The chief obstacles to any immediate appreciation of Orlovitz's poems are their considerable "difficulty" and the fact that he regularly offends our age's bias against puns. It is the latter of these obstacles that is undoubtedly the more momentous, for not only does the contemporary eye regard even the best of puns as brothers to the cliché, but it looks askance at all wordplay and persuades the intelligence that so much spectacle may serve to mask a poverty of substance, that so energetic an appearance can function to obscure many an effete reality. When the eye bugs and the intellect boggles at a poet's technique, what is needed for effective communication is either a bold and obvious poetic content or a supremely skilful and devoted reader…. The content of Orlovitz's poetry, though it is often bold, is intricate and elusive. It is a mental content that seeks to make the mind's privacy public, and to render public myths personal. It is shamelessly autocratic—a content without a country. But even at that it is not obscure. (pp. 547-48)

What I am proposing is that as it is quite legitimate and even ordinary to consider poetry as a phenomenon of the mind created for the mind, it is legitimate, and even compelling, to consider that poetry's chief subject, chief meaning, and chief "content" might also be the mind. What Orlovitz's poetry is mainly "about," I submit, is the mind that has written it and the mind that can read it. Orlovitz's approach to poetry will then, inevitably, be compared by some to Jackson Pollock's approach to painting—which will do it at once whatever harm or good a just comparison can manage. The poem is the world's words and Orlovitz's mind; the painting is the world's pigments and Pollock's hands. (p. 548)

The subject of ["Numbers: 63"] is not simply the death of Orlovitz's father but, as Thomas (or even John Donne) might have said, the "manhood" of that death—what that death does in Orlovitz's mind, and in all men's minds. "All summer morning long," the phrase with which the poem opens, is neither so much an image or so much a symbol as it is a fragment of experience: in the past, the experience of such mornings; in the present, the experience of their irremediable "pastness." The poem is full of symbols, colors, tricks of language, literary allusions, and fragments of myth; but they are not there that they might represent a catalogue, an anthology, or any kind of mere collection of wonders; they are there that they may become a total mental experience.

The words total experience are, of course, jargon—whatever their context. But I am at a loss for others. To state my case as conservatively as possible, I cannot see in "Numbers: 63" that Orlovitz is attempting to do anything other than what he has always said he is trying to do: to make a poem that is "as arrogant as a piece of energy," which is to create both a unit and a force. This is achieved in two ways: through juxtaposition and control.

The control Orlovitz employs has two aspects, the more familiar of which we are accustomed to call form. The basic elements of form in "Numbers: 63" are rhythm and repetition…. Though the nature of written English makes it impossible to dispense entirely with the line, Orlovitz has done as much to dispense with it as one can without resorting to such gaucheries as composing in spirals or sine waves; he varies the lengths of his lines so that no two of them are visually equal, and he further interrupts them with slashes. The mind perceives as much in certain kinds of flashes as it does in certain kinds of lines. This recognition is one that has vitality for Orlovitz; in fact, one of his most obvious concerns in his best-known series, "Art of the Sonnet," is that the sonnet be able to exceed its superficial definition as a verse form containing fourteen lines of equal length. In "Numbers: 63" the repetition of "all summer morning long" does as much to deemphasize the importance of line as the bob-and-wheel does in Gawain and the Green Knight.

Orlovitz's use of justaposition serves, of course, as another means of diminishing the effect of the linear, but more importantly it corresponds to essential operations of the mind and, consequently, the poetic process…. Metaphor precedes discovery. Thus in "Numbers: 63" we encounter a sad Ahab in the father who hunts for a "parakeet with crutches" among "green leaves" that are "as a humpbacked sea," maybe an Ishmael in the son who works "at cross purposes" and tries "to drive away the intruders with sacrificial imitations," and perhaps a Starbuck in the mother who whispers "that eternity must be kept clean"; in any case, we discover "Numbers: 63" to be, among other things, half of a greater juxtaposition in which the second element is Moby-Dick—or perhaps the mind of Herman Melville. (pp. 549-51)

I have the impression that although Orlovitz frequently operates on the principle of free association, he is not attempting in any way to present those associations in the order in which they occur: he gives his loyalty not to the order of occurrence but to the fact of these juxtapositions. As he confronts the paper upon which his poem will grow to maturity, he delights in letting his mind run on in whatever "streams" it may choose. However, instead of recording that process dispassionately and unanalytically, he pauses periodically to do two things: to look back at what he has written and what he has thought, to edit and correlate and order—and then to record the results of that process. If this is actually his method, he is more truly the student of his own mind than the experimenter of the '20s who, in attempting to do justice to his mental processes, tended to subordinate the work of the mind to the order in which that work was performed. (pp. 552-53)

Orlovitz has always been more purposeful and certainly more serious than the Dadaists or surrealists. The juxtapositions of surrealism are self-consciously exotic and deliberately wary of obvious significance; the juxtapositions of Dadaism placed an urgent emphasis on the incontestably absurd. Orlovitz characterizes himself by the intensity of his search for the significance in his own associations and his militant reluctance to let them go by without explaining themselves. If Coleridge were here to evaluate Orlovitz, I am confident he would consign the Dadaists and surrealists to the realm of fancy—and admit, if not elevate, Orlovitz to the kingdom of the imagination….

Mind is Gil Orlovitz's chief literary concern. The negative character of most American reviews of Milkbottle H seems in large measure to have been due to the fact that Orlovitz and his publishers elected to call it a "novel." Consequently it was judged as a novel. To me, the book's primary resemblance to what I know as "the novel" is its length…. Indeed, it seems to me that Milkbottle H might better be described as a long poem. Its language and architecture do not differ substantially from the language and architecture of Orlovitz's poetry, and all the comments I have made here apply as much to this particular work as they do to any of the works to which Orlovitz has applied the name of poetry. (p. 553)