Once More Unto The Breach

Helen Guri's analysis of Jason Guriel's review of Alice Oswald's Memorial continues to dominate discussion online. Stewart Cole weighs in.

Guri has not shown convincingly that the implications she highlights in Guriel’s review are anything more than emanations of her own ingenuity. Those who want to bask in those emanations will presumably continue to do so, meanwhile ignoring and/or misrepresenting (as Guri does) the considerable descriptive and analytical work performed by reviews like Guriel’s. This is not to deny that the literary world in Canada and everywhere is fundamentally patriarchal (as our societies are) and that this fact should be railed against. I think it’s entirely probable that Guriel derives his pose of authority (and I mine in writing this) from a sense of white male privilege to which we are so firmly acculturated as to be almost oblivious. But I do not think it at all helpful to misrepresent his or anyone’s critical efforts so (and yes I do stand behind this) violently. Most basically, I would rather have seen the poet-critic Helen Guri use her evident talents to actually review one of the “too-large proportion” of books she loves that “don’t get their due in the public sphere.” But again, this comes from me thinking that the biggest problem in Canadian poetry culture is lack of discourse—especially lack of discourse on more than a handful of books per season—not the tenor of it. On the other hand, I’m utterly glad that Guri wrote what she did; as much I’ve found to disagree with in it, there’s no denying that it set me thinking (and writing!) unlike anything I’ve encountered in recent months.

Just So We're Clear

When Helen Guri says this:

This brings me to a review I read a while ago, “Rosy-Fingered Yawn,” by Jason Guriel, about Alice Oswald’s work of poetry Memorial. It appeared in the September/October 2012 issue of the PN Review, although I did not notice it until a year later, when a link was posted on what would become a baroquely awful Facebook thread, the kind we Canadian poets seem to love to make, and which some might argue is our true genre of artistic achievement. 

The "baroquely awful" thing that happened was this:

On a recent Facebook thread, a female critic suggested that my review of Alice Oswald’s Memorial was the “poetry world’s version of a Twitter rape threat.” The critic had badly misread and misrepresented my relatively mixed and innocuous review. (For example, I called Oswald’s writing solutions “easy”; the critic decided I had called Oswald “easy.”) Nevertheless, Gillian Jerome—the Chair of CWILA—concurred immediately, and commissioned a blog post from the critic. Eventually, there was pushback on the thread— from no less than Tabatha Southey—and both thread and accusation were promptly deleted. The blog post has yet to appear. But for a few hours there, CWILA was in the business of libel.

Surprised that someone would compare a skeptical poetry review to a "rape threat"? Don't be. Jan Zwicky ushered in that kind of discourse over a year ago, by describing negative reviews as non-consensual sexual encounters, or rape:

Some people write negative reviews because they enjoy feeling hatred; they find it erotically satisfying. That the writing of viciously negative reviews can satisfy sadistic impulses does not surprise me; but it is a weakness of my essay that I failed to discuss such satisfaction as a conscious motive. Is it, in fact, a good moral defence of the practice of negative reviewing? No. In sexual encounters, our culture condones sadistic behaviour only between consenting adults. I see no reason to think that our standards should be different for critics and the critiqued.

VPC125

Vancouver was fantastic. Everyone came ready to play. The panels crackled. And the conversations—which often went into the wee hours—were partisan and passionate. Some of the best four days I've had in a long time. I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. For the curious, I've gathered up some of the (mostly blurry) iPhone pics that have been circulating.

(Left to right: Gillian Jerome, Ben Doller, the back of my head, Sandra Doller, Melanie Siebert, Christian Bök, Silas White, Katia Grubisic, Srikanth Reddy, Matthew Zapruder)

(Left to right: Jeramy Dodds, George Murray, Ken Babstock, Helen Guri, David Seymour)

(Michael Lista, Ken Babstock)

(Christian Bök, Darren Wershler)

(David McGimpsey, Darren Wershler)

(George Murray, Damian Rogers)

(Ken Babstock illustrates Matthew Zapruder in action)

Three Way

If you wanted to list the young poets who were likely to figure in many of our literary conversations over, say, the next decade, you could hardly do better than the names on this poster. And I'm happy to say two of them are ours. It's going to be a great reading. See you there?