Jonathan Ball giveth...
"Starnino is a smart and savvy reader, with a stunning ability to attend to the smallest details. This fine sensibility allows Starnino, at his best, to recuperate the work of people that might actually need recuperating, like John Glassco, whose observation that “man ‘is destined for slaughter in the course of things’” won’t end up riding the bus anytime soon. Moreover, as everyone knows, Starnino shines on the attack. Here, he assaults Atwood, McKay, and Moritz. Although they are to some degree easy targets (Atwood for lazy languishment in simplistic political prose-with-line-breaks, McKay for devolving into self-parody, and Moritz for sham artistry), Starnino neatly dissects their development and the larger significance of the poetic trends they represent. At the same time, Starnino’s attacks are rarer, more nuanced, and fairer than in the earlier A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), and he has toned down the mean-spirited glee that sometimes surfaced in that earlier collection."...and Jonathan Ball taketh away:
"The tragedy and triumph of Carmine Starnino are thus the same: once bitten, twice shy, he has avoided engagement with the avant-garde in this second collection. As a result, he has produced a better but less interesting book, because the real poets he should be grappling with are the ones that he does not understand, and so cannot engage. Everything Starnino loves in poetry—formal rigour, ambition, intellectual engagement with the world’s complexity, tactile and aural obsession with language—has become the domain of the avant-garde he hates."
3 comments:
Are you serious? All this B.S. about not understanding the Avante Garde is the old tantrum that always arises. And the bellyache begins, "no one understands us." First off, you don't want to be understood, so what is the problem? Secondly, this circular logic has made it impossible for anyone to flat out disagree because then it's all about how you aren't understood. I'd like to know what the lot of you know about form or metrics. Likely, its less than Starnino knows about The Garde.
This Winnipeg Review writer is exquisitely passive-aggressive. He calls the poetry he likes 'avant-garde' because it's often opaque, incomprehensible, or (to the uninitiated reader) pointless, and has a tiny number of readers. Therefore it MUST be ahead of its time.... And if Starnino were to criticise someone like Christian Bok because his 'innovations' don't look particularly original or innovative against the background of twentieth-century literature (sorry, 'European', 'American' and 'British' literature of the 20th century) then Jonathan Ball would no doubt simperingly patronise him for bringing too much information or learning into the discussion -- or accuse him of elitism/showing off. "The tragedy of writing more fairly, and on the whole more positively (most of the book praises rather than scolds), is that 'Lazy Bastardism' is less fun to read." You see what the reviewer's doing -- he's trying to smother honest criticism with what looks like a hug. Uriah Heep-ism is even more widespread and destructive in Canadian literature than Lazy Bastardism. A lot of writers criticise Starnino for being 'mean' and unfair', yet this sort of smiling cowardice is far more vicious and unjust. So Carmine Starnino doesn't like the same things that Jonathan Ball likes. My advice to the latter: get over yourself and -- pardon the male-chauvinist 'active aggression' -- grow some balls.
These two sections (apparently excerpted by Starnino himself) don't really capture the overall thesis of this review, which I found insightful. Most reviews of Starnino's critical works are thinly disguised confirmations of or quarrels with his taste. This was one of the few that recognized Starnino's appeal to those of us who don't feel particularly invested in these critical debates: a "muscled prose" that "often outshines the bland versification of the poets he discusses." I read Starnino's critical work because it's some damn fine writing--the work of any writer who shows evident care even in the crafting of a single sentence is for me.
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