Terreson

Today on a very small board I run a member quoted something William James said about philosophers. She said he said:

“William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament…This creates, as James puts it, ‘A certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: The potentest of all our premesis is never mentioned…What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is–and so flagrantly!–is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”

A certain insincerity in the discussion James draws attention to. To me this as true of the philosopher as it is of the scientist as it is of the politician as it is of the priest as it is of the poetry critic. In the case of poetry criticism the insincerity has to do with the critic’s relative lack of self-reflection, his incapacity for seeing the extent to which his crits are the product of “personal flavor.” Said differently, in my view, the poetry critic who predicates his value on his critical abilities should always be held suspect for compensatory behavior.

Mr. Durkee makes a vaild point. I think Mr. Epstein adds to the point to make a valid distinction between critic and critiquer. But I have to remind everyone of two cases in which the critic, speaking to his readers, looked to disparage poetry. Dryden whose label of Metaphysical poets was a put down of Dryden and company. And Rosenthal whose coining of Confessional poetry was a put down of Lowell and company. In both cases I would argue the point that the poetry involved is world-class.

What was the name of that woman who was so easy on the eyes and whose poetry was metrically exacting on the ears? Carolyn Kizer I think it was. She said something like a good poetry teacher wants you to get your poetry right on your own terms. A bad poetry teacher wants you to write like them, just not as well. Most critics fall into the second class in my view.

No. The poet/critic relationship is a bust.

Terreson

The 2 modes often are mixed online, but people seem more confused than benefited by the overlap.

RHE

On the one hand, it is a teacher’s job to encourage and motivate: in a word, to mentor. One changes one’s tactics based on the student in question. The best mentoring is flexible and adaptable, never absolutist and never rule-based. (Those who consider themselves charter members of the Grammar Police rarely achieve their goal of making everyone conform to their ruleset, but more tragically many Grammar Cops never seem to understand that poetry isn’t prose and isn’t required to follow the same ruleset.)

On the other hand, one can make a strong case for student writers never learning anything at all from either reviews or classroom critique. The best way to learn to write remains reading, reading, and reading some more, and picking up good ideas from good writing. By absorbing it from good examples, and by osmosis. That mentors can be found, when needed, in many places other than the classroom—yes, I do realize it’s heresy anymore to state that MFA writing programs are not necessarily the best choice in one’s life, but nonetheless there it is—and that one of the best places to look for mentors, when one desires to write, is the library.

Two other points: I don’t think book reviews are equivalent to end comments on student papers. (If anything, teachers — especially school teachers — have a greater responsibility to encourage).

That said, I don’t quite understand the function of critics like William Logan who trash many of my favorite poets (Dean Young, Kevin Young — and I’m just in the “Y” section of the index!). I’ll address what I see as a serious audience problem in poetry in an upcoming post.

P.S. Since friends have asked: the bird at the top of the post is an “auk.”

I assume we agree on the tautological: in any endeavour that involves skill neophytes tend to perform like, well, neophytes.

Here I think you’ve hit on the crux of the matter:

Can’t we have a bit of both? Candour + encouragement?

Candour is precisely what I’m advocating.

I think “encouragement” is the trickier part of your equation. For starters, are we encouraging students to continue writing [badly] or to begin writing well? Surely the former has to stop before the latter can commence, with considerable unlearning and learning in between, no? When better to initiate this transition than when they enter our classroom?

If we give students the mistaken notion that their work is impeccable (or within a few minor edits of perfection) why should they continue coming to class? Why should they bother contemplating what, in one word, distinguishes the free verse of the 1920s from that of the 1930’s and what we see today? Why discover whether “Prufrock” is free verse or het-met? Why wonder how critics were able to predict that “Beans” would be received as the best DPK poem and “Eve Marie” the worst? Why ask about the absence of a volta in “The Silken Tent”? Why strive to understand the reason Poe’s work was disparaged by most contemporaries and by critics ever since? These are just some of the hundreds of pertinent questions that can be answered. Imagine the thousands that can’t! Instead, students can plod along the rest of their lives wondering why discerning editors, critics, readers, publishers and contest judges reject their work.

“It must be just a matter of taste. Or politics. After all, I know my work is fine. My professor said so!” Or, at the very least, never said otherwise.

That brings us full circle back to candour.

-o-

“Whether or not critique is constructive depends on how the author uses it, not on the manner in which it’s phrased.”

– John Boddie

“Yes, how selfish of someone to spend time giving an informed critique of another’s work.”

– Aidan Tynan

“But what really pisses me off, when you get right down to it, is the unmitigated gall of so many who…have the patronizing, self-absorbed opinion that the person who critiques their poetry has not a clue, has never loved, has never grieved, has never existed in all of the frames they write so badly about. THAT (at the moment) is what really pisses me off.”

– Debi Zathan