Jason Guriel on Johnston and Dodds

November 3, 2009

The October 2009 issue of Poetry has a great book review by Jason Guriel, exemplifying just the kind of review I like to read: respectful, insightful, honest and entertaining. Guriel’s quite perceptive, getting to the heart of the craft of two very different poets and effectively transcending the “gimmick factor” of pairing George Johnston and Jeramy Dodds in the first place.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are a few choice snippets.

I love that Guriel can discern the “radical” in Johnston’s relatively traditional lyric poems:

So even though Johnston would seem to present a placid lyric poetry about domestic goings-on, the poetry is more “daring,” Sarah proposes, than what she calls “the linguistic antics of the avant-gardists”—and there is plenty of proof to pull and quote.

[…]

But when Johnston writes in more traditional forms—which is much of the time, at least in his early work—the results can be just as unsettling as his later, more formally mischievous achievements.

[…]

Perhaps, then, Johnston is less a “radical poet” and more the author of a clutch of poems that come to no easy conclusions and display a wide enough range of forms that we can save the fellow the indignity of classifying him. And anyway, the adjective “radical,” when applied to the noun “poet,” is redundant. Any person worth calling a poet (and there are far fewer of these than we might prefer) writes poetry because more basic modes of communication (like the emoticon-caulked prose of texting, say) just won’t do—because basic communication isn’t the point. “All poetry is experimental poetry,” wrote Stevens. In other words, all poets are always already “radical” or “experimental” or “innovative.” This isn’t to suggest that good poets haven’t occasionally huddled around some hub, mimeographed or e-mailed a manifesto, and declared themselves an avant-garde; this is only to suggest that all poets are mavericks, whether they, or their circle, choose to brand themselves as such or not. Johnston, for his part, didn’t much think of himself as a poet, let alone a maverick.

On the appropriation of Dodds’ work by “the avant-garde” (whoever they might be):

Still, some will want to claim Dodds for the revolution, and not necessarily those professional avant-gardists looking to fill their ranks. A recent review of Crabwise to the Hounds, by an otherwise sensible reviewer, insists, “if this book can be characterized it must be considered part of the avant-garde.” But must it? And which avant-garde? (There seem to be so many of the things, tramping bravely forward.) Perhaps the assertion ought to be: if this book must be characterized it can be considered part of an avant-garde. And yet Dodds, for his part, doesn’t appear to have imposed upon his poems the duty of prodding the reader out of passivity by scrambling the order of words for the sheer sake of scrambling it; nor does he wheelbarrow in and dump at the reader’s feet all of the clauses it was his responsibility to organize. Boring as this may sound, a genuine jolt requires careful planning, and in the first two lines of the book’s first piece—a ruthlessly scant six words—Dodds’s planning pays off:

A bed
robbed of its river.

And again, noting the craft in Dodd’ poem:

A poem—whether fixed or free, lyric or language, traditional or experimental, name the deadlock—assures the reader that there’s a sound reason for most, if not all, of its words. Even if it has been channelled via meditation or hallucinogens or randomizing computer program, the poem will somehow account for the quality of the meditation or give some assurance that the hallucinogens have been well spent or the lines of code well programmed. Assurance is not reassurance, and Dodds, like Johnston, doesn’t comfort (a verb that’s far too maligned anyway).

Tags: criticism, george johnston, jason guriel, jeramy dodds, poetry, review