Here's what happened then (with links): Jason Guriel wrote an essay called "Going Negative" in Poetry in March of 2009, after writing a number of "negative" reviews in the pages of that magazine; poet Kent Johnson wrote a response to that essay in the form of a Letter to the Editor of Poetry (some of which later appeared online, but none of which, as I understand it, appeared in the pages of the magazine); and then others, indeed a whole host of very intelligent others, wrote responses to Johnson in the online mag?Mayday, including the following poets and poet-scholars (click a name to see the response):
V. Joshua Adams
Joe Amato
Robert Archambeau
Tim Atkins
Robert Baird
John Beer
John Bradley
Stephen Burt
Scott Esposito
Annie Finch
Bill Freind
Daisy Fried
Mark Halliday
Johannes Goransson
John Latta
David Lau
Eric Lorberer
Maureen McLane
Ange Mlinko
Murat Nemet-Nejat
Tom Orange
David Orr
Richard Owens
Rebecca Porte
Kristin Prevallet
Michael Robbins
Michael Theune
Barry Schwabsky
Don Share
Dale Smith
Rodrigo Toscano
Mark Wallace
I'll concede that I haven't yet had a chance to read all these responses, but suffice to say that there are a lot of luminaries here--Joe Amato, Robert Archambeau, John Beer, Stephen Burt, Annie Finch, Daisy Fried, Mark Halliday, Johannes Goransson, John Latta, Ange Mlinko, David Orr, Michael Theune, and Don Share--along with the many others listed above, among which latter group (I will say) are a small number of well-known cranks whose interest in "negative reviews" is likely, my instincts tell me, first and foremost a product of their interest in light sadism rather any sincere interest in the dialogic. (They know who they are.) I make that comment, snarky as it seems, for a reason: I think it needs to be said that, if you're reading this, and if you're a poet, you?know that poets as a class are as bitter a population as we have in America, and so if we're going to discuss "negative reviews" we must cleanse the debate, first and foremost, of that instinct to wound other poets under the guise of the "professional" operation known as "reviewing." Surely, such an instinct has at times infected certain reviewers and reviews, just as it routinely infects poets despite our best efforts to ward it off. Nevertheless, the desire to take someone down a peg will never be an adequate justification for a negative review, though again, I do suspect it's just that sort of sanctioned "flaming" that animates certain individuals.
Anyway, I can't and won't speak to the responses above individually, except to say that I hope some or all of them have acknowledged the history of the negative review, which is that it is generally a type of review that takes upon itself the task of mapping the contemporary American poetry scene by comparing one poet to another, one poetics to another, one community to another -- in short, there's necessarily a lot of line-drawing, distinction-making, taxonomizing, et cetera, that goes into the so-called "negative review." Implicit in many such reviews is this message to the reader: "You're reading this, but you shouldn't be!"; or "These poets are present top dogs, but it ought not be so!"; or "This poetics is retrograde, as compared to this other!"; and so on. For the negative review to work, it has to be pushing off a series of assumptions about the clarity and organization and alignment of contemporary poets and poetics which -- I submit -- have largely become laughable in a country with 70,000 working poets (2012) instead of 5,000 (1942). It is hard for me to imagine a negative review that does not predicate its attacks or criticisms on a series of false assumptions and false first principles about the sociology and present circumstance of poets and poetry.?I've come to believe this even more strongly as I've been exposed to the largely-execrable scholarship available on any poems, poets, poetries, or poetics emanating from the Program Era (1964-present, though not a presence on the national scene until the late 1980s at the earliest). Such "scholarship" has discarded entire generations of poets on the basis of the ideology-driven -- and, I'll add, perniciously ahistorical -- narrative it developed in order to have something to "push off" from.
One reason negative reviews require this pushing-off point is that no one, whether poet-critic or scholar, is willing to deep-six a work without contextualizing it first. Which is all to the good -- if the poet-critic or scholar is an expert when it comes to literary history. Most aren't, so their contextualization of a work is typically narrow, reflexive, and skewed. It's not clear to me that the negative review, in consequence, says much more to anyone than that a specific reviewer didn't like something (as if I wanted a proper literary history, I'd not look to the genre of the "poetry review" to find it). That's a pretty minimal contribution, but one which would be further foreshortened if Kent Johnson's above-linked-to proposal of anonymous reviews were adopted -- as in that case we'd simply know that someone, somewhere, with an education in literary history consisting of we know not what, didn't like what they read. And moreover, even if we took such a review at face value it would only -- at most -- prompt us not to read the book in question, though human perverseness being what it is, negative reviews are even inoperative (I feel) in that way, as we're often more likely to use a negative review to hunt down the derided books to "decide for ourselves." Poets aren't big, thank god, on taking anything at face value.
As to the reviewer himself/herself, at most a non-anonymous negative review makes a name for that reviewer as someone worth reading due to the universally-acknowledged deliciousness of snark (and presumably, that awareness of prospective notoriety sometimes helps form the reviewer's motivation for reviewing in the first place); at worst, it leads to the reviewer being unfairly blacklisted by the derided poet and every friend she or he has ever made in the poetry community.
As to the content of such a review, at most it makes for a terrible literary history far less comprehensive or accurate or ingenuous than any one of a number of such histories you could find among the scholarly works of today's Contemporary Poetry Studies, at worst it creates an entirely notional map of contemporary American poetry which will mislead its readers into thinking certain movements or poets or groups of poets are more "central" to American poetry than they are -- or that American poetry even has a "center" anymore. Far better for us to simply acknowledge what we know: Book sales figures are unreliable because they can be manipulated easily by even one or two friends of the poet teaching a given book (you'd be floored if you knew how few book sales are required for a book to be a monthly bestseller on SPD; and fewer than 50 books sold in a given week can make a book a national bestseller); too many poets are now writing for anyone to announce themselves a dean of the contemporary poetry "scene"; despite reviewers' ongoing fetishizing of only two groups of poets -- those who win prizes and those who self-define as avant-garde whether they really hail from that august tradition or not -- most of what's happening in contemporary American poetry hails from the Program Era scene which both literary studies academics and poet-critics have thus far entirely ignored.
Which, I think, is the real point here -- and is how this conversation dovetails with the essays I've been writing about "creative writing" and the academy. With the growth in creative writing doctoral programs -- almost all of which came between 1980 and 1995 -- and with the advent of the nation's first "hybrid" doctoral program during that time (at SUNY-Buffalo, in 1989), and even with the development of an Internal Creative Writing Minor within the traditional Literary Studies doctoral program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, an entire generation of poet-scholars was born. And these individuals had no idea what to do with themselves. They are still not taken seriously by their peers -- a Contemporary Poetry Studies scholar of some renown recently reminded me that Charles Bernstein's SUNY-Buffalo program is not an "academic" doctorate; creative writing doctoral students at the nation's thirty-three such programs are largely segregated culturally and academically from their literary studies peers; few poets who delve deeply into poetry criticism are taken seriously, at least for long, by their working-poet peers -- and most vitally, it's not clear what genre their hybridistic work (or sensibilities) can or should fall into. As a nominal poet-critic, my own fourth manuscript is an attempt to finally reconcile academic and "creative writing" discourse using certain favored avant-garde compositional techniques; Lord knows when or where or how I will publish it, especially as we continue to suffer fallout from the longstanding (false) linkage between academic-institutional-housed "creative writing" and the New Criticism.
The poet-critic naturally feels she or he should be writing a sort of review that acknowledges his or her academic training. And surely, positive reviews offer fewer opportunities to do that, as praising a work without spending overmuch time on what it's pushing off from is seen as lacking scholarly rigor (in my own reviews, I often gesture at trends I consider worthy of repeal by working poets; these "negative" commentaries on contemporary poetry are quickly consumed, however, by any superlatives I might apply to the specific work under consideration). Meanwhile -- and this is also vital -- Contemporary Poetry Studies scholars of the "traditional" type (meaning: no MFA; no interest in "creative writing") are more specialized than ever before, having spent the last twenty-five years doing their best to ignore any poet hailing from the Program Era and lionizing, instead, a tiny cadre of avant-gardes from the 1940s and 1950s who were a) largely male, b) largely white, c) largely upper-middle-class, d) largely coastal, and e) largely incestous inasmuch as almost all of them knew each other. Such self-ghettoization, on the part of literary studies academics, was understandable when there were 5,000 working poets in America; with 70,000 working poets now publishing, there's an increasingly broad swath of writing which is getting no scholarly attention and which -- a self-identity-confused poet-critic might feel -- is therefore ripe for the sort of quasi-scholarly review we denominate "negative."
The question is, do such reviews serve the community of working poets, which is primarily invested in, well, how not to become bored by poetry? Which is primarily interested in finding new and exciting work to fuel its own creative energies? Which is excited -- not chagrined -- to read a wide range of reviews looking at a vast array of poetries now extant in America, rather than reading conflicting scholarly accounts of the same small number of authors time after time? I really don't think negative reviewing serves that community or those interests. I think the "negative review" largely serves a series of reading interests which no longer exist -- they died out as the number of working poets exploded in the 1980s, and individual readers no longer could navigate the landscape without assistance -- and a series of reviewing interests which are largely confined to this "new" question of the poet-critic and his/her place in contemporary American culture.
So to those intrigued by the negative review I say -- well, first, "Is this about sadism? If so, get a grip!" -- and secondly, "Is there any reason this 'negative review'?can't be written as a piece of traditional Contemporary Poetry Studies scholarship, rather than masquerading as an attempt to 'help the reader' determine what to read and what's happening in American poetry?" As to that second query, one worries that part of the answer is that poet-critics would rather publish in Poetry than in venues none of their poet-peers read -- like MLA publications of dubious interest to anyone outside academia -- and also that the latter form of scholarship requires much, much more background preparation regarding the study of literary history than does the "negative review."
By contrast, I believe that a?positive review that meets the standards I laid out in Part I of this essay -- no cronyism; a large number of reviews in a short space; a large stock of books considered for possible review; no esoteric limitations on eligibility (e.g., books only published in the last thirty days, or only books not yet published, or only books submitted by publishers, or only books that are not published POD, et cetera) -- does serve the actual needs of the community (not the reviewer) provided that it explains in clear terms why a book is working in the way it seems to wish to work, rather than merely supplying conclusory language about a book's merits without such explication.
I am as concerned as anyone about reviews becoming merely "blurbs," but contrary to those who sometimes decry positive reviews I also am quite clear about what a blurb is and is not. A blurb is: solicited by the poet or his/her publisher; not written electively (that is, the blurbist has not explicitly and actively rejected hundreds of other books of poetry in the process of choosing this one to speak on); offers praise without qualification or nuance; provides little to no explication in support of its claims; trades as much on the identity of the blurbist as the content of the statement itself; constitutes an attempt to make a sale, whereas a positive review provides a recommendation to the reader which may not ever lead to a transaction -- i.e., a positive review can raise awareness and interest in what a poet is doing such that readers will seek out free exemplars of that poet's work, something that's possible largely because the review is not inextricably tied to a physical product (as most reviews are now online). I'm not saying I always succeed at writing this sort of positive review; I can say that it's what I'm striving toward and believe I have (sometimes or even often) achieved.
Those are a few key distinctions between blurbs and positive reviews. There are others. But there's also one more I'd add here: I do think faith plays a vital role in the life of a poetry community just as in (perhaps in a secular way) the life of most individuals. As poets, we have to know who to trust -- as friends, as possible critics of our work, as critics of the work of others, as co-workers, as peers, as editors, as publishers, as community organizers, as commentators, et cetera. We are constantly being called upon to acknowledge that our field is one filled with those who have their own -- and not anyone else's -- interests at stake. If you don't trust someone, you don't read their reviews, whatever their stripe. Certainly, we already know that, whatever poets say -- and they often do say otherwise -- they won't read any poetry written by someone they don't like personally, no matter how much they laud the purity, autonomy, and clarity of Art's first principles. So why shouldn't the same apply to reviews? Surely, it already does apply -- to both positive and negative reviews, or really to any pronouncement by a poet on any topic, including this pronouncement, by me, on this topic -- so let's promote a reviewing regime that materializes that requirement of faith rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Those who attribute a sort of purity to the negative review that they deny to the positive review are not considering either the history of American poetry, the history of American poets, the history of poetry reviews, or the history of that designation so many of those writing negative reviews now (willingly or no) claim for themselves: the "poet-critic" who sits halfway between the academy and "creative writing," and is therefore in the crosshairs of an internecine skirmish that as yet hasn't any resolution.
Source: http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-power-of-positive-poetry-reviewing_18.html
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