You Must Work Harder To Write Poetry of Excellence

Darren Bifford tries to find common ground with Donato Mancini's book on the state of Canadian poetry reviewing:

It’s easy for me to sympathize with the very general claim that one of the ways poetry reviews must work harder is to avoid the lazy kinds of hypostatization that Mancini discusses. The common reader is indeed no reader at all, and Mancini is probably right to say that such invocations often function as empty receptacles for the reviewer’s own ideological predilections. He is probably right to say that the specter of accessibility or humanity or craft or tradition can simply be a way for the reviewer to reify his or her ideas about what poetry is—and isn’t. Thus what I think most useful about Mancini’s argument, i.e., that it makes a case for the necessity of more imaginative critical practices in order to negotiate the very broad range of poetries that have developed in this country over the last sixty or so years. If that’s the case, the terms by which those postmodern poems are to be engaged by critics and reviewers ought not be identical to the way we might, for example, engage a book of sonnets.

But he finds plenty to dislike:

Take the tropes of craft and tradition, both of which Mancini goes to lengths to dismiss. I agree that when taken as static fetish-like ideals, they may be less illuminating than otherwise. But when I praise a collection for its author’s attention and attainment of a high level of craft and of interestingly engaging with the English literary tradition, it seems possible—indeed, good critics show that it is possible—that I’ve used those tropes to point to actual features of the work of art as such. Of course these are not neutral categories; but it takes more than pointing out that fact to give us grounds for rejecting them.

And he sometimes gets exasperated:

It’s not obvious to me, however, why judgment and assessment of any kind is either precluded or opposed to the sort of hermeneutics Mancini calls for. It’s thus easy, again, to distrust the strong dichotomy Mancini asserts. In art, as in life, we do well to encounter strangeness with curiosity and an open mind. Even that supposedly conservative critic, T.S. Eliot, disparages the “dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value.” Such a critic, Eliot continues, “has left his labour incomplete… but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself.” Critics and reviewers are just those partial and fallible readers who publically articulate their responses to texts as best as they can. A good critic’s evaluations are always tentative; he or she knows very well the risk of attempting to judge a work of art. He or she will acknowledge that evaluation is never neutral and no perspective is from nowhere. Good critics, in other words, wear their aesthetic biases on their sleeves and, like Nietzsche remarked, match the courage of their convictions with the courage to challenge those convictions.

Peter Norman

Stewart Cole is back with a piece that makes you want to rush out and read Peter Norman's new collection, Water Damage. In his praise of Norman's poetry, he reminds us that the pleasure we take in a poem sometimes owes less to how well it is made, but rather how it is made and then unmade:

He seems capable of writing anything he wants—ranging in his two collections from brilliant sonnets and rhymed quatrains to fragmentary free-verse narratives and prose poems—and yet every display of metrical virtuosity or musical uplift seems counterpointed by a moment of bizarre incompletion or even just silliness. Put simply, Norman is a master whose suspicion of mastery leads him to self-sabotage, and—and this is the kicker—rightly so, for in continually emphasizing our fallibility, the worldview embodied in his work depends for its persuasiveness on the poet’s showing himself to be fallible. Thus, in addition to exemplifying all the fine qualities I’ve named above, At the Gates of the Theme Park also presents itself as a catalogue of lapses, and it is all the better for it.

Pollock Replies

Immensely gratified as I am by Stewart Cole's thoughtful and sensitive review, I'm puzzled by his critique on these points. On "the work of art per se": the whole thrust of the essay he quotes that phrase from ("The Art of Poetry") is to greatly expand the reach of my own thinking about poetry to include pragmatic, mimetic and performative values. Early in the essay I write that "to ignore all other values besides the aesthetic would be to miss a great deal of what a lot of poetry does." And by the end of the essay I say things like this: "[The] object [of truly great poetry] is ultimately the formation, and transformation, of the human self and community." Granted, I argue that aesthetic value must be central to any good theory of poetry. But my position is much broader than Cole gives me credit for here.

On the matter of our aesthetic sensitivities being affected by our material conditions: of course they are, but I'd argue that we shouldn't merely surrender to our own social conditioning; we should strive to overcome it. That's what it means to be a true cosmopolitan. As I say later in the same essay, "particular aesthetic values change over time: some eras and readers will especially value classical clarity and restraint, others romantic passion or intellectual challenge; but in our time it should be possible to value a wide range of aesthetic qualities, because we have the benefit of a vast literary history. I can value Lorca's fierce rhetorical passion and surreal imagery, and also Cavafy's classical restraint and clarity; nevertheless I can also value Lorca over some minor French surrealist and Cavafy over some dull author of versified history. It is not the poet's particular aesthetic values that should determine the critic's estimation of the poem, but the quality of the art."—James Pollock

You Are Here

Stewart Cole is impressed by James Pollock's essays ("an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries") and poems ("an agile command of prosody and rhetoric") but he pushes back against Pollock's notion of the “work of art per se”:

Let me make my position on this clear: there is no “work of art per se,” in the sense that “per se” means in itself and so implies that a work of art that can in any way be isolated from the social conditions of its creation and/or reception. Such a notion—also embodied in Pollock’s conception of poetry as “an autonomous technology for producing aesthetic pleasure”—is a bourgeois chimera.

Cole continues:

In other words, what qualifies for us as “delight, originality, and imagination,” or which aspects of “verbal sensitivity and dexterity” we are most attuned to as any given person in any given time is significantly shaped by the political, social, and otherwise material conditions that produce both us and the art we encounter. This is why the best argument in favour of formalist practice remains a social one: that such practice does justice to poetry’s social origins and orientation, linking us rhythmically and rhetorically to a shared past and giving shape to our aspirations for communal futures. This is also why the most compelling argument advanced by the ‘innovative’ school against such formalisms is also precisely social: that the old forms stand at odds with our modern social formations, that we must seek out new forms to reflect our societal disorientation. These two positions might best be thought of as the two ends of a continuum, somewhere along which—whether they know it or not—most poets today situate their practice.

Monkey Ranch

Julie Bruck's GG-winning Monkey Ranch was, for some, one of the best poetry books of the year—a return to form after a 13-year interruption. Stewart Cole, however, lay outs some of his concerns with the book:

"When thinking of traditions or poets to which I might ally Bruck’s work (besides the lineated near-prose that characterized much of the dominant mode of Canadian poetry from the 1960s to at least the 1990s), I settle on Elizabeth Bishop, who serves as the subject of a poem in both The End of Travel and Monkey Ranch. Indeed, Bruck's prosy free verse stands above so much similar work because of her Bishopesque powers of observation and phrasal care. On the other hand, however, Bruck is like Bishop purged of not just her formal virtuosity—Bishop excelled at even the most difficult fixed forms, while Bruck doesn’t attempt them—but her eccentricity: nothing in Bruck's body of work is as unabashedly strange as 'The Man-Moth,' for instance, nor does she favour the sort of daring rhetorical leaps that lift 'The Fish,' for example, into its 'rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!' moment of transcendence. Instead, whether formally, rhetorically, emotionally, or politically, Bruck's work tends toward the safe route, rarely off-putting readers with any outlandishness, but lacking the sense of hazard that marks the artform at its best. To use a sports analogy: Bruck’s poetry often reads like it's playing not to lose."

How Foreign Is Foreign?

Stevie Howell pushes back on Stewart Cole's characterization of her Walrus prize short-listed poem “Rip Torn” as being an example of "cosmopolitanism in flashing lights":

The upshot is, as foreign as Ireland and England may seem, they are not internet-scoured metaphor-props, but core to who I am—closer to who I am than so much souvenir shop Canadiana. And if that’s not in my work, part of me would be lacking.

(Illustration by Danielle Bazinet.)

The Politics of Knives

A fan of Jonathan Ball's previous book, Clockfire ("a rare combination of accessibility, experimental cred, and linguistic craft"), Stewart Coles doesn't do a very good job of hiding his disappointment with Ball's new collection:

while perhaps ambitious, The Politics of Knives undertakes a narrowly cerebral approach to its complex concerns, resulting in language that, while often vivid, rarely stirs from its cold inertia long enough to be truly tactile....most of its engagements with politics and violence remain purely theoretical, or more properly, purely verbal, so that we never sense the author’s investment in anything other than the somewhat patronizing constructs he cobbles together from the abstracted lexicons of these spheres of very real compromise, exploitation, and suffering

Sumptuary Laws

In his most challenging, insightful and keen-minded review to date, Stewart Cole zeroes in on why Nyla Matuk's Sumptuary Laws is such an extraordinary debut.

Matuk’s work continually raises aesthetic questions, prompting us to examine where we stand in relation to the choices it embodies—and this, I would argue, is a telling sign of Sumptuary Laws’s essential excellence. With mediocre poetry, we either can’t see significant evidence of the poet’s grappling with the many spectral aesthetic possibilities she may or may not have actualized, or we don’t care because her choices aren’t made with great enough talent or high enough stakes. In Matuk’s work, however, talent and stakes are everywhere, leading us as readers to fully invest in the aesthetic risks she takes.

While Cole exposes some weaknesses in Matuk's method, I'd like to push back on one point. He seems unhappy with the Commentary the book ends on, believing that the annotations somehow give too much away. My suggestion for him, and anyone else struggling with that last section, is to lighten up. The section is meant as a joke, a send-up, a lark. A bit like the digressive notes in Pale Fire, it's a product of Matuk's "duplicate self," and thus was designed to appear (while being couched in witty and lush prose) as unhelpful, faux-pedantic and counterproductive as possible—playing up the notion of the poet as a wildly unreliable narrator of her own ideas.

The New Measures

Over at The Urge, the book of the month is A.F. Moritz's The New Measures. Arguing that Moritz's new collection—his 16th—finds the Toronto poet at "the height of his relevance," Stewart Cole's review is an impassioned response to readers who might dismiss Moritz's poetry as "highfalutin, full of empty portent." Cole's enthusiasm, however, runs a little wild at the peroration:

It’s become fashionable in certain circles to pretend we’ve moved on from the potent mix of difficulty and seriousness that work like Moritz’s embodies, and to regard poetry that doesn’t ‘entertain’ us in a fairly immediate way as musty and/or indulgent. This attitude has helped lead to the current burgeoning of work dripping with showy metropolitanism and pop-cultural references, desperate to claim its relevance in negotiating our late-capitalist funhouse, but too often mistaking capitulation for critique. Moritz, on the other hand, simply doesn’t seem interested in the coveted proverbial ‘audience that doesn’t usually read poetry’, and his critique consists of ignoring our market-driven culture’s many hollow frivolities and instead cutting at the universal urgencies often obscured by such clutter.