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Prompted was I, by Glenn Dixon’s essay on the Hirshhorn’s “Regarding Beauty” (“It’s All Too Beautiful,” 1/14), to exhume a losing entry (my six other efforts also lost) from the Washington Post’s alphabet poem contest decades ago:

Kafka Dafka

“Asinine!” Boor cries.

“Dammit,

Each framed glop here

Is junk.

Kafka loved

Meaninglessness.

Nevertheless,

One prefers

Quality.

Rare, searching, taut,

Ulyssean visions.

Whitish Xs yawn,

‘ZERO!’”

I don’t invoke “Kafka Dafka” to inveigh against “Regarding Beauty,” which I haven’t seen yet. I was thinking especially of White on White—a white square (?) on a white canvas—which I viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of the last century. I used to say that there should be a sequel, a picture frame with nothing inside, called White off White.

Rockville, Md.