Content"] from Say Pardon is his famous observation on "what is":

                     I should be content
                     to look at a mountain
                     for what it is
                     and not as a comment
                     on my life.

Ignatow still likes to make a poem out of almost nothing, daring us to take it as poetry, to question its slightness. (pp. 473-74)

Like the Black Mountain poets—with whom he otherwise has little in common—he envisions a poem as one continuous speech, not image, unit. Ignatow, unlike Olson or Creeley, however, sees the poet as a definitive moral force; he is the witnesser of the thing, the thing as total experience, not image nor construct. (p. 474)

[His] plain speaking is deceptive enough to cause one critic mistakenly to insist, "nothing should be taken for more than it says on the surface," when describing this poet. Ignatow is shot full of tonal ambiguities and ironies in almost every poem, though, and paradoxes, too, if I can dare to pull on another term out of favor at the present. The prose poems in this volume contain his usual virtues, but their form stretches out the flatness we find in the verse and that parable-quality found in so many of his poems is slacker and more indulgent in his prose. (pp. 474-75)