BAP 2009: Foreword & Intro

While I don’t plan to proceed through Best American Poetry 2009 in an orderly fashion, I did want to capture a few thoughts about David Lehman’s foreword and David Wagoner’s introduction.

On Negative Criticism

Lehman’s dismissal of Jason Guriel’s “Going Negative” (“The title of Guriel’s piece sums it up”) is a bald misrepresentation. Guriel’s essay puts forth relatively sophisticated, cogent argument for a healthy place in the world of poetry for a certain kind of review that might be called negative but is, in fact, simply sharp criticism. The term “negative” turns out to be insufficient and not really even representative for what Guriel is talking about. And the comments on the Guriel’s essay are fascinating; a few are mini-essays of their own (Harriet has some of the most interesting poetry discussions around, a good antidote to the slow poison of Ron Silliman’s blog).

I find Lehman’s reference particularly rich in light of the fact that I was so impressed by some more recent critical work by Guriel that I highlighted it here at Cosmopoetica. And I’ve been looking for critics who aren’t confusing for a while.

The number of approaches to writing about poetry borders on the infinite. As I’ve noted here before, what I look for in a critical piece– whether it’s a brief review or an extended examination– is something that illuminates the work using, if length permits specific examples. I’m looking for critics who are teachers. Illumination can be achieved through a “negative” approach, but it’s difficult and demanding… and few are good at it. Again, Lehman makes my point (though I could quibble with a few details):

Yet what Wordsworth calls the “grand elementary principle of pleasure” is missing from discussions of contemporary poetry. Schadenfreude is a poor substitute. True delight accompanies edification when a lover of poetry shows us how to read a poem on its own terms, paying it the respect of careful attention, leaving aside the prejudices of the anathematist, the ideologue, the apostle of received opinion, or the bully on the block.

Accepting that there are many ways to interpret the word “negative,” the real problem with negative criticism for me is reflected in something Lehman says just a few pages later:

For many years I resisted Kierkegaard’s “either/or” logic. I felt that there needn’t be a structural enmity between poetry and criticism. No I wonder.

I don’t know if there is necessarily an enmity between poetry and criticism as product, but I definitely believe there is a dissonance in the act of writing poetry and criticism. No matter how well-intentioned and productive, it’s my belief that writing critically about poems makes it harder to write poems. Critical examination of poetry is a necessary part of the process, but it can be dangerous. And trying to write a healthy negative criticism perhaps even more so. There’s a reason that so few great critics are also great writers of creative work– particularly the kind of work they write about. As Lehman notes:

If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you’ll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.

I suspect it goes even further than that. If you spend too much time and mental energy analyzing, with hostile intent or not, your creative energy gets sucked dry.

On “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Lehman’s summary of a brief bit of Christopher Ricks’ reading of “Prufrock”– one of my all-time favorite poems– is intriguing and makes me want to find the book and read more. Ricks’ analysis of the assumptions many have made regarding Eliot’s famous couplet is astute and well-taken.

On Contemporary Trends and Ultra-Talk

I don’t read widely enough to speak with any kind of authority about trends, but I have also noticed a resurgence in the “rediscovery of old forms and the fabrication of new ones.” Part of the ongoing ebb and flow of poetry. And I’m a big fan of many of the “ultra-talk” poets– a good read on this subject is an essay by David Graham in Valparaiso Poetry Review: “The Ultra-Talk Poem and Mark Halliday”. And the phenomenon isn’t limited to poetry, as David Kirby’s book of personal essays, Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation demonstrates.

Wagoner on “Imaginary Poems”

Wagoner eloquently brings up my most significant problem with a lot of “post-avant” poetry: they aren’t really poems in any sense of the word that involves what feeds my heart and soul:

I found many poems in print– both in established journals and in more hairy, “experimental,” often one-shot publications– that Auden would have called “imaginary poems,” a term he applied to verse in which the poet had left most of the creative work to the reader and had failed to supply enough building materials to allow even that much to happen.