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.

The Cloaca Has Landed

Andrew Hood was in Ottawa recently to launch his monstrously good second book of stories, The Cloaca, published by the very fresh and infectiously unpretentious Invisible Publishing. On a day that The Cloaca received some good critical attention from Phillip Marchand in National Post, Hood gave a short reading at Collected Works Bookstore and answered questions from the madding crowd.

Asked who he's reading, Hood mentioned Flannery O'Connor ('for the violence in her stories') and Amy Hempel. Asked if the stories in his second book were easier or harder to write than the bunch in Pardon Our Monsters, Hood confessed writing has got a lot harder to do, scratched his head, and said some things that cannot be printed here. Asked how he knows when he's finished with a story, Hood answered he knows he's done when he can't take anything more out of a story, without it falling apart. The folks at Véhicule Press wish the inimitable Hoodly all the readers he deserves and then some.

Sunday Poem

SUMMIT

This isn't the light we wanted, the weather

we're supposed to be having. But it's still

sometimes all we have to talk about. We

put all our little fingertips in the sky

and changed the climate—those are your

fingerprints on the moon, and mine. Now

we've made room for these leaders,

appointments moving like flocks of birds

down the calendar. The police get sweeping

new powers to sweep us away, and we hope

this particular patchwork of leaders will give

a little thought to the little people, some

blank-eyed woman behind a window holding

a sandwich to her face like gauze to a wound.

Not to worry, there are key initiatives,

discussions. I know change, it's like a coin

we take out and toss again and again. All

we're doing is hanging like a water droplet.

From The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, 2012) by Alex Boyd.

Who is Reviewing Books of Poetry by Canadian Women?

Natalie Zed is starting to keep score, and isn't impressed:

It occurred to me that it had been a rather long time since I read a review of a book of poetry by a woman in The National Post, and so I called up the column in question and counted. Only 2 of the 14 books of poetry that The National Post has reviewed in the last year and a half were written by women. 2 in 14. I was expecting some discrepancy, from what I had just passively noticed, but nothing like this.

"A Magnetic Personality"

A new poem by Jason Guriel.

Verbatim

"We’re just animals (my three-year-old son is currently fascinated by this thought)—dominant because of our ability to generate adaptive technologies, but still animals that eat, shit, fuck, and die. This may seem like a bleak outlook, but I don’t consider it so. We’re part of something larger than ourselves, which is not god but the long and varied history of life on this planet. When we die, we’ll feed more life; we’re little pieces of the cosmos. There’s something beautiful in that."

Mark Callanan on the absence of God in his book Gift Horse.

Good Night and Good Luck

After four years of blogging, Jacob McArthur Mooney closes shop.

I understand now that what I was trying to do with Vox Populism was socialize a solitary experience, and that’s why I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I mean “socialize” here as an extrapolation from the word “social” itself, and not “socialism”. I was trying to bundle my loneliness as a practitioner of a quiet, bashful, art form into a kind of popular front. In wanting to band together, I forgot my interest in both poetry and blogging started lonely, and was made to thrive in that loneliness. That it was a loneliness covered in the warm blue glow of internet collaboration only masked its solitary truth.