Little Chocolate Prizes

In a long essay (skip to page 45), David O'Meara looks at poems by George Mackay Brown, Tim Lilburn and Fanny Howe and ponders the way poets understand and use information, which he defines as "the concrete details and news we share in a poem":

Poetry resists paraphrase, it’s been said. But with the best intentions, we are often taught to read it this way, like a treasure hunt with a little chocolate prize at the end. “Oh, Jane, that’s correct. The poem means you should always be nice to animals.” “Oh, Jimmy, you’re right. The poem means death is inescapable and all our experience will one day be reduced to mere data. Here is a gold star for your booklet.” This kind of reading is something like those tourists who hop off the bus in Agra, take a few photos before hopping back on, just so they can say they were at the Taj Mahal. Likewise, if we are only reading a poem to get the point, we miss all the landscape, history, architecture and food stands along the road. We do come to a poem for meaning, but that meaning is bonded to the act of reading it, made cumulative through our interaction with the texture of the poem, its diction, images and associations.

O'Meara elaborates:

The best poems tell us something in an interesting way, but confound our expectation of it. It’s a delicate balancing act of uncertainties and recognitions and the more effectively the reader is dangled in the interstice, the deeper the transmission. The three poems I’ve discussed are all successful in their own way. But if a poem is too easily graspable, if we “get it” in one go, like “Taxman,” it exhausts itself of any requirement to re-read. It’s consumed, but there’s little digestion. And if a poem is too elliptical, like “Inescapable,” it edges into the nebula of incomprehension and might exhaust the reader’s patience and be abandoned. For a poem’s effect to be profound, it must also initiate a breach in our cognitive confidence and then restore it partly. Which is a fancy way of saying it needs to surprise us. 

Taking Exception

Bryan Sentes isn't impressed with Michael Lista’s review of Tim Lilburn’s Assiniboia (my earlier post here). If I understand him correctly, he thinks Lista trashed the poems without bothering to understand them. Worse, that such negative reviewing “hardens positions” rather than “expanding and quickening literary awareness”—the latter, according to Sentes, being the real goal of criticism. I have three points to make. First, it's precisely because Lista draws on Lilburn’s own theories that his defrocking of his book rises to the level of criticism. Second, it's precisely because Lista has spent so much time thinking about those theories that he is able to dress his doubts in sentences that are crisp, coherent and immensely nuanced. In other words, if I admire Lista's "articulate, high-spirited" prose it's because it is proof that Lista did his homework. There are plenty of well-written "evaluatively polemical" reviews that I think are total bullshit. Third, Sentes is right: criticism for me exists to jolt re-evaluations. There are, of course, valuable critical practices that don’t factor in that duty. You can, like Seamus Heaney, turn your subjectivity squarely on itself and scrutinize the reasons you do what you do. You can, like Stephen Burt, play devil’s advocate with your own partiality and train yourself to be an appreciationist. But man, there’s nothing like watching an informed reviewer weaponize their skepticism and attack with suavity—it’s what criticism was invented to do.

"Apollonian bummer bumf"

Michael Lista's bracing review of Tim Lilburn's new book of poems, Assiniboia, should be required reading for anyone who still believes the canard that literary journalism has no business calling itself criticism:

"Once we start taking Lilburn as directed, though, we become acquainted with the deleterious side effects: dry mouth, bloating, the runs. For decades, Lilburn, a trained Jesuit, has been preaching his Gospel of Strangeness. In his book of essays Living in the World As If It Were Home, he famously wrote: “the world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything else, it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.” One must appreciate how strange it is, if nothing else, for a poet to say that the world is not like something else, because that is what poetry is: anthropomorphizing nature by transubstantiating it into the most human elements—language and metaphor."

UPDATE: Bryan Sentes responds.