A post on a mailing list brought my attention to Michael Schiavo’s body-slamming take down of Matthew Dickman’s recent volume of poetry All-American Poem. I don’t have any real problem with negative reviews, though I do find them generally less-than-productive and in those cases usually wonder if the time and energy spent taking a chunk of poetry down wouldn’t be better spent elevating something the author does like. But any review, positive or negative, has to pass the smell test and Schiavo’s unfortunately carries the faint stink of the personal, hinting at a personal agenda. It’s hard to take broad assertions like “Dickman is full of shit” and that “everything” about Dickman’s book is “insulting and self-centered” seriously. Similarly, while I understand that the general thrust of the review is frustration at an Emperor that Schiavo feels has no clothes, two paragraphs of sniping at awards and fellowships Dickman has received starts to make me wonder if there aren’t some sour grapes festering in there somewhere… and perhaps there should be! I’m just unsure how it helps make the review stronger.
I say unfortunately because while I don’t agree with a fair number of Schiavo’s aesthetic contentions, he makes a solid case that spurred me to consider Dickman’s poems more closely… a case undermined by what reads like personal enmity. A good review should spur thinking about the poems, not questions about the relationship (if there is one) between the reviewer and the poet.
Another problem with strongly negative reviews is that their authors sometimes give in to temptation to overreach and include edge-cases, surmises, and marginal details that weaken their argument when those details are held up to scrutiny. For a simple example, Schiavo takes Dickman to task over his poem “Chick Corea is Alive and Well!” (shared in this blog because it was the first Dickman poem I’d seen, and one I do like):
Dickman is full of shit for a poet who is supposed to be such a straight shooter. He cites a Chick Corea album cover where the pianist is “smoking an unfiltered cigarette” and, on the LP itself, his “poor dead fingers” are “flying / like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING / IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING.” According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork, neither is the experimental jazz musician known for his Duke Ellington covers but his fusion work with Miles Davis and his own band, Return to Forever. I won’t even bother with the necrophilic ending. This is not Whitman containing multitudes that contradict nor New York School abstraction of logic or language. This is just a bad poet writing about a subject with which he has no connection. It gives him the chance to use another pop culture reference he’s vaguely aware of so he can demonstrate how in tune he is with “the people.” He gives negative capability a bad name.
The problem? First, while Corea is certainly known for his fusion work, many jazz fans know his early work quite well, particularly albums like Tones for Joan’s Bones which are hardly fusion… and Corea does play “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing” on at least one album that I own (Chick Corea & Friends which I bought because it includes Lionel Hampton) which has been released a coupe of times under different names in the last decade. Which wouldn’t be important if Schaivo weren’t using that as evidence of Dickman’s evident bad faith. Second, while it’s hard to prove a negative, phrasing such as “According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork” is at best misleading, since Corea has “said” nothing of the kind… and the non-existence of the cover in question isn’t asserted by a wholly incomplete discography which doesn’t even include the three releases I just mentioned.
The bottom line: this review would be much more powerful if it didn’t appear so personal and if questionable details weren’t included and used to hang broad arguments that attempt to get inside Dickman’s head… stick to the poetry! It works. Nevertheless, Schiavo does do things too many negative reviews neglect:
he links to the book, he quotes liberally from the poems, even offering
links to poems that might not be formatted accurately, and he offers up
counter-examples of poems and poetry. For all his evident anger and frustration, Schaivo seems to be in good faith and ultimately recognizes that readers have to decide for themselves. For that I’m grateful.
Schiavo is thorough in his review, and his complaints are not unfounded. But his intention to utterly decimate and extinguish the poet’s effort causes him to stretch (as you’ve pointed out in one instance, repeated in several others) and engage in the some of the same artificiality. His “campy bitchiness” (Schiavo’s accusation of O’Hara) overthrows much of the review’s usefulness in favor of what comes off as simple whining.
Most illuminating are accusations “cowardly and selfish”, and of course the very useful phrase “full of shit”.
The more I think about that review, the more it infuriates me. For instance, even if the facts supported the Chick Corea premise, the argument itself is about as vital as criticizing Eliot for not knowing what cards are in an actual tarot deck.
For what it’s worth, your blog posts are once again proving a great distraction from my real life.
I’m glad you’re reading– it’s nice to have a less encumbered (with history and perceived expectations) space.
I absolutely agree about the irrelevance of the factual points in and of themselves… their inaccuracy matters to me because it illustrates the kind of overreaching that goes bad and makes me suspicious about other contentions w/r/t areas I don’t happen to have knowledge in. It’s about trust… and I don’t fully trust Schiavo for the reasons given…