Critical Community

Phoebe Wang describes the reasons for her foray into poetry reviewing:

I began writing reviews in 2012 after becoming aware of VIDA’s and CWILA’s annual reports on the low percentages of female-authored books reviewed by major literary publications. It’s not the reviews themselves that matter as much as the fact that so many young women, myself included, fear misreading work or becoming entangled in a literary feud or simply don’t find writing criticism appealing. But criticism and reviewing in Canada is tied up in whole apparatus of validation: anthologizing, prize-giving, popular consensus, university curriculums and canon-formation. I feel I have no choice but to participate in whose poems gets read, reviewed, included, studied and taught, if I want to see literary criticism in Canada reflect the enormous range of human experiences contained by its borders.

Official Avant-Garde Culture

In his bracing 6200-word dismantling of Charles Bernstein's career, Jason Guriel takes a minute to ask a few questions:

How does a Language poet know when her poem is finished, or at least ready for the typesetter? (It strikes me that a non-linear and non-representational poetry of fragments that resist closure could go on forever.) Does a Language poem end where it does because its author got winded and, well, a poem has to end somewhere? What does her revision process look like? Why is it “Surfeit, sure fight,” and not “Sure fight, surfeit”? Why couldn’t the lines in “Solidarity Is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold” and “Let’s Just Say” be shuffled into a different order and still enable the reader to come up with the same point about the wobbliness of words? And if the lines can be shuffled into a different order, why should the reader read the poems at all? And why does the Language poet keep writing them, once she’s got a few under her belt? How many Language poems does it take to unscrew the signified from the signifier?

(Drawing from "Mini Gross Sketches")

You Are Here

Stewart Cole is impressed by James Pollock's essays ("an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries") and poems ("an agile command of prosody and rhetoric") but he pushes back against Pollock's notion of the “work of art per se”:

Let me make my position on this clear: there is no “work of art per se,” in the sense that “per se” means in itself and so implies that a work of art that can in any way be isolated from the social conditions of its creation and/or reception. Such a notion—also embodied in Pollock’s conception of poetry as “an autonomous technology for producing aesthetic pleasure”—is a bourgeois chimera.

Cole continues:

In other words, what qualifies for us as “delight, originality, and imagination,” or which aspects of “verbal sensitivity and dexterity” we are most attuned to as any given person in any given time is significantly shaped by the political, social, and otherwise material conditions that produce both us and the art we encounter. This is why the best argument in favour of formalist practice remains a social one: that such practice does justice to poetry’s social origins and orientation, linking us rhythmically and rhetorically to a shared past and giving shape to our aspirations for communal futures. This is also why the most compelling argument advanced by the ‘innovative’ school against such formalisms is also precisely social: that the old forms stand at odds with our modern social formations, that we must seek out new forms to reflect our societal disorientation. These two positions might best be thought of as the two ends of a continuum, somewhere along which—whether they know it or not—most poets today situate their practice.

The Boogey Ideas

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nigel Beale, Michael Lista tackles the idea that an ethical reviews culture requires critics to be silent in the face of what they dislike.

A Better Way Of Telling The Truth

Sue Sinclair, CWILA's first resident critic, hopes to refocus the discussion of criticism:

I see the critic as someone who serves both past readers of the work and its possible future readers, as well as the writer. In a sense the critic also serves the artwork in that she takes up its invitation, engages with it. But it’s the writer I’d like to focus on for a moment. Some people think that the critic is not there to serve the writer in any capacity. But given that the writer, if he reads a review of his work, will likely be more affected by it than anyone else, I think it behooves the reviewer to consider the effect she may have on him. Some think that the writer is best served in just the way that the reader is: by the critic’s truthful response. I agree. But there are different ways of telling the truth: it can be done indifferently, it can be done as a slap in the face, or it can be done kindly and with a—perhaps implicit—acknowledgement of the effort that every writer brings to their work. My experience is that the first two approaches can hamper or harm the writer and that the last one can help the writer to rise to the difficult occasion of public criticism. Not everyone thinks that truthfulness and kindness can coexist. Creating the space in which they can coexist is difficult, but I’ve seen it done. And I’m up for the challenge. It’s worth taking on.

Lazy Bastardism Review III

Two months ago, Kimberly Bourgeois asked me a bunch of very good questions about my new book Lazy Bastardism and I did my best to answer them. The result appears in the Spring 2013 issue of the MRB. One point that keeps coming up with readers and friends is how I've "mellowed." Kimberly, for instance, found my earlier essays (collected in A Lover's Quarrel) far more aggressive and wanted to know what had happened. My answer:

Age. I was younger then, and angrier. I was burning to change everything around me. I’ve since grown older, and realize that it’s harder—and more effective, in terms of the long game—to write essays and reviews that can so persuasively advocate their bias they’re able to change a reader’s mind about a poet, or cause readers to second-guess their assumptions. I now want to be in the persuasion business, not the pissing-off business. Though I do recognize that, sometimes, it’s impossible to do the former without the latter.

The Red Menace

More than a name to conjure with, Anne Carson remains—13 years after her breakout success, Autobiography of Red—a name to pick a fight over. Mention her in conversation and battle-lines get drawn. Jason Guriel's provocative new review explores some of what bugs him about the Canadian classicist's verse, namely the way she's always grabbing some new form, but the content never changes

Like other recent Carson productions, Red Doc, the sequel to 1998’s verse novel Autobiography of Red, is a feast for first glances. But when I resolve finally to turn away from surface pleasures and reckon with the words, I encounter nothing less than the voice of, well, Anne Carson!—learned, deadpan, comma-less, and frequently carried away by tangent....A consistent, distinctive voice isn’t usually a problem. (Most poets should be so lucky.) But I’m not very far into Red Doc> when I find myself wondering why a voice so unperturbed by its latest packaging—long and short lines, rival columns, the screenplay, the essay, opera—needed such packaging in the first place. It’s hard to think of another more restless poet, whose adventures in form and genre, from book to book, have left less of a mark on her sensibility. Is it that the medium isn’t so much the message as the marketing strategy? Carson poems, I’m convinced, will soon come packaged in a Cornell box—but they will sound like Carson.

Is Matthew Tierney's New Book Any Good?

Phoebe Wang thinks so:

There is a truly exuberant pleasure in language expressed in metaphors such as “tumbleweeds of O2,” “counterfactuals pile up like cornflakes pile up/like models of megamolecules” and “galaxies fanning out like patches of demin.” Tierney finds time, space, matter, particles and the processes that form life on Earth endlessly diverting and chaotic. He, or his poet-persona, would be the ideal party guest, someone who could explain different kinds of infinity over a few pilsners in a way that you’d be sure to remember.

Kevin Kvas disagrees:

When all is said and done—when all is Googled and parsed—the poems are simply more masterfully sententious lyrics (sentimental individualism propagandized) with enough basic stuff about physics, math, and philosophy mixed in competently now and then for the book to benefit from the science-in-poetry bandwagon that’s been created by a few actually innovative experiments with science and math in poetry.

Debating Rich

Reviewing Adrienne Rich's Later Poems, Ange Mlinko worries about the late poet's legacy.

Rich’s signature style—fragmentary (even halting), earnest, direct—did not alter much in the four decades covered by Later Poems. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” Robert Frost warned; I thought of this maxim more than once while reading this thick volume. I also thought of Wallace Stevens’s distinction between the poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination; I thought of Keats writing “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and his insistence that the poetic character “has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” I thought of Sir Philip Sidney, who died of a gangrenous battle injury in his early 30s, writing of the poet: “he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.” These were poets who made a strong distinction between art and the world, imagination and reality. Rich belonged to a tradition that collapsed that distinction. The fact that such poetry attracts large, committed audiences is not lost on either its proponents or its detractors. Even so, most poets are not willing to give up their prerogative to be uncommitted: ambiguous, ambivalent, negatively capable and, yes, playful. 

Carol Muske-Dukes is having none of it:

O those devil-may-care playful trickster poets—lazily stretching in their negatively capable workout clothes! So different than the rest of us, worker-drone poets, dully collapsing the distinction between art and the world and imagination and reality! Does Mlinko really believe that poets like Rich never offered themselves up to the aleatory in composing a poem—as ANY POET does who imagines the world, or worlds, familiar and strange... even (as implied) while dreaming of attracting those "large committed audiences"? Excuse me, is she talking about a Springsteen concert or "open mic" at the bookstore?

Who Do You Think You Are?

James Pollock interviews himself on the nature of literary criticism:

Does the critic have an ethical responsibility?

The critic must be honest. He must say what he thinks. He must ignore the poet’s reputation, her relationship to himself or his friends, the prizes and honours she has won, her status in the literary establishment, not to mention his own career advancement, and anything else that threatens to dissuade him, and tell the truth about the poems. He has a responsibility to his readers, to the poet, to his self-respect, to the field of criticism and the art of poetry, to be an honest judge. Otherwise, he deceives his readers and the poet both, corrupts himself, and damages criticism and poetry within publishing range of his words. It is no trivial transgression. If he hasn’t the courage to be honest he should give up now before anyone else gets hurt.

(Illustration 'Two Heads" by Pierre Piech.)