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.

“… 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.’”

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

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.

FA

http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/poetic-industrial-complex-book-reviews

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.

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.

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