To be or not to be negative: A critic’s job is to seek out the good, and to deal with the bad as they become unavoidable. (A bad book is unavoidable when it wins a major literary award, for example.)

William Logan: A mere polemicist. One suspects bad faith in a critic who’s also, as has been pointed out, a persistently mediocre poet – that is, who persists in his mediocrity.

Race and ethnicity: Poetry is all about branding. Good non-white poets refuse to harp on the narrow themes of politics and identity – as a result, no one recognizes their brand.

The survival of genuine poetry: Is at the hand of good poets. “Let such who others teach, themselves excel; / and censure freely, who have written well.” (Alexander Pope, somewhere)

[Note to admin: You may delete this paragraph.] If you’re interested in really good poetry that’s not currently on the market, check out the Lyric Depot, my blog of original poetry. Click on the icon for my book, and read, toward the end, the poems “Power comes to the countryside,” “Room without posters,” and “Nothing to write home about” – and tell me if this isn’t something utterly different than the stuff featured in all the journals and magazines.
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“… a sense of scope and a belief in intertextuality always does African-American poetry a world of good. We, who write poems and look to make sense of what has been written, canonized, forgotten or coming next, are all part of a search.”

I like this very much. He concludes with a quote from the late Lorenzo Thomas:

“As a wise man once said, ‘We have got to dance our way out of this constriction.’”
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I didn’t mean to suggest that names should be revealed. I’m sorry if that was implied. I’m just generally interested in discussing the phenomena or thinking that leads a reviewer decline to take on a book review assignment because its by members of a group whose ethnicity is not their own.

The majority of the contributors in The Wind Shift are American-born poets who write in English, so I’m interested in better understanding the thinking that arrives at this decision regardless. What informs it? Did some perhaps think that “Latino” meant “it must in Spanish”? Did they decline before even cracking the book? Or after cracking the book? I’m

What allows Eric Selinger, who’s been a long-time reviewer for Parnassus Poetry in Review, an esteemed journal, to not shy away from such an assignment, and who continues to write reviews by other minority poets.

I’m not interested in naming names, I’m interested in exploring the thinking that arrives at these decisions so that perhaps, with some respectful dialogue, and education, some of these reviewers might take tentative steps to venture beyond their comfort zones as critics in the future.

Could you envision a situation and circumstance where this thinking could be discussed and explored, safely?

FA
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David Huerta and Alberto Blanco, both wonderful, powerful poets, are privileged members of Mexico’s intellectual elite. To find a Latin American poet who is conscious of being a minority in that sense, you could go to the magnificent aphoristic Guatemalan-Mayan poet Humberto Ak’abal, who writes bilingually in Spanish and Ki’ché, and in 2004 rejected his country’s national prize for literature, which is named after the Nobel Prize novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, because of some incorrect and insensitive things Asturias wrote about Native people sixty years ago.
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FA
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http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/poetic-industrial-complex-book-reviews
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As framed, the question says there are not enough people “of color” reviewing poetry books. But the reason this is a bad thing cannot simply be that it is a good thing to have people “of color” reviewing poetry books. The reason must be that this “problem” is held to be an expression of a further systemic discrimination that hold within the circulation & distribution channels of poetic production. If this is true, why not examine the question instead of carping about how many people from Mexico review books? And part of the reason for remaining on the surface of the “problem” is, I take it, that at its base this is not a question of race or ethnicity at all — but a question of class. Which is to say that it is a question of race insofar as race is one of the categories in which class oppression gets expressed. There are plenty of Latino, black, Indian, etc., poets. But reviewers tend to be people from backgrounds privileged enough to have afforded them the opportunities for quality education — training, that is, in composition & rhetoric, with a concomitant mastery of standard English (some, needless to say, more masterful than others). And these people tend, because the institutional hierarchies of education reflect those of society itself, not to be “of color.” But the relationship of race to class is, I think, one that is usually stood on its head. We should try to see the ways in which “race” or “ethnicity” function in the ideology of superstructural relations, rather than assuming their ultimate determining power.
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He asks:

Q: so why is there such a scarcity of reviews of poetry books by writers of color?

are presses that publish ethnic writers sending review copies?
are writers of color sending review copies?
are editors assigning reviews of books by ethnic writers?
are freelance reviewers actively following new books by ethnic writers?

These are great questions. I can only speak from my own experience, but for what it’s worth:

Re the big Q… let’s say who comes to mind here… Re the others -

1.) Some presses that publish ethnic writers send review copies. In fact, a few are very good at this. However, most small presses simply cannot afford to send out books. And so…. 2.) It really may be up to writers sending review copies out themselves; again, some do, but most don’t; the return on their investment could be very small. 3.) We try to. But…. 4.) Reviewers like the rest of us have their own interests, specialties, connections and predilections: they tend to accept assignments that they’re comfortable with, and want to review books about which they can say things authoritatively. Moreover, as a practical matter, people write less well about things they can’t comprehend or have no real interest in. So what we need are reviewers who take in all kinds of writing – who want to draw people in, and not narrow things down. I keep advocating a sort of dreamy ecclecticism, but in reality it’s not what most reviewers are into…

I’m generalizing, and none of this is expressed to exculpate editors. There’s work to be done on all sides, that’s for sure.
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Don’t know if she would have wished to participate, but a major space-out on my part, admittedly, was to not ask Eileen Tabios, editor of the excellent review site Galatea Resurrects.

Kent
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“it’s interesting that the whining bitching and moaning all started with some ‘white’ poet named jason guriel reviewing 3 other white poets and then another ‘white’ poet, kent johnson, responding and asking many other ‘white’ poets to respond. ok ok, i dont mean to flatten all their responses or racialized experiences, but seriously none of these people really explore why the majority of reviews written are reviews of ‘white’ poets! why is that? Unlike most journals, Galatea & Latino Poetry Review provide ample reviews of ‘ethnic’ poets.”

I posted this reply just now on Craig’s blog:

Craig,

Just noticing this. It’s not true that the list of responders is completely “white.” Granted, only three “non-white” poets out of 32 is not exactly diverse. And the gender mix could also have been a lot stronger.

But for what it’s worth, the list of poets I initially queried was much more diverse than how things ended up. I was operating under a deadline and without much time. For whatever reason, most of the “No thank you’s” or no-responses were from women (a good dozen), and at least three of them were from Latino poets.

Kent
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“The mainstream finds a pitbull who pisses a lot of people off and he gets declared edgy or bold or truthful when he’s just a high-toned homophobe with very little knowledge of the real landscape.”

Are we implying that non-mainstream (and therefore “edgy”) pitbulls like Silliman are the only ones who may be “declared” bold, truthful, and knowledgeable?

And what on earth is meant by “the real landscape?” What qualifies one to know its geography?
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His essentially anti-intellectual attacks and thrashings are knock-about entertainment for the lit-lite minded who like one-liners.

His art, is the art of a weedy frat-class show-off who boots with a broad brush, because his mind has not developed sufficiently enough to connect with the fundamental Truth of Poetry.

Love.

He is too lazy, grown too static and comfortable in his tiny little world to be capable of getting passed a first base jealously in which man Critics first instinct is to disagree, no matter what the quality of the writing.

Fancying himself a a ditty maker himself, it is natural jealousy will be present as it is in all artists of stature, which Logan is obviously not.

However, it is how we chanel our envy which decides if we end up like Logan, a person who assembles himself the facade of poetic expression: ae cloak of guff from fave poet X, the verbal tic of poet Y – and in mis-matched hand-me-downs with imitationally inspired instincts, choosing to say the first thing he thinks about a poem, over a 20 year period, all his potential of becoming himself was subsumed into being a hack-bag of borrowed stylistic twitches with nothing original being said.

Pointing out, no matter how slight, the inelegance in others which makes up the most of himself, even if the poetry is of 80% positive quality – like seeing a painting by a very gifted artist which has a speck of dust on it, and instead of talking about the beauty in the image, concentrates on the flaw to get a thousands words out of it in his anal-game of working out long convolutions of, frankly, anti-intellectual posturing — he poses as a sophisticated member from some esoteric guild holding abstruse arcane knowledge of Enlightment, which is in fact – the exact opposite.

Worthless dumbed down dreck.

~

Envy needs to be chanelled into a game-with-self. If we read, see or hear a poet who sets of the gree twitch, rather than childishly hating them because we beleive them more gifted or better than us: we use this force to imporve our own practice. Focus into getting better than the one who sparked it off, and when we meet them again, perhaps we are a step closer. Or we see them and rather than being intimidated by their dazzling edifice, the act of making an effort into developing our own potential, instead of a sneery jibe, results in us coming to understand the deeper poetic truth – because we tried harder and did not accept staying in our comfort zone.

We then start to see behind the god, and get to see the technician at work. What blinded us before and we thought sheer genius naturally flowing as though divine, we recognise it for what it is – hard work of another put into attaining their own potential.

Then, slowly, we become repsectful and even if we hate them, because we put the slog in, our professiona pride in doing the right thing leads us to getting better and leaving them behind and then we think: why did i ever think i wouildn’t get better than the ones who i thought cleverer and more creative and better. All along, i had it in me to beat them by beating my own standards, rasing the bar within and becoming closer to God within, as s/he is without – the seed inside, the Seigas Well Logan i am willing to bet a billion bucks, does not know, but which is worth a trillion twitters from this Delphic Sibyl from..sorry, where’s that Logan you weed Boston Massachusetts?

Well JFK you aint, more Sarah Palin of the poetry village, cuz this Southie homeboy got reared on the reality of it: Poetry. Go away Logan.

~

When he gets a book of poems to hate, he is like an old and highly unintelligent red-neck who was once welcome socially for their caustic wit and coarse charm when a younger man whose misanthropy was not at 100% – but after 25 years, in the absence of any America Poetry Critic who is any good, he has come to delude himself that his low-level mindless rants are not the product of a priveliged boor, but of a prophetic post-modern thinker whose every word, every jock-like impulse to expose his ignorance, is another step leading him to Parnassus, rather than what it is in reality – retarded moves into eventual obscurity and a total loss of wit and all credibility as a critic.

Being one’s inferior poetically speaking, both in live and printed poetry, along with Criticism – i can only sneer at how unintelligent this clown is.

Like a wife-beater whose spousal abuse over many years has led them to believe violence and love are the natural state of being, he’s been made flabby due to getting accorded a wholly artificial and false rep and status by the WASP frat-boy silver spoons, and his juvenile and childish world-view, never got him past first base because he is lazy intellctually and a spent force now.

He only half-formed his poetic intelligence, in the pool of satire which grossly distended his print-persona into one which is deeply unpleasant and will be viewed in 20 years, in a clearer light, for what it is. A product of his time. All the prejudices and faults he is excused now because of the hawk-war mindset of the last few decades in which bullying under a guise of doing the world a favour, is the cloak concealing highly unpleasanter truths — his many and numerous misanthropic texts will be totally forgotten, because re-reading them will only compound our sense of shame and guilt that we were complicit in the manufacture of such shallow and unpoetic conduct.

His poetry, to be blunt, is rubbish, along with his Criticism. As comedic rant from a poet manque, it works, but not as poetically perspicacious pieces which lead the Reader to the light of something truly humanly warm and inclusive.

No, rather, his is the work of a one-sided has-been who never was.
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Logan is flawed. We’re all flawed. He’s worth reading. I don’t expect him to write well on O’Hara, Williams, or Crane, but I do count on him to be a thoughtful and aggressive adversary. Poetry doesn’t need to be protected from bullies, does it?

If anything, it needs to be protected from a native fatal lack of curiosity.
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Cmon Michael you can’t believe Logan’s writing among the best criticism being written…and then try and make your comparison by citing what i-phone blurbspeak aps. That doesn’t even make sense. Now we cheer cause Logan’s writing. He’s like the Camillie Paglia of poetry reviewing. The mainstream finds a pitbull who pisses a lot of people off and he gets declared edgy or bold or truthful when he’s just a high-toned homophobe with very little knowledge of the real landscape. I agree w F. Aragon that to have a reviewer with some commitement to writing about all or at least more of the poetry written in a time would be tremendously meaningful and valuable.
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1.) Excellent piece. Especially:
I don’t want to be talked down to by a review. I don’t want cosy chat. I don’t want sheer territorialism and bullying. The occasional dash of fury is fine providing it is understood why there is fury. Passion can be honest even when wrong.

And in the end, a review is not the be all and end all. Byron thought Keats had been killed by a bad review. Later he found out he was wrong.”

2.) Did we work together at Partisan? Is this you?

3.) Hello! Hope you’re well. (Because I’m guessing this is you, only wiser.)

Best,
Melissa
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Of the same book another reviewer wrote that the simile “growling like a dog behind gates” was banal, but failed to mention that it was the sea that was being talked about which, I thought, made a considerable difference. I took the man simply to be stupid and ignored him.

It is possible to ignore the stupid. Eventually most people do.
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Here I sit happy-hearted
Talks on Mideast peace have started

I’d love to have seen that written on a bathroom wall.
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Seriously, thank you, Joel, for this. I really think people don’t understand what goes into the actual writing of criticism, a subject well worth bringing up, money needing to be put where mouths are and so on.
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Poets are a lot like fighter pilots: solitary, highly trained and skilled, yet all alone in mortal combat in the insubstantial skies. The best any fighter pilot can hope for is that, if bested, the other pilot will have the respect for their profession to salute his enemy as he crashes to earth in flames.
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A reviewer, whenever possible, should quote liberally from that which pleases and does not please them.

This 1) allows the reader to see for himself what the poet is up to.

2) Allows the reader to see precisely what the reviewer likes and dislikes.

This is win-win, because the reader can now judge both poet and reviewer sufficiently, and yet VERY few poetry reviews quote liberally, pro and con from the text under review.

As long as this is done, the review will be a ‘success.’ An essay need not accompany such a review, and if it does, it will earn its stripes–or not–in the context of liberal quotation.

A reviewer who followed this practice of liberal quotation was–Edgar Poe.
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On the other hand, critics are called upon to acknowledge, as you put it, Don, that “my good may be your bad, and vice-versa,” in order to ensure that they’re not marginalizing anyone unfairly based on bias or bigotry, not penalizing the new merely for its newness, etc.

So if critics fail to judge we’re damned as acquiescent and/or useless and if we judge we’re damned as inflexible and/or reactionary. There are a few easy ways out of, or around the dilemma, though.

1. Don’t write criticism yourself. Instead criticize people who do. You’ll look smart and you don’t risk a thing.

2. Describe rather than evaluate. The poems in the book are about such and such, they look like this, they sound like that. Try to create the appearance of taking no position; not even the position of not taking a position. I guarantee there will be no grouchy letters to the editor.

3. Make like you’re putting the book through grueling tests of strength, and then say it’s a terrific book. This will satisfy your audience’s requirement for rigor, but also avoid any chance of alienating anyone at all. (This one’s the trickiest, because it can result in a genuine review that has the appearance of a hack job or vice-versa.)

If you insist on making life difficult for yourself, you can try instead to write reviews which judge without being judgmental and admit uncertainty without being spineless. You’ll fail at it, but you might learn something in the doing of it, and others might learn something too.

Reading Orwell’s essays used to drive me crazy, because he’d convince me of something in one and then convince me of the opposite in the next. I’ve since realized that’s precisely their value. Good criticism doesn’t do your thinking for you; it provokes you to think about the thing more vigorously and rigorously than you otherwise would. (Good creative writing classes, incidentally, work the same way.)
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You mention Poe as America’s first fearsome reviewer, and he was.

Poe was an idependent writer who sought to elevate American Letters by attacking both slavish imitation of Britain AND puffery of books just because they were American. Poe demolished cliques no matter where they were.

The reason we haven’t had a Poe since 1849 is because Modernism was naturally against the sort of rigor Poe espoused; Poe and Modernism were natural enemies, and we should therfore see that Modernist poets (Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Winters) as a rule attacked Poe–and they did. Williams, who based his identity on a hatred of T.S. Eliot, probably grabbed onto Poe because he was American, but I just can’t see Poe and Williams together at all.

The triumph of Modernism has seen the suppression of Poe as critic (he carries on more or less as a Vincent Price character); it couldn’t have been any other way. Modernism and Poe simply cannot exist together. This does not mean that Poe is not actually more modern than Modernism, but the two as critical movements are antithetical.

William Logan is actually beholden to High Modernism, so he’s actually no Poe, either.

Also the rise of the creative writing program has meant that we NURTURE poets and poetry, not pull a Poe on them.

Louis Menand in the latest New Yorker (June 8 & 15) rings some foetry thunder in discussing Creative Writing Programs, as he reviews a new book, ‘The Program Era’ (Harvard) by Mark McGurl.

In the article, Menand quotes the founder of the A.W.P., Verlin Cassill, speaking at the organization’s 15th anniversary convention in Boston in 1982 (this is not in McGurl’s book):

“We are now at the point where writing programs are poisoning, and in turn we are being poisoned by, departments and institutions on which we have fastened them.”

Cassill wanted to disband the A.W.P. the organization he founded.

(It’s now called the A.W.W.P.)

Menand writes:

“He [Cassill] thought that writers had become complicit in the academic logrolling and gamesmanship of publish-or-perish: using other people’s money—grants from their universities and from arts agencies—they devised ways to get their own and one another’s work into print, and then converted those publications into salary increments…They wrote poems to get raises.”

Menand quickly drops this line of inquiry, however, and agrees with McGurl that creative writing programs may be a “scandal,” but a “scandal that suits everyone.”

Mendand and McGurl both argue that the business model of the creative-writing program is good for writing and good for the writer not because they teach people how to write—and creative-writing programs admit this–but because (here is the great unspoken trump card of success) creative-writing programs are dense models of highly socialized, self-conscious human existence which teach management presentation skills in an open-ended, non-institutional setting in a degree-granting institution.

McGurl’s book deals with fiction, not poetry. Fiction is far less interesting to me because Fiction 1) imitates real life 2) was not ruined by a small clique of Modernists 3) is not suffering a crisis of identity and 4) it sells. The art of the short story has not changed much since Hawthorne and Poe. Fiction, like the movies, hasn’t been touched by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rimbaud, William James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Yvor Winters, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Bloom, Marjorie Perloff, or Ron Silliman. Fiction is not quietly killing minds as poetry has been for years now.

Menand mentions Allen Tate’s writing program at Princeton and Engle/Schramm at Iowa, but does not bother with John Crowe Ransom, the Fugitives, the New Critics, and the amazing story of how Modernist poets took over the university so suddenly in mid-century.

The amazing story of 20th century American poetry isn’t going to show up on any mainstream radar screens–perhaps until some Fiction workshop graduate puts it into a work of fiction.

So the rise of the Creative-Writing Program in Letters is another reason the ‘Poe Review’ has been banished.

Modern poetry has expanded to include all sorts of experimental discursiveness that WILL NOT be judged by any sort of standard. Modernism sought to discredit and BE SAFE FROM Poe at the same time, and has succeeded wildly.
One example of this is when discussing VERSE, which is STILL an interest to us, even in the modern age, no one ever refers to Poe’s ‘Rationale Of Verse,’ the best work on the subject.

Anyway, there’s my lengthy reply to your lengthy comment!

Thomas
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due to work schedule and this already being solong i left aside a number of other suggestion such as re fiction and drama elements
used in a reiew
If the same questions are being raised in both 1840′s and 2009 American poetics with regard to reviews of poetry, many ideas come to mind for sure!
One of them being the kind of ahistoricty which has long been part of the formalist Poetics in the US, in contradistinction to what one might call the Hieroglyphic tradition which moves from the disparate geniuses of Poe and Emerson through Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and finds its way via Ezra Pound to Olson. And Paul Metcalf, and the early Susan Howe.

The Formalist eschews history—while the Hieroglyphian so to speak– embraces it—
Even when it is a made up or mistranslated, misunderstood misreading which for al its screwiness produces ever more lines of poetry reaching out in to ever more rhizomatic lines of flight

Reading most poetry reviews, i am struck by how little historical presence and context is brought up, as though the poetry takes place in an abstract, formal sphere quite cut off from either Emerson or Poe, not to mention many other persistent yet marginalized strands–that of the Anarchists, Rexroth to some degree, Patchen, Theodore Enslin–
And the New England School of Brevity one finds moving through Emily Dickinson into Creeley and Larry Eigner

And in this narrow ahistorical space as it attempts to turn historical –what happens but that the formerly banished “self” returns and takes up the formerly despised private sphere and al the worries and narcissism of poets . . . watch and listen as the austere Language and other avant schools find themselves embracing al the elements of the dread school of quietude—melding with them-=-meeting with them and joining the country club atmosphere of mainstream magazines–

There are to be sure many other strands which run through historical time and permeate certain areas of American poetry with the grace of underground waters–

Having been a reviewer some twenty or so years ago, primarily of films and music and less so of writing, books–one can make distinctions among the failure or success by an author in any media in the context of what within that particular’s artists’ strands they are trying to create.

This is why the basic elements which WCW sees Poe making such a monstrous to-do about is so crucial–he is trying to give a sense of rigor to what is –and still is–the often incredible slackness of poetry in terms of grammar alone.

I think that the approach which sees rather hilariously the same issues at their most watered down that Poe observed–between those of puffery and those of the maledictions Poe himself casts upon the doughy and rising pudding—continuing rather placidly along, one observes the enduring strictures and Manichean divisions of an either /or mentality, which greatly limits the various approaches in their extensions and depths that one may be able to deduce from these.

Among the recommendations Kent Johnson suggests for ameliorating the “current condition” (the long term “current” of it from Poe to the present not being taken into consideration–)—are anonymity and satire, the latter of which he suggests English templates for—

Yes—that long enduring figure–the anonymous author, the anonymous reviewer–in what way is one thinking of anonymity however—as simply the lack of an author’s name, or perhaps going further, a deliberate anonymity of style, in which as little as a possible of a personality who may be identifiable across several reviews is allowed to exist.

Of course, many a person would at this point recommend the by now rather tired trope of the machine-poet, cheerfully manufacturing lines from the detritus fed into , passing through it,–and which, as always happens, does not remain anonymous for very long, sooner or later al robots acquire a name and distinct personality–

A writer may be anonymous, yet at the same time recognized, via style, mannerisms, the works alluded to or being compared with—
Every bit and even more—perhaps?– than a robot–poet is–

The issue of satire comes up also in Kent Johnson’s critique, yet how long would this really be allowed to go on? Persons would take offense quite early on in to this new Open Form, as Wide Open as the open Range, as after all not al that many poets are blessed with a sense of the ridiculous and especially not when it is epitomized as themselves-being the most ridiculous of all—

In the first place the whole undertaking needs to be revolutionized by the imagaintion–perhaps to write of contemporary poetry books in the manner of Edgar Poe–
Or to write in the happy manner of those wonderful reviews of Leaves of Grass which Walt Whitman under various psuedononmys penned him–

Why not use one’s own principles and standards to review one’s own book–???

Another method i have been working on is that of taking a work, especially if it not one of the better productions of the poet, and stripping it for parts basically in order to make out of this sorry smashed machine and “shell of a society” something truly refreshing and energetic and–not at al conforming to any of the rules that the original had tried to set down for itself and others. ..

One could produce such a negentropic example and then run it across the bridge of one’s own translations not as oneself so to speak but playing the character of a malevolent swashbuckling opportunist, say–stealing off the volume and translating the improved one has made–into another language in which it will not be recognized as the former work, but taken to be a completely new work

Following on this success, one may then reverse engineer the translations back into the original language as a distanced version, a distant cousin, of the translation and original both–

It is not the poet or the poetry that “disappears” under the various guises of these pseudonyms, these anonymous turns made by an actor adept at concealing his or her identity in the faultless portrayal of smaller parts—

No, it is not that these disappear or are dead, it is that they are now performing—are actors—may indeed become distant cousins of that greatest of poet actors/writers/directors—the part of Richard the Third which Shakespeare wrote as a Globe theater unto himself—entering the stage and confiding in the audience how he shall control the events to follow by the wicked imagings and coldly crafted machinations of his forceful will and desire . . . His a kingdom constructed at first out of asides, confidentialities, to the audience—the quick, sure sketching out of both acting and actions to take place on the historical “Global” stages of action—

And this actor writing his actions for the audience to know ahead of time what they are to be and still astounded at how Richard brings these events off—this Richard playing the role of director, scene changer, prompter, spontaneous reviser of his own texts in full play—during the drama raking off into evermore actions and words which are completely “in character” and just as completely the character going “outside of his self, losing his character—as a King suddenly booted out of the “King’s men” troop of actors to which Shakespeare beloonged—
And finding himself horseless, doomed, crying piteously into the havoc of battle that drowns his words out except to be remembered with relish—by the victors—which is in actuality the very audience now watching the play–
Rather than being swamped and suffocated under the sheer tonnage and volume of the bad poems, as well as the mediocties and the near missed not to mention a number of “glorious but failed endeavors–”–

The project here is not to review the book, but to rewrite it–reimagine it from the shards and fragments which one has glimpsed amidst the teeming swarms of Possibilities–

In the travel literature of the 18th century, such translations and editions as i described were indeed produced by single individuals, who simply donned a different identity with each new versions being produced
in this manner one began with the haphazard quilting designs of the original work which in itself may be original in only the methods used to suture together already existing texts, many of thethemslvesbootleddandplagairexedbowdlerixedfrompreviouseditions,tranlstedpoorlilyandthenonceagaintrnbaslatedwithanevermoreoutrageouselan–

The18thceturyinEuropewaslitteredwithafantastic literature of thoroughly astounding hyrbird, withso many approaches all mixed together its not “montage “or “collage” that is produced at all, but a swarm–

These rather stretchy travelogues of course found their greatest sources in the then not so well defined and explored Americas lands filed in with al manner of nester, gigantic persons or small–and al manner of animals flowers insects and birds–and truly prodigious feats of creation on the part of Mother Nature herself, in the guise of al these seemingly endless mountain’s plains, the colossal rivers, the gigantic lakes–

The place in itself practically called out to be turned into that early classic American genre–the tall Tale, the Bunyanesqe “stretcher” as lies were called at the time–

perhaps what i am writing of is not so much reviewing at al but a reinvigorating process using the mulched decaying rotting elements poems blowing about like those crazy quilt parchments found in Egyptian dumps, which when unraveled reveal themselves to be a copy of a missing and hitherto unknown poem of Sappho’s–
or perhaps a bad attempt at an imitation turrned into a plagerization of some other poet’s lines to try to “improve” the failed parts and bring them up to snuff with the “good”–
Of course this may be much easier to accomplish and attempt if one follows a method suggested recently by Pierre Bayard, in which to really review a writer to really understand them one takes the absolute worst works of great writers–and uses them to begin to construct this other “might have been” edifice which it was most patently not–and at the time existed as the messy swarm from which eventually the honey of the great works emerged–

Al of this would indeed be a real challenge considering the extents to which many American poets and forms of poetry try to make themselves go–

Really one begins to wonder if every word written to day is in fact its exact opposite in the Grand Orwellian manner of 2+ 2 +5 and “war=peace,” love=hate”–

The double talk of double standards applied to the conditions of the world and their existences in language has increasing made gnarled, garbled, terrifying and hilarious much of the utterances of anyone anymore–
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John Oliver Simon, for what it’s worth, was one of the first poet-critics to recognize and REVIEW the work, over twenty years ago, of the poet who who co-won the National Book Critics Circle Award recently for his New and Selected: Juan Felipe Herrera.

Thanks John. It was nice seeing you in Berkeley this past February. Thank you for coming out to The Wind Shifts reading at Moe’s

FA
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Ten or twelve years later, I sent Bob Hass a postcard. I was wrong, I said, I was sorry. The poem that changed my mind was Meditation at Lagunitas. Anyway, Bob and I got together for coffee. He confessed that he had been crushed at the time, because mine was the first review of Field Guide, and that he had always tried his best to dislike me. Since then, well, we get along.

On my long travels down through Latin America, folks would ask what’s happening it North American poetry, and I would say, there’s the Language poets, but they’re unreadable, and then there’s Meditation at Lagunitas, which by that time I knew almost by heart in either Spanish or English. Zarzamora, zarzamora, zarzamora.
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my next goal is to put some manners on Logan, make him eat humble pie, get him apologising and promising to change.

If you’re reading Logan, apologise to all the poets you have been unfair to and i will forgive you.
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He is a laughably transparent critical hypocrite. When reviewing the Dennis O’Driscoll Stepping Stones interviews and Heaney generally, he deploys the word cunning a lot with a perjorative slant, stating:

“The slyest moments here are his backhanded judgments on fellow poets”

…before indulging in the exact same practice:

“The richness of these interviews comes in part from the weakness of character inadvertently revealed. A poetry of warmth and humility has been drawn around a personality at times icy with conceit.”

The obvious statement to make about Logan’s style is that he has made a name for himself as a boot-boy, applying the sneeriest of standards to others, when his own poetry is of fare poorer quality than most of the people he slates.

Henry Lloyd Moon, a regular poster responding on the guardian books blog, in a recent worshipful blog by John Sutherland blowing Martin Amis – could equally be referring to Logan’s overblown standing:

“It’s like laughing along with the worldly but weedy class show-off.

Poet manque Logan, is clearly more of a comedian than critic, a professional and outrageously readable troll whose glaring fault is that for all his material comfort, he is essentially unfulfilled in the role of poet, because no Joy ever passes from his lips. The simple humble human state of being in awe and wonder with the divine, is something which has totally passed this doggerelist of awful, plodding ditties by.

Working with only half the ingrediants in the poetry kit-bag, the fi of toxic satire and none of the li of splendour in praise which make up a real fili (poet).

Here’s a short few lines from the resident know all whose mediocrity knows no bounds:

After the Blitz, her mother had begun an affair. So she said.
No one would have called her wellbred,

but she knew how to fill a low-cut dress,
had a fetching smile and a tongue for success.

…and on and on ad finitum, deploying all the plodding amateur rhyming skills and poetic intelligence he lambasts the targets of his critcial misanthropy for displaying.

I read an extract from Our Savage Art recently, liitered with allusions and references to figures from Greek myth, as Logan tried to strike a balance between being bare-knuckle bore and belabouring his points about the fine art of Criticism, seemingly blind to the irony, that most exampled of what he is saying about all the poetaster critics of yesteryear – are equally applicable to himself:

“Blackmur, who, though a brilliant critic, was a dreadful poet.”

…and quoting Coleridge:

..a critic most hates those who excel in the particular depart­ment in which he, the critic, has notoriously been defeated..

The problem with aging two-dimensional ditty makers who have little in the way of poetic talent and lots in the way of attitude, who fall into safe comfortable numbers as the jolly pit-bull critic sneering at all and sundry – is that eventually they become spent grumps and arte finished off when a far younger wit enters the ring and knocks them out with the first blow.

I have stated before, i am keen to debate, with or without gloves, with Logan anywhere at all, but i do not think he has the courage to face me, because he knows i am far superior in both intellect and artistry than he.

WB Logan is a joker, a fake, no more a poet than i’m a tree who’s a planet or a moon fully Spanish, more, he’s a weedy armchair Rambo who’s gob dribbles for the Pop Idol generation of second rate ditty readers.

William Logan. Critic manque, forgettable ditty maker>

RIP
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