A few years ago, i.e. The Cambridge Review spent a lot of time and pages thinking about the problems of artistic creation and criticized the Advocate for failing to concern itself with such matters. While the latest is sue (December) of the Advocate gives no indication that the magazine itself will ever accept the challenge, it does show clearly that some of the writers it publishes have. One of its poems, "Report of the Artist's Progress to his Doctor" by A. E. Keir Nash is specificaly concerned with the artist and another, "The Exhortation to an Audience, to be Still" by Arthur W. Freeman, indirectly so.

Nash's poem is very ambitious. A long and complicated work, it is the biography of a painting combining nature, the painter, onlookers, and the canvas itself as it develops. As the story of a painting within a poem, one might call Nash's work the autobiography of a poem.

The synthesis of such a diversity of subjective and objective elements, however, is only partially successful. The rhythm and consistently gaunt imagery give the poem a great amount of tonal unity, but there is little development toward the identity of the artist with his environment that the last stanza professes him to have achieved. Granted the painter may have felt this identity, but it is still up to the poem to help the reader partake of the process. But it's too static and remains as a whole nebulous and gray. Despite its other virtues, there is little light and color in the imagery, something which is doubly essential here because of the central position of a painting in the poem.

The best lines stand out too conspicuously, or more often remain submerged in the gray sounds of grammar and they must be hunted for. One has the feeling that the poet is mumbling to himself. The absence of an audience is also implied by the almost total lack of humor despite the title of the poem.

Freeman's poem, in contrast, specifically recognizes the existence of an audience. Certainly the most successful work in this Advocate, it is an hortatory stage whisper to "an audience" accompanied by appropriate rhythmic gestures. The poet succeeds in sharing with his readers some of stagecraft's "dreams," "contrived hallucinations" through which one might "Now in attentive webs, catch rapture fleeting." The sounds are precise, pleasing, and appropriate. The images cast out to the listeners are nearly as fine as the sound that bears them, and there is a welcome humor in the poem's treatment of itself and of its audience. Nash uses a picture within a poem; here we have an aside from a play within a poem that carries itself out to the satisfaction of all.

The third poem of this issue, "The Return of the Magi" by George Starbuck is neither ambitious nor very successful. It's about taking the Christ out of Christmas and the sing-songy rhythms and rhymes, while appropriate for the subject, walk the poem too hard in places. Elsewhere it stumbles over metrically awkward phrases or inconsistent imagery: "But when we got there the manger was bare./ The land was sore athirst." Consequently, the Magi seem to progress with the poem in a series of starts and stops. It is appropriate for them to stumble occasionally, but they never seem to be really moving enough to have occasion for stumbling.

"First Love" by Jonathan Kozol is a short story about the not so innocent first love of two thirteen year olds: Pixie, the innkeeper's daughter, and Cherub, a visiting youth. It has all the ingredients of an excellent story, humor, sex, concrete and abundant metaphor, good description and suspense. The dialogue is sometimes devastating: (Pixie): "You know what Daddy has said? Daddy says they don't wear bathing-tops in the desert. He says I will only need my panties." The story is somewhat less than excellent, however, because of spotiness. There are lapses in the consistency of metaphor; plot and dialogue are not always uniformly plausible, or what is perhaps the same thing, implausible.

With its abundant symbolism, the story operates on two levels, plot and metaphor, and needs a more carefully worked out and comprehensive dominant metaphor into which the particulars can fit. Kozol seems to have tried using the seasons this way but never fully develops them. A consequent lack of tonal unity limits the story's achievements, outside of passages taken in isolation, to its shock value. But unified or not, it is almost always funny or slightly frightening.

This, alas, is more than one can say of "The Island of Dawn" by William Wertenbaker. The story is about a woman living in New York who is called to her home town in the far south for her twin sister's funeral. She is very much afraid to go, because her departure was an escape which she fears wasn't complete. Although there are occasional very convincing statements of her loneliness and fear, there is never an adequate explanation of it. Instead of being seductive, the South seems dull. What sinister undercurrent there may be is over-whelmed by the mere verboseness of the conversation and thought. Too much time is spent on the essentially dull characters and too little on their potentially interesting environment.