Cosmopoetica

From a mailing list I belong to:

“Marjorie Perloff thinks that so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow because agriculture is important.”

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I refuse to admit how and why I came to be in the “Letters” section of a television review of a show I’ve never seen (or plan to see), but this bit made it all worthwhile:

…the theme song. Good christ on a bike, I have never heard such a bloated, idiotic dog’s breakfast of musical twattery in all my years of TV addiction. It’s like having somebody puke needles into your ears.

That, my friends, is criticism.

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I recently ‘fessed up to a friend that I sometimes enjoy William Logan’s vicious reviews. I don’t necessarily agree with the substance of Logan’s criticism—in fact I agree with most of the well-publicized pans—but I admire his verbal facility, his sharp, intelligent wit, and, yes, his literate snark. I’m not a big fan of negative reviewing for what I consider to be pragmatic reasons, but I can appreciate these aspects of Logan’s hatchety reviews in the way I can appreciate a standup comic even if I have no sympathy for the ideas he is joking about.

Bill Knott recently (re)posted a blast at Robert Hass that closely resembles the ideal of the comi-tragic critical form in my head. Knott’s diatribe made me laugh out loud, which I appreciate. It’s a creative work in and of itself, which so few examples of this kind of writing are… it’s pretty obvious that when he wrote this he was on some kind of crazy “roll.” And Knott doesn’t pretend he’s writing from some generic, generally representative, objective place but straight out of his own personal (and personally affronted) perspective. Plus, Bill’s a far better poet than William Logan.

I can’t say that I agree wholly with Bill’s take on Hass, but it’s a take that is something to behold. Hass’ poetry has never really stood out—it’s difficult for me to recall anything of his I’ve read—despite reading at least three of his books. But he is the author of one of my favorite traditional prose poems, which I (almost guiltily) include here:

"A Story About the Body"

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

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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.

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Via an entertaining article on writing about poetry and the admitted awesomeness of Keats comes this breathless and little-deathless blurb:

“Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack.” —David Orr, the New York Times

I’m not only happy not to be a mere lay reader, but proud of myself for avoiding the obvious South Park-ian jokes that come to mind.

Also of note, The Page, a site featuring a constantly updated list of interesting two word extracts from literary reviews (critical blurbs that are sometimes a kind of analytical haiku in and of themselves) and links to recent poems of note.

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Thanks to a reference by Reginald Shepherd I discovered Robert Philen’s blog. Why is his name so familiar to me? Anyway, a lot of fun reading to be had there (before I go on, a nod toward his entertaining and oh-so-true post on why punk rock is so boring). I recommend checking out his favorite books (parts one and two) and films (parts one and two) of 2007. Great capsule reviews/notes that are personal, direct, and don’t claim to place every piece in a grand universal aesthetic schema).

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