Human Dissatisfied

Adam Plunkett takes issue with what he calls Stephen Burt's "blurbing good cheer":

The gnawing condescension at the heart of Burt’s essays and reviews is the premise that criticism is far less important than praise because not enough people read poetry, as though poetry were too delicate for yelling. “I have written reviews I regarded as negative,” Burt writes, but “such pieces do their work upon their first appearances, losing, often enough, what value they have after the waves that they track have hit the shore.” Burt has to know that the history of taste has worked otherwise, with negativity galvanizing preferences and poets from T. E. Hulme on Romanticism to Langston Hughes on “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Adrienne Rich on female poets’ entrapment in patriarchy, from high modernism to the Harlem Renaissance and second-wave feminist poetry. Taste has to exclude as well as include; and when it includes, it must be with reservations as well as unconditional love. It would go a long way toward Burt’s “helping you enjoy” new poetry if he were to help you to articulate why you do not enjoy some of it, rather than leaving you with the uncomfortable sense that there is something wrong with you if you do not. This kind of attitude suits pedantry more than pleasure, and better to be a human dissatisfied than a prig satisfied.

Name Drops

Noreen Malone takes Sheryl Sandberg to task for saddling her new book, Lean In, with a fulsome acknowledgments page:

Sandberg is not entirely to blame: As a first time author, she was merely following recent convention. And as a high-achiever, she was merely outdoing everyone else who has written an acknowledgment section in the past few years. Where readers used to see, perhaps, a paragraph thanking the writer’s editor and agent, a few key researchers, and maybe a family member or two, now we are confronted with a chapter-long laundry list of name after name. Sandberg’s seven-and-a-half page section, for instance, thanks more than 140 people for contributing to her 172 page book. She doesn’t just thank her superagent, she thanks her superagent’s boss, Ari Emanuel, “for his friendship as well as his ever-amusing and supportive check-in calls.” She doesn’t just thank her editor, she thanks “Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Knopf, whose unflagging support kept this project on the fast track.”

Verbatim

"Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It’s got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side."

Clive James describes his own relationship to bad reviews.