Unstuffy and Unafraid

In his review of The Pigheaded Soul, Brian Palmu seems incensed by Jason Guriel's dismissal of Charles Bernstein's work

This is all too easy, this macro-dumping on avant-garde poetry. I’ve expressed my disgust with a lot of it, in reviews of specific books, and in proactive poetics. But that’s the point. Books should be reviewed for what’s between the pages, not as soldiers in a long line of casualties in an ongoing war. It’d be nice if Bernstein’s poems, delightfully various and rich with sound, feeling, and sense, could’ve gotten a deliberate airing in the expanded word count. But Guriel has formed an opinion on avant-garde poetry, and has framed his argument with misconstrued examples from several poems. God knows, if that’s the route one takes, it’s easy pickings: pretentious nonsense like “Virtual Reality” won’t win Bernstein many new converts. But Guriel’s also failed to note, never mind comment on, other worthy poems, and lines of poems in All the Whiskey in Heaven.

Still, Palmu finds a great deal to admire:

Guriel’s most important attribute, however, is his writing: concise, with creative turns of phrase, surprising and apt lexical choices, skeptical, allusive, unstuffy and unafraid to stick his neck out with evaluations (Heaney’s The Human Chain doesn’t make the grade), and wide-ranging, Guriel is foremost a curious reader who’s arrogant enough to believe his opinions matter (reviewers, in general, need more of that arrogance). That I disagree with him on many of his assessments isn’t all that big a deal. At least I know where the man stands. Can a reader of criticism ask for anything more important?

Tweet Of The Day

Still, I think TPHS is the most impressively alive and engaged volume of Canadian poetry criticism I've encountered in many seasons.
— Lemon Hound (@lemonhound) April 9, 2014

Praise for Jason Guriel's The Pigheaded Soul: Essays on Poetry and Culture.

Epoch of Likes and Follows

In his fourth—and final—column for The National Post, Jason Guriel recommends four collections of criticism that influenced The Pigheaded Soul. First up, The Portable Dorothy Parker:

A member of the Algonquin Round Table, around which New York’s wits famously assembled, Parker knew what we, in the Epoch of Likes and Follows, would like to forget: most of the art that wants our time is only going to waste it. Ruthless, maybe, but her devotion was to readers, not writers. “I tried, for my first duty is toward you…” she reports of one of her efforts to reckon with a book. “Unhappily, it was like counting those sheep over that fence; before I had listed the first hundred I was safely asleep.” Parker wakes you up.

Pileup of Talking Points

In his third excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel recalls some of his formative influences: 

My senior-year writing teacher—a gaunt, sharp woman—could muster no patience for the Beat poet who finds his utterances too inevitable to revise. This wasn’t “conservatism,” that label a conservative mind will pin on those it decides aren’t liberal enough; this was concern for language. Anyway, what’s more conservative than a rigorously regulated subculture of rebels – you could opt in any number of avant-gardists, pre- and post-Beat – for whom innovation amounts to the same old pileup of talking points?

Poetry As Escapism

In his second excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel wants us to stop "overburdening poems" with "the noble purpose of making some supposedly thoughtless reader think." He defends his favourite poets as being

far too intelligent to try to teach us anything, to condescend. Yes, their poems make us more alert, but the authors make no great claim to cracking open some mindless reader’s middlebrow and terraforming her consciousness. As with the best kind of “experimental” poets, the adjective is implicit. Entertainment, escapism—these are feats enough.

Low Hum of Hedging

In his first excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel shares his discomfort with the online world:

My brief stint as a paid blogger was fun for a time, and I’ve preserved some of the posts in my book. But it also permitted the young critic too much of the wrong kind of freedom: freedom to go on at length; freedom to qualify; freedom to moisten an otherwise wick-crisp phrase for fear it might inflame the comment stream; freedom to take the real-time responses of those kind enough to read one’s writing—and, by extension, to take one’s writing—too seriously. I gathered I was expected to set a tone: to stay on top of the comment stream by pouring into it enough courtesy to ensure the poisonous comments were merely parts per million. (Thank you, reader; may I have another?) But in the utopian interest of dialogue and community, I often made like the failing teacher who has to put up with a certain amount of petulance if he’s to keep the class moving along. What the former editor of Poetry magazine, Christian Wiman, says about teaching—“The chief difficulty is the sound of your own voice, the assuredness that inevitably creeps in, the sheer volume of talk that, after a few weeks, you feel flabbing around you like a body gone bad‚" is what I want to say about our endless, editorless, online adventure. Except that it’s not even “assuredness” that’s the real problem in the poetry world (flame wars, sparked by the self-assured, can be trusted to flame out); it’s the low hum of hedging, a commitment to consensus, that high-speed Internet encourages.

What Are The Benefits Of Pigheadedness?

Jason Guriel points them out:

Pigheadedness, at its most productive, can result in a kind of head-clearing loyalty to one’s gut reactions—and an allegedly self-destructive compulsion to air those reactions publicly. I say “allegedly” because I really do think that expressing an honest opinion about, say, the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony or Dennis Lee can only be good for one’s health in the long term. What I mean is that the short-term negative effects of pigheadedness are outweighed by the lasting benefits of honesty. Pigheadedness makes far more enemies than allies—but they tend to be the right enemies, the right allies.