Interesting post by Zach Wellshttp://zachariahwells.blogspot.com/2009/12/nature-poetry.html
I have no problem with poets entering all kinds of current political, environmental, cultural issues into their work. There're three main problems with doing so, though:
1) The "message" typically overwhelms the more artful aspects of the verse: rhythm, sound, e.g., and especially subtlety.
2) Following from (1), poetry isn't an excuse to proselytize, or to prove what a generous soul the author possesses. This parallels rather well with my own personal peeve: poets (ironically) flaunting ever-so-quietly their own spiritual sensitivity.
3) If you're gonna speak to complex issues, and climate change certainly fills that sink, then you'd better be intimately aware of all sides of the argument.
Speaking to #1, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Homer wrote well and profoundly on politics, Jeffers and Hughes on the environment. But their poetry sung, and their opinions would have been lost forever, just as quickly as will the article LH links to (I agree with the emotional tenor of Monbiot's column re Alberta's Tar Sands, but from a different perspective altogether), if those views were announced artlessly. Poetry's effects, when good, usually help the reader to ask further and better questions rather than to hammer home a group-solidified opinion.
As for #2, this oratory comes from the secular pulpit. There's a time and place for position-taking essays, and for journalist slant, but again, that's a far call from poetry's richness.
#3 is amply demonstrated by LH's confident but dubious view that "at a moment when people are in fact willing to face the reality of climate change and the urgency and complexity of environmentalism we need to have a variety of complex representations and assertions."
Well, first off, climate change is a given. That's what climate does. The question becomes: how much of it is person-caused, and how much of it is a natural fluctuation, seen and recorded throughout the centuries? Back in 1990, this "urgency"LH wants to express was new and dramatic; lately, much evidence and bureaucratic and scientific revelation has revealed multiple cracks in the "humans are to blame" climate change mantra. But you see what I'm helping to perpetuate here: the great unwashed heave of peopledom love to argue and declaim over the environment, politics, religion; not too many are willing to explore a poem as a poem, though.
This changing of popular views -- shown here in a mere 20 years -- speaks to another danger (#4, actually) in bringing current issues to the writing table. If and when the ideas expressed are shown to be not only outdated, but based on wrong premises, well, then, there goes your "content". If I want to learn more about global warming (oops, I mean climate cooling or climate change) I sure won't leaf through contemporary CanPo to get my info. (Or is this just another chapter in "tribal aesthetics"?) Those poets are more than likely not looking to--as LH would have it-- the "complexity of environmentalism". I've read enough contemporary verse, both here and abroad, to know that, more often than not, sloganeering and sanctimonious declaration substitute for and destroy complexity, nuance, and a concern with language and rhythm and sound.
Again, I greatly admire anyone who can insert important contemporary events into their poetry. But it's extremely difficult, and poets who've shown a lack of talent for composing a simple "I walked down the street today" anecdote would be better off tackling that "project" first before the hard organic shaping of poems on climate change.
I disagree somewhat with Zach's final point on the complicity of poets leaving their carbon footprints all about like a consuming Sasquatch. Just by being born, we have a negative effect on the environment. But I'm not one of those lugubrious haters of "manunkind" who would cheer -- could they see it -- the extinction of homosapiens from gentle Gaia. It's a matter of degree. Yes, I agree that most volumes of contemporary CanPo, including most of those from the "ecological" genre, will be dumpster filler or recycled into reusable bumpaper. But "man does not live by bread alone" is the key, here. We need pine beds and walls, but we also need good books of poetry (emphasis on the adjective). (Besides, hemp isn't just for smoking.)Those good books will often have little to do with contemporary news always in the headlines. Some will be exceptions, though .... I'd hope.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Addendum
Just to be clear, I'm not agreeing with everything in Knott's rant-review. His first remarks misunderstand hair-styling procedures of the 80s-90s. When I had hair -- last century -- it was commonplace to get a pre- rinse and shampoo as part of the cut. And it was cheap. So there is certainly misreading of objectives or meaning, but that in no way makes the case for there always being clearly understood intent. (Just look at all the other valid confusions of the figures in the poem, for example.)
Spread the Snark
Roughly edited (if altered at all), this single poem review eschews dispassionate "objectivity". It's a highly personal take, an exasperated unscrolling of the reviewer's thoughts on the poem's intent. But whatever the intent of a poet is, however accurately measured, the next and more important two questions become: do we care about the poem simply by recognizing its intent?; and how is that intent executed?
http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/11/repostthis-appeared-here-in-may-09.html
http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/11/repostthis-appeared-here-in-may-09.html
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Further Comments on Snark
I was rather naive on the meaning of the word "snark". I'd thought it was a short, dismissive review or comment, extremely negative in tone. In other words, an honest, damning comment on what one has engaged with. But I haven't given myself enough credit. Since my several dictionaries, including the on-line versions, either have no entries, or the lone meaning is pertaining to Lewis Carroll's animal, I had to go to the "source", as it were, and discovered that it was coined (from Paul Vermeersch's link) by Heidi Julavits in her March 2003 essay. The essay itself is very unfocussed, but towards the end comes the vague, theoretical definition. Not much to base a definitive understanding on, and the subsequent discussion of the word's meaning, and hence its more serious ramifications, are problematic, and need to be entertained with a preamble on how the word is to be employed for purposes of a particular conversational framework. Those later definitions will be outlined perhaps in a later blog post, but for now let's focus on Julavits. (Bolding is mine.)
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=article_julavits
"I don't know what many critics believe when it comes to literature; at worst, I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake. This hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt is, I suspect, a bastard offspring of Orwell’s flea-weighers. I call it Snark...."(Julavits)
The bolded qualifiers shift the emphasis away from unsubstantiated emotional reaction to a hoped-for rarified aura, a virtue self-placed by easy, cherry-picked quotes and anecdotes. She ushers in this line by a fallacious and rather unseemly guise of falsely planed contrasts, the reviewers who fail to emulate Edmund Wilson, James Wood, and Lionel Trilling all made to look feeble by the logical fallacy of the call to authority. But "snark", so-called, is, even by the definition of anti-snarkers David Denby and Julavits, exclusively negative and sarcastic. The two lamentable reviewers currently under the gun from the "Save Canadian Poets From Hurt Feelings" campaign (last one in the pool is the most oppressed!) have, on more than one occasion, championed not only many individuals and many individual books of poetry, but furthermore have championed the rationale behind those positive reviews, and have even spoken in specific poetics of how and why those books made the grade while others fell short.
That's strike one, against just the definition of snark, and how it's made up from vague notions, changeably conducive to one's emotional predilection. To go on, in this vein, with more Julavistas:
"I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications, and not only the The New York Observer, or the The New York Press, the possible laboratories of this disorder."(Julavits)
Now I realize that New Yawkers think their city's the centre of the universe, but has Julavits perused widely-known poetry and the canonical crit issueing from those books' immediate publication, as well as reaction to those (early) books centuries later? Horace, Catullus, Pope, Shakespeare (that canny Bard-- just who was Timon?), Layton, generated proof of the physics law of equal reaction to every action with those authors' critical counterparts.
David Denby (I haven't read his book, so I won't respond to its larger argument) bases his anti-snark views largely on Teh Internets and on pop-culture snipes, but of course Banks and Vermeersch are talking not only of CanLit "culture", in general, but to the specific reviewing style of Zach Wells and of this writer. This is strike two, and is a clear example of another popularly deployed logical fallacy:
a) reviewers these days write a lot of snark (however that's defined-- see strike #1)
b) Palmu and Wells write reviews expressing negative opinions
c) therefore, Palmu and Wells are snarkists
"If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine; but should the writer, who is a pawn in this system"(Julavits)
What system? Julavits has set up her strawperson with detailed cheerleading blurbs, but it has nothing to do with the motivations of her supposedly unfair snarkists. As in:
"who is a pawn in this system, who has negligible say over the design of his book jacket or even his title, who would never be so presumptuous to compare himself to Dickens, should this disdain be delivered unto him?"(Julavits)
I quoted Emily Schultz giving what I thought to be ridiculous claims for Banks' books; that's a reflection on Schultz, not Banks. Of course the author isn't responsible for blurbs, but it's useful to point out (where necessary) the discrepancy between a blurb's specific attributes for the book under review and what the reviewer's experiences of that book were. After all, many a time a reader's first found commentary on what a book might contain is on that very book-flap, and certainly not on what a relatively obscure blogger has said about it.
"(Writers also become pawns of the “call and response” reviewing that occurs between competing publications; Time magazine runs a glowing review, and Newsweek answers with a pan.)"(Julavits)
Ah, yes. Or to tweak the conspiracy just a bit: Internet "warriors" are the hoi polloi, the great unwashed plebs just trying to get a break through (over?) the walls of academe, and the publishing levers they control. (Vermeersch publishes, Banks teaches -- we're just competing for their positions. Isn't that just answering the reviewers' obvious intentions, objectively?)
"Here’s another theory about snark. Maybe snark was a critical attempt to compete, on an entertainment level."(Julavits)[bolding mine]
Objectivity. I love well-researched essays. I have a theory, too. Has Julavits perhaps been given a .... "snarky" review, too? And we can't have entertainment! (And I love the very subtle Queen's put-down-- entertainment level!)
"the giggling, minuscule minority. We also see those movies. Book reviewers who adopt this tone when reviewing literary fiction are about as humorous as cow tippers"(Julavits)
Which is it? For objectively subjective theory-based, emotionally driven disingenuous-linked argument, this is further richness. Are we bitter and angry, or just having some sporting fun? Or both? Or have those on the receiving end of this nebulous term also been by turns bitter and reactively sarcastic?
"as a result, they guarantee a book that might have sold 4,000 copies, will now sell 800. And nobody will read that book, not even the literary types, who are off watching Titanic with a knowing smirk"(Julavits)
Aha, power to the downtrodden reviewer! But Banks would have it that no one listens to us. Again, I'm confused. Are we two-handedly bringing down the House of CanLit, or are we mere annoyances?
"Most frightening is how easily snark is perpetuated by snark bytes—fragmented portions of essays, articles, interviews, taken out of context in order to make the author appear in the worst possible light— those little bonbons of malice favored by The New York Observer, New York magazine, The New York Post. Unfortunately, most readers don’t return to the source to determine what the article in question was striving to say. The snark byte supplants the original article; the author’s intent is reduced to the periodical equivalent of gossip."(Julavits)
Again, to direct this to the matter at hand (remember, it's fair game since Vermeersch linked to this article to damn Wells' and my own procedures), the opposite is overwhelmingly the reality: positive tidbits in an otherwise negative or at least mixed review will be wrenched out of context or predominant assessment in order to boost a book's perceived reception.
"Wood makes people hopping mad, yes, but despite his grumbly excoriations there’s usually room for a dialogue with Woods, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over, i.e., his claims are based on a strongly-held (and felt) belief system, and he’s an intellectual, which means he likes to be forced to defend that belief system."(Julavits)
Good for Woods. And my comment stream is always open. But when Julavits says "dialogue", I take that word seriously, not interpreted as drive-by smears, back-stage whispers as deflected sniping to "you-know-who", glossing over substantive posts or ignoring them altogether, bringing up repeated arguments to points I've already answered and which haven't been properly and directly refuted or even addressed, original thought in the debaters' own words, not cutting-and-pasting portions (sometimes out of context) of some other authority figure in lieu of the debater's own opinion. You want communication? Go for it. But it takes two.
"snark, I suspect, is a scornful, knowing tone frequently employed to mask an actual lack of information about books."(Julavits)
Scornful and knowing. My, my. And the "lack of knowledge".... yes, of course it's lack of knowledge, I suspect, when the author is getting panned, otherwise the review would have been filled with superlatives, but why is it I've never heard an author complain about a positive review if said review is misinformed or poorly written?
"This is because a lot of books are reviewed by people who don’t read books unless they’re reviewing them."(Julavits)
I wish I had a loonie for every modifier this outer of snark has composed. And a lot (including moi) of people read books because we love books, and because we hope to be surprised and delighted by every book we first encounter. But that's like having season's tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs: you hope every game is going to be a win, but you know that's not often going to be the case. You can't celebrate, though, unless you're at the game.
"The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?"(Julavits)
Leaving aside, once again, the repeated ad hominem charge, from Julavits (here at the quote's end) and from others in this internet page-burner, I agree with Sessions here (generally-- again, I haven't read Denby's book)--
"When snarkers do attack, it’s not because they’re purveyors of an angry form of discourse that values cruelty as an end. Rather, it’s a means for expressing defeated idealism, for raving at the absurdity of entrenched institutions that insult our intelligence and sense of fairness."(Sessions)
http://www.patrolmag.com/times/1356/the-art-of-being-nasty
If you want a positive review, read a review I've done of another's book. Ah, but it's not at all about "objectivity" and the "author's always-to-be-respected intent", is it? It's personal. Are those positive reviews similarly deformed, then , too? And if not, why not, since they issue from the same "snarky" mindset? Am I praising them out of insincerity? Is every motive so suspicious to you? And, if so, isn't that rather a joyless, rather a faithless and emotionally tainted and (wait for it) snarky approach to my work?
To be paradoxical for a moment (though the fundamentalists can't seem to hold two opposing views in mind at the same time-- Blake would have found the views ironical), one of many reasons I snark from time to time is that I agree with D H Lawrence's view that 90% of creation is first concerned with tearing down rotten edifices. Egalitarians often miss that part of the natural world, though. "If we welcome every view, respect everyone's view equally, support each others' efforts, we'll all learn and grow together." No. I'm a Nietzschean, here. As to art, it surprises me that any serious artist would take the communal common denominator view. Or is this view just held for public consumption? For oiling the public connections? Well, Vermeersch's and Banks' hypocrisies have now been exposed, put on record. But, unlike Banks, I wouldn't want to speculate on the answer to that last question above. (If Banks ever decides to post a "negative" review on a specific author on his positive-reviews-only site, someone let me know.)
"Besides, I have that three lousy cents burning a hole in my pocket—and I’m eager to place my bet on the latter horse."(Julavits)
The minimun bet in horse racing is $2. Pony up and name names, Julavits.
(More later.)
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=article_julavits
"I don't know what many critics believe when it comes to literature; at worst, I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake. This hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt is, I suspect, a bastard offspring of Orwell’s flea-weighers. I call it Snark...."(Julavits)
The bolded qualifiers shift the emphasis away from unsubstantiated emotional reaction to a hoped-for rarified aura, a virtue self-placed by easy, cherry-picked quotes and anecdotes. She ushers in this line by a fallacious and rather unseemly guise of falsely planed contrasts, the reviewers who fail to emulate Edmund Wilson, James Wood, and Lionel Trilling all made to look feeble by the logical fallacy of the call to authority. But "snark", so-called, is, even by the definition of anti-snarkers David Denby and Julavits, exclusively negative and sarcastic. The two lamentable reviewers currently under the gun from the "Save Canadian Poets From Hurt Feelings" campaign (last one in the pool is the most oppressed!) have, on more than one occasion, championed not only many individuals and many individual books of poetry, but furthermore have championed the rationale behind those positive reviews, and have even spoken in specific poetics of how and why those books made the grade while others fell short.
That's strike one, against just the definition of snark, and how it's made up from vague notions, changeably conducive to one's emotional predilection. To go on, in this vein, with more Julavistas:
"I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications, and not only the The New York Observer, or the The New York Press, the possible laboratories of this disorder."(Julavits)
Now I realize that New Yawkers think their city's the centre of the universe, but has Julavits perused widely-known poetry and the canonical crit issueing from those books' immediate publication, as well as reaction to those (early) books centuries later? Horace, Catullus, Pope, Shakespeare (that canny Bard-- just who was Timon?), Layton, generated proof of the physics law of equal reaction to every action with those authors' critical counterparts.
David Denby (I haven't read his book, so I won't respond to its larger argument) bases his anti-snark views largely on Teh Internets and on pop-culture snipes, but of course Banks and Vermeersch are talking not only of CanLit "culture", in general, but to the specific reviewing style of Zach Wells and of this writer. This is strike two, and is a clear example of another popularly deployed logical fallacy:
a) reviewers these days write a lot of snark (however that's defined-- see strike #1)
b) Palmu and Wells write reviews expressing negative opinions
c) therefore, Palmu and Wells are snarkists
"If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine; but should the writer, who is a pawn in this system"(Julavits)
What system? Julavits has set up her strawperson with detailed cheerleading blurbs, but it has nothing to do with the motivations of her supposedly unfair snarkists. As in:
"who is a pawn in this system, who has negligible say over the design of his book jacket or even his title, who would never be so presumptuous to compare himself to Dickens, should this disdain be delivered unto him?"(Julavits)
I quoted Emily Schultz giving what I thought to be ridiculous claims for Banks' books; that's a reflection on Schultz, not Banks. Of course the author isn't responsible for blurbs, but it's useful to point out (where necessary) the discrepancy between a blurb's specific attributes for the book under review and what the reviewer's experiences of that book were. After all, many a time a reader's first found commentary on what a book might contain is on that very book-flap, and certainly not on what a relatively obscure blogger has said about it.
"(Writers also become pawns of the “call and response” reviewing that occurs between competing publications; Time magazine runs a glowing review, and Newsweek answers with a pan.)"(Julavits)
Ah, yes. Or to tweak the conspiracy just a bit: Internet "warriors" are the hoi polloi, the great unwashed plebs just trying to get a break through (over?) the walls of academe, and the publishing levers they control. (Vermeersch publishes, Banks teaches -- we're just competing for their positions. Isn't that just answering the reviewers' obvious intentions, objectively?)
"Here’s another theory about snark. Maybe snark was a critical attempt to compete, on an entertainment level."(Julavits)[bolding mine]
Objectivity. I love well-researched essays. I have a theory, too. Has Julavits perhaps been given a .... "snarky" review, too? And we can't have entertainment! (And I love the very subtle Queen's put-down-- entertainment level!)
"the giggling, minuscule minority. We also see those movies. Book reviewers who adopt this tone when reviewing literary fiction are about as humorous as cow tippers"(Julavits)
Which is it? For objectively subjective theory-based, emotionally driven disingenuous-linked argument, this is further richness. Are we bitter and angry, or just having some sporting fun? Or both? Or have those on the receiving end of this nebulous term also been by turns bitter and reactively sarcastic?
"as a result, they guarantee a book that might have sold 4,000 copies, will now sell 800. And nobody will read that book, not even the literary types, who are off watching Titanic with a knowing smirk"(Julavits)
Aha, power to the downtrodden reviewer! But Banks would have it that no one listens to us. Again, I'm confused. Are we two-handedly bringing down the House of CanLit, or are we mere annoyances?
"Most frightening is how easily snark is perpetuated by snark bytes—fragmented portions of essays, articles, interviews, taken out of context in order to make the author appear in the worst possible light— those little bonbons of malice favored by The New York Observer, New York magazine, The New York Post. Unfortunately, most readers don’t return to the source to determine what the article in question was striving to say. The snark byte supplants the original article; the author’s intent is reduced to the periodical equivalent of gossip."(Julavits)
Again, to direct this to the matter at hand (remember, it's fair game since Vermeersch linked to this article to damn Wells' and my own procedures), the opposite is overwhelmingly the reality: positive tidbits in an otherwise negative or at least mixed review will be wrenched out of context or predominant assessment in order to boost a book's perceived reception.
"Wood makes people hopping mad, yes, but despite his grumbly excoriations there’s usually room for a dialogue with Woods, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over, i.e., his claims are based on a strongly-held (and felt) belief system, and he’s an intellectual, which means he likes to be forced to defend that belief system."(Julavits)
Good for Woods. And my comment stream is always open. But when Julavits says "dialogue", I take that word seriously, not interpreted as drive-by smears, back-stage whispers as deflected sniping to "you-know-who", glossing over substantive posts or ignoring them altogether, bringing up repeated arguments to points I've already answered and which haven't been properly and directly refuted or even addressed, original thought in the debaters' own words, not cutting-and-pasting portions (sometimes out of context) of some other authority figure in lieu of the debater's own opinion. You want communication? Go for it. But it takes two.
"snark, I suspect, is a scornful, knowing tone frequently employed to mask an actual lack of information about books."(Julavits)
Scornful and knowing. My, my. And the "lack of knowledge".... yes, of course it's lack of knowledge, I suspect, when the author is getting panned, otherwise the review would have been filled with superlatives, but why is it I've never heard an author complain about a positive review if said review is misinformed or poorly written?
"This is because a lot of books are reviewed by people who don’t read books unless they’re reviewing them."(Julavits)
I wish I had a loonie for every modifier this outer of snark has composed. And a lot (including moi) of people read books because we love books, and because we hope to be surprised and delighted by every book we first encounter. But that's like having season's tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs: you hope every game is going to be a win, but you know that's not often going to be the case. You can't celebrate, though, unless you're at the game.
"The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?"(Julavits)
Leaving aside, once again, the repeated ad hominem charge, from Julavits (here at the quote's end) and from others in this internet page-burner, I agree with Sessions here (generally-- again, I haven't read Denby's book)--
"When snarkers do attack, it’s not because they’re purveyors of an angry form of discourse that values cruelty as an end. Rather, it’s a means for expressing defeated idealism, for raving at the absurdity of entrenched institutions that insult our intelligence and sense of fairness."(Sessions)
http://www.patrolmag.com/times/1356/the-art-of-being-nasty
If you want a positive review, read a review I've done of another's book. Ah, but it's not at all about "objectivity" and the "author's always-to-be-respected intent", is it? It's personal. Are those positive reviews similarly deformed, then , too? And if not, why not, since they issue from the same "snarky" mindset? Am I praising them out of insincerity? Is every motive so suspicious to you? And, if so, isn't that rather a joyless, rather a faithless and emotionally tainted and (wait for it) snarky approach to my work?
To be paradoxical for a moment (though the fundamentalists can't seem to hold two opposing views in mind at the same time-- Blake would have found the views ironical), one of many reasons I snark from time to time is that I agree with D H Lawrence's view that 90% of creation is first concerned with tearing down rotten edifices. Egalitarians often miss that part of the natural world, though. "If we welcome every view, respect everyone's view equally, support each others' efforts, we'll all learn and grow together." No. I'm a Nietzschean, here. As to art, it surprises me that any serious artist would take the communal common denominator view. Or is this view just held for public consumption? For oiling the public connections? Well, Vermeersch's and Banks' hypocrisies have now been exposed, put on record. But, unlike Banks, I wouldn't want to speculate on the answer to that last question above. (If Banks ever decides to post a "negative" review on a specific author on his positive-reviews-only site, someone let me know.)
"Besides, I have that three lousy cents burning a hole in my pocket—and I’m eager to place my bet on the latter horse."(Julavits)
The minimun bet in horse racing is $2. Pony up and name names, Julavits.
(More later.)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Chris Banks Switches From Attack to "Content"
I missed this Banksian doodle from last week, but it's no less enertaining than his previous entries.
http://chrisbanksy.blogspot.com/2009/11/william-s-burroughs-from-review-of.html
He links to one of my earlier posts, wherein I chide the author of yellow bitchiness (is it a snark if it's a rearrangement of her preferred persona? After all, she revels in the oh-so-clever throw-it-back-in-yer-face "ironical" self-promotion of her own negativity) for her utter lack of substance in her post on her equally vapid (oops, except for one drive-by snark) contribution in the bookninja post on Packer-Danner, as well as chiding Trailing Clouds Of Glory Banks defending the poets-huddled-in-comment-stream-hovels. This is all so mature, isn't it, "high seriousness" Banks? Please continue; I notice, with increasing pleasure, the gathering tribal solidarity forming, as well. Can you always be accused of aesthetic tribalism, especially now that the writing seminar doors have been closed for the day? (I won't tell Hoaglund, I promise.)
No response at all to that post except for the linked highlight "personal prejudice".
That's it. A two-word response instead of a rebuttal.
Following that, though, as I say in the header, we have a surprising switcheroo! Banks has finally realized that embarrassing ad hominems only work in the schoolyard, and has now re-entered the "debate" with an astounding array of substantive material! Oh, wait .... he's using some other fellow's intellectual dick -- er, actually, Arnold through Burroughs, so I guess it's thrice-removed -- to make his "case". The content?
"Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition."(Banks, or rather, Arnold, as channel-wikipediaed through Banks)
That's it.
Thank you so much. I'd never seen this reviewer's creed before!
Just a subtle hint: I'm not a freshman creative writing seminar student, hanging on your every word so's to make the hoped-for tribal connection a year before my premature poemlets arrive on your writing desk for dissemination. Do you really want to talk about Arnold, and his incredibly complex and contradictory contributions to the literature of reviewing? Is Arnold your boy? Because you set down these three criteria as if ..... oh, I don't know, they were (to use Paul Vermeersch's word) fundamental or something. I'm just trying to follow the bouncing ball, but all I get is eye strain.
As to the Arnoldian precepts you trumpet, I've already dealt with the first two. Please pay attention. If you wish to discuss what I've already said, it helps the "debate" to become a true, give-and-take engagement with one another's material, and from becoming redundant. I'm sure you'd agree, entertainment and clarity and compression beat rounding the roller-derby floor for the hundredth time. (And what does Lemon Hound have to say about the blatant sexism contained in rule #2?!)
Reviewing, reading, writing poetry, life observation are all more simple and more complex than you and Paul Vermeersch seem to have it. And more elegant. (Don't you find it interesting, if not amusing, to read so many of Arnold's denunciatory calls on abstraction, while much of his own prose rolls on like a document missing six senses?). A person, in any of the above four roles, is simultaneously subjective and objective. Neither is ever eliminated, and never can be.
I remember a second-year English course I took on the Romantic poets. The prof handed out two poems, one by Shelley and one by Byron. The former was a demonstration of a subjective mood, the latter of objective assessment. We were given a fair amount of time to read them (all this is in-class, remember). He then asked for a show of hands on how many preferred Shelley's entry. Myself and two or three others put up our hands. Byron got the remaining 20 + votes. The prof then noted that this wasn't a surprise; Shelley's subjective slant was out of style. (Shelley's reputation has vacillated wildly these 200 years.) And if we're informed at all about literary history, we'll see that the objective/subjective see-saw has swung up-and down continually. Wyatt to Sidney to Greville to Milton to the Romantics to the Victorians to the Moderns to the Postmoderns and to the Kitchen Sink. Of course, there are many anomalies, many movements I've purposely missed, many ambivalences, many syntheses. As Chris Banks would appreciate, a Zen Master was asked for the basis on which he gave advice when in satsang: "when a pupil is too extreme one way, I say 'go left, go left!'; when (s)he is too extreme the other way, I say 'go right, go right!' ". Again, elegant (in theory, at least), while being both simple and difficult.
I'd just add that Shelley and Byron, of course, were good friends. And that I love the poetry of both. Most good poets are objective and subjective, available for alternate approaches or closed to certain ones, or to all other takes, and, thusly so, either simultaneously (with multiple meanings in ordered or singled-out diction in the same poem, e.g.) or in different poems. Ah, fundamentalism. And the Arnoldian wrenching of meaning onto a higher plane, making a prosaic two levels instead of the reversed and altered Blakean three-pronged higher third.
Rule #3? Well, Arnold struck Chaucer off the list because of this "failing". Of course, he was wrong in both assessment (so much for "understanding the author's intention") and snobbish belief. Again, a fundamental failure of imagination, a failure to balance opposites in joyous contradistinction.
Damn it, just what is that poet thinking about on line 32? Or to correctly credit Arnold in one of his astute critical notes, paraphrasing: as the complexities build, so too does (or can) the overestimation.
http://chrisbanksy.blogspot.com/2009/11/william-s-burroughs-from-review-of.html
He links to one of my earlier posts, wherein I chide the author of yellow bitchiness (is it a snark if it's a rearrangement of her preferred persona? After all, she revels in the oh-so-clever throw-it-back-in-yer-face "ironical" self-promotion of her own negativity) for her utter lack of substance in her post on her equally vapid (oops, except for one drive-by snark) contribution in the bookninja post on Packer-Danner, as well as chiding Trailing Clouds Of Glory Banks defending the poets-huddled-in-comment-stream-hovels. This is all so mature, isn't it, "high seriousness" Banks? Please continue; I notice, with increasing pleasure, the gathering tribal solidarity forming, as well. Can you always be accused of aesthetic tribalism, especially now that the writing seminar doors have been closed for the day? (I won't tell Hoaglund, I promise.)
No response at all to that post except for the linked highlight "personal prejudice".
That's it. A two-word response instead of a rebuttal.
Following that, though, as I say in the header, we have a surprising switcheroo! Banks has finally realized that embarrassing ad hominems only work in the schoolyard, and has now re-entered the "debate" with an astounding array of substantive material! Oh, wait .... he's using some other fellow's intellectual dick -- er, actually, Arnold through Burroughs, so I guess it's thrice-removed -- to make his "case". The content?
"Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition."(Banks, or rather, Arnold, as channel-wikipediaed through Banks)
That's it.
Thank you so much. I'd never seen this reviewer's creed before!
Just a subtle hint: I'm not a freshman creative writing seminar student, hanging on your every word so's to make the hoped-for tribal connection a year before my premature poemlets arrive on your writing desk for dissemination. Do you really want to talk about Arnold, and his incredibly complex and contradictory contributions to the literature of reviewing? Is Arnold your boy? Because you set down these three criteria as if ..... oh, I don't know, they were (to use Paul Vermeersch's word) fundamental or something. I'm just trying to follow the bouncing ball, but all I get is eye strain.
As to the Arnoldian precepts you trumpet, I've already dealt with the first two. Please pay attention. If you wish to discuss what I've already said, it helps the "debate" to become a true, give-and-take engagement with one another's material, and from becoming redundant. I'm sure you'd agree, entertainment and clarity and compression beat rounding the roller-derby floor for the hundredth time. (And what does Lemon Hound have to say about the blatant sexism contained in rule #2?!)
Reviewing, reading, writing poetry, life observation are all more simple and more complex than you and Paul Vermeersch seem to have it. And more elegant. (Don't you find it interesting, if not amusing, to read so many of Arnold's denunciatory calls on abstraction, while much of his own prose rolls on like a document missing six senses?). A person, in any of the above four roles, is simultaneously subjective and objective. Neither is ever eliminated, and never can be.
I remember a second-year English course I took on the Romantic poets. The prof handed out two poems, one by Shelley and one by Byron. The former was a demonstration of a subjective mood, the latter of objective assessment. We were given a fair amount of time to read them (all this is in-class, remember). He then asked for a show of hands on how many preferred Shelley's entry. Myself and two or three others put up our hands. Byron got the remaining 20 + votes. The prof then noted that this wasn't a surprise; Shelley's subjective slant was out of style. (Shelley's reputation has vacillated wildly these 200 years.) And if we're informed at all about literary history, we'll see that the objective/subjective see-saw has swung up-and down continually. Wyatt to Sidney to Greville to Milton to the Romantics to the Victorians to the Moderns to the Postmoderns and to the Kitchen Sink. Of course, there are many anomalies, many movements I've purposely missed, many ambivalences, many syntheses. As Chris Banks would appreciate, a Zen Master was asked for the basis on which he gave advice when in satsang: "when a pupil is too extreme one way, I say 'go left, go left!'; when (s)he is too extreme the other way, I say 'go right, go right!' ". Again, elegant (in theory, at least), while being both simple and difficult.
I'd just add that Shelley and Byron, of course, were good friends. And that I love the poetry of both. Most good poets are objective and subjective, available for alternate approaches or closed to certain ones, or to all other takes, and, thusly so, either simultaneously (with multiple meanings in ordered or singled-out diction in the same poem, e.g.) or in different poems. Ah, fundamentalism. And the Arnoldian wrenching of meaning onto a higher plane, making a prosaic two levels instead of the reversed and altered Blakean three-pronged higher third.
Rule #3? Well, Arnold struck Chaucer off the list because of this "failing". Of course, he was wrong in both assessment (so much for "understanding the author's intention") and snobbish belief. Again, a fundamental failure of imagination, a failure to balance opposites in joyous contradistinction.
Damn it, just what is that poet thinking about on line 32? Or to correctly credit Arnold in one of his astute critical notes, paraphrasing: as the complexities build, so too does (or can) the overestimation.
Gradations of Snark
Ahhh, if I only had a tenth of the talent of these blurbers. After these quotes, the legacies of these poets told of the effect.
------------------------------------------------------
"A pig rooting among garbage."
--on Walt Whitman
"A blandly inoffensive barns and farms poet, suitable for use in seducing blue-haired old ladies."
--on Ted Kooser
"Pinsky wants to dance with his poems. The problem is, he has a lead ass."
--on Robert Pinsky
"It's hard to say what's worse, his milquetoast attempts at "the uncanny" in his profoundly overrated "crow" poems, or his tepid early nature poems. Brother should have stuck to children's books."
--on Ted Hughes
"Like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep."
--on Alfred Lord Tennyson
"A hack with a tin ear, ....should have been forgotten long ago."
--on Edgar Allan Poe
"A humorless fraud, cold and toady."
--on Seamus Heaney
"The praise she gets for [her poems] is the same kind of praise I give to my undergraduate creative writing students when they make one good word choice in a ten-page story. I cringe every time I read a Dickinson poem."
--on Emily Dickinson
"Keats. Fucking Keats and his fucking Grecian Urn."
--on .... John Keats
"This will never do."
--on William Wordsworth
"Boring conversational lines."
--on Chris Banks
---------------------------------------------------------------------
And to close with a snark so damning, the unfortunate recipient has been expunged from history:
"You small and runny pile of encephalitis. "American Literature is dead." Where'd you get that insight, the LaBrea fucking tar-pits? Keep raving in your forest, pal, but you are a far, far cry from earning any love/cred from us real snarkers. Your own yawn is bored with you. God knows you're not worth the gurney they'll inevitably strap you down on."
Who says reviewers don't have influence?
------------------------------------------------------
"A pig rooting among garbage."
--on Walt Whitman
"A blandly inoffensive barns and farms poet, suitable for use in seducing blue-haired old ladies."
--on Ted Kooser
"Pinsky wants to dance with his poems. The problem is, he has a lead ass."
--on Robert Pinsky
"It's hard to say what's worse, his milquetoast attempts at "the uncanny" in his profoundly overrated "crow" poems, or his tepid early nature poems. Brother should have stuck to children's books."
--on Ted Hughes
"Like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep."
--on Alfred Lord Tennyson
"A hack with a tin ear, ....should have been forgotten long ago."
--on Edgar Allan Poe
"A humorless fraud, cold and toady."
--on Seamus Heaney
"The praise she gets for [her poems] is the same kind of praise I give to my undergraduate creative writing students when they make one good word choice in a ten-page story. I cringe every time I read a Dickinson poem."
--on Emily Dickinson
"Keats. Fucking Keats and his fucking Grecian Urn."
--on .... John Keats
"This will never do."
--on William Wordsworth
"Boring conversational lines."
--on Chris Banks
---------------------------------------------------------------------
And to close with a snark so damning, the unfortunate recipient has been expunged from history:
"You small and runny pile of encephalitis. "American Literature is dead." Where'd you get that insight, the LaBrea fucking tar-pits? Keep raving in your forest, pal, but you are a far, far cry from earning any love/cred from us real snarkers. Your own yawn is bored with you. God knows you're not worth the gurney they'll inevitably strap you down on."
Who says reviewers don't have influence?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Complexity Of Interpretation Is Not Optative Authorial Depth
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-sovereign-ghost-of-Wallace-Stevens-4283
For me, a timely piece on Wallace Stevens by that "King of Snark", William Logan.
(The prefaces here are my own subjective interpretations on the quotes that follow, in mind of the recent discussions on intent, fundamentalism, objectivity, and the reviewer's "job". I realize, and admire, that there are also many other ways to take Logan's words.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Robert Hilles' assessment of Chris Banks' (at the time) just-released Bonfires: "Rarely has a first book been this impressive"; and on the Globe & Mail's take on Tom Wayman, after the recent publication of High Speed Through Shoaling Water: "a contemporary 'Homer' " (he or she wasn't referring to the Simpsons, or to Canadian nationalism):
"It’s easy to underestimate this moment in American letters, when certain boundaries and stock notions about poetry were, in geological terms, erased almost overnight. Between 1909 (Personae) and 1923 (Harmonium), there was a tectonic shift in what a poem had to do to be called a poem."(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the limits of technical antecedents and expectations when faced with a unique voice:
"In short, [Stevens'] poems are so strange, so unlikely, sometimes they don’t seem poems at all."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the fact that spiritual evolution has little, if anything, to do with a poet's worth:
"This is responsive observation coiled around casual racism (the black draftees are perhaps still absurd animals to him—his benevolent feelings seem provoked more by the draft)"(Logan) [italics in the original]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the dangers of making premature cementlike canonical declaratives, pro or anti, -- or on making descriptive "objective" authoritative conclusions -- on recent publications:
"The poems are so peculiar, critics were a while catching up."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On making a strong case for a poet even if he or she has written abysmal poems, or poems from abysmal stances (weak philosophy, in one of Logan's negative-side views of Stevens):
And on using comparisons with other poets appropriately:
"To love Stevens, you have to love his deformities and even his monstrosities, as you do the wretched, self-conscious lines in Whitman."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the forgiveness of those weaknesses in the case of a great poet (or a poet a reader or reviewer thinks has a chance at lasting value):
"The poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities, but without the arterial energies they solicit and unleash, the better poems might be nothing. The license of exaggeration and exorbitance is the guilty evidence of the pressure of imagination elsewhere."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the unimaginative mistakes of later poets issueing from the same approaches from great forbears:
" "When this yokel comes maundering,/ Whetting his hacker” .... (The preposterousness of such lines has licensed a lot of freakish language since.)" (Logan)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the checking of awed mystery that attends heady reviewers even when reviewing a specific poem, the latter reviewer giving it authoritative scope and depth where a (perhaps) stronger case and plaudit could be set down from a more "pedestrian" take on it:
"[Blackmur's] argument is unsatisfying in a number of ways. The poem isn’t nearly so mysterious."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On not confusing the importance, exactitude, and heightened separateness of meaning with guessing the author's intention(s) through an affective fallacy, or through a wrong premise (consider Logan's discussion of the "loge" in this context):
"The astonishing thing is that Blackmur, as close to a genius as American criticism ever produced (excepting only Poe), gave up on meaning so easily"(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On sound (or any other device) when effectively deployed becoming the possible meaning where diction and/or syntax makes meaning difficult:
"No man writes phrases like “fubbed the girandoles” who doesn’t want to be taken as a bit of a dandy, an aesthete in yellow kid-gloves—but, unless he’s also a kook, he has something precise in mind. I’d quarrel with Blackmur that the words Stevens used in Harmonium (“diaphanes,” “pannicles,” “carked,” “ructive,” “cantilene,” “buffo,” “princox,” “funest”) were always the most exact or exacting available, but, even if so, words have an effect beyond their meaning."(Logan)
It's also a difficult topic in poetics. Does the effort justify the end? Each reader or reviewer has to make the call, alone.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've included the following extended passage, because taken as is, or even with the rest of the essay, there are those who'll still see it as "snark". If that's the case, then Logan would be a waffler, or the intellectual equivalent of a manic-depressive, because he loves Stevens as much as most.
"Much of Stevens is tedious, refractory, pompous, or ponderous; even his masterpieces are full of bombast and puffery. As he got older, he fell into blank-verse philosophizing no less like boilerplate than the reams of legal documents that presumably issued from his office. He’s a poet whose words you want to get behind: the language is as much an obstacle as a pleasure. But, when you parse those phrases, when you go to the Palaz of Hoon and come back again, you’re often a little disappointed. The philosophy of his poems, the grand ones as well as the pleasingly trivial, are those of a freshman class in ontology, epistemology, or aesthetics. Stevens had a high opinion of his philosophical gifts—he was prickly and childish when a late lecture was rejected by the Review of Metaphysics. Eliot, who was a trained philosopher and possessed the subtlest mind among the moderns—perhaps the subtlest mind in all American poetry, if you exclude Melville—knew enough to leave the philosophy out, or to bury it deeply."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is my highlight of the piece. I love it. I'm reminded of Stevens' "gloomy grammarians", and I think his wild wordplay was often a purposeful ploy to trip up those academics who pedantically stumbled and puzzled over reconciling wit and nonsense with "deep thots". Logan, though often showing humourous discrepancies between an author's lines and reach, hasn't much of a sense of play. And Stevens may be successfully playing him, too, at times self-satirizing philosophical overreach:
"The critical response to Stevens has itself so often been abstract, so full of critic’s legalese, it has made him more a great cloud of being than a man who at times played with words."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On not trumpeting a solidified "vision", especially for poets contemporary or from the same clique or poetic school, or within a friendly relationship.
"Like Swinburne, like Hart Crane, like Ashbery, Stevens is reduced by explanation."(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the assertion and inevitability of individual taste:
"If I prefer poems more complicated the more their effects are exposed (consider Eliot, or Lowell, or Hill—and think of Shakespeare), that is a preference armed as a prejudice."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a reviewer knowingly contradicting him- or herself if the context justifies it, or even if the reviewer's own mood is temporarily changed (see above: "the poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities...."):
"It’s a pity that you have to wade through a great bog of minor work to get at poems that sharpen the responses of the imagination."(Logan)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On "oh my! more snark":
"The magnificence of Stevens comes at a cost, the same cost we pay for Whitman: logorrhea of an uncharming and embarrassing sort, absurd notions, passages too private with their own pleasure, tone-deafness, lofty ambitions insufficiently grounded, and gouts of gimcrack philosophy. The longer the poems, the more likely they were disfigured—even defeated—by these defects."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the curious fact that I don't see too many Canadian poets of the anecdotal lyric even attempting to review postmodernists:
"Stevens requires the condition of taste merely to begin, because he’s not well served by his weaknesses"(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On humility, when genuine and appropriate:
"But Stevens is so capacious a poet, he has room for my obtuseness."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On evaluative audacity:
"[Stevens] remains one of our great poets."(Logan)
For me, a timely piece on Wallace Stevens by that "King of Snark", William Logan.
(The prefaces here are my own subjective interpretations on the quotes that follow, in mind of the recent discussions on intent, fundamentalism, objectivity, and the reviewer's "job". I realize, and admire, that there are also many other ways to take Logan's words.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Robert Hilles' assessment of Chris Banks' (at the time) just-released Bonfires: "Rarely has a first book been this impressive"; and on the Globe & Mail's take on Tom Wayman, after the recent publication of High Speed Through Shoaling Water: "a contemporary 'Homer' " (he or she wasn't referring to the Simpsons, or to Canadian nationalism):
"It’s easy to underestimate this moment in American letters, when certain boundaries and stock notions about poetry were, in geological terms, erased almost overnight. Between 1909 (Personae) and 1923 (Harmonium), there was a tectonic shift in what a poem had to do to be called a poem."(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the limits of technical antecedents and expectations when faced with a unique voice:
"In short, [Stevens'] poems are so strange, so unlikely, sometimes they don’t seem poems at all."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the fact that spiritual evolution has little, if anything, to do with a poet's worth:
"This is responsive observation coiled around casual racism (the black draftees are perhaps still absurd animals to him—his benevolent feelings seem provoked more by the draft)"(Logan) [italics in the original]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the dangers of making premature cementlike canonical declaratives, pro or anti, -- or on making descriptive "objective" authoritative conclusions -- on recent publications:
"The poems are so peculiar, critics were a while catching up."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On making a strong case for a poet even if he or she has written abysmal poems, or poems from abysmal stances (weak philosophy, in one of Logan's negative-side views of Stevens):
And on using comparisons with other poets appropriately:
"To love Stevens, you have to love his deformities and even his monstrosities, as you do the wretched, self-conscious lines in Whitman."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the forgiveness of those weaknesses in the case of a great poet (or a poet a reader or reviewer thinks has a chance at lasting value):
"The poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities, but without the arterial energies they solicit and unleash, the better poems might be nothing. The license of exaggeration and exorbitance is the guilty evidence of the pressure of imagination elsewhere."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the unimaginative mistakes of later poets issueing from the same approaches from great forbears:
" "When this yokel comes maundering,/ Whetting his hacker” .... (The preposterousness of such lines has licensed a lot of freakish language since.)" (Logan)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the checking of awed mystery that attends heady reviewers even when reviewing a specific poem, the latter reviewer giving it authoritative scope and depth where a (perhaps) stronger case and plaudit could be set down from a more "pedestrian" take on it:
"[Blackmur's] argument is unsatisfying in a number of ways. The poem isn’t nearly so mysterious."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On not confusing the importance, exactitude, and heightened separateness of meaning with guessing the author's intention(s) through an affective fallacy, or through a wrong premise (consider Logan's discussion of the "loge" in this context):
"The astonishing thing is that Blackmur, as close to a genius as American criticism ever produced (excepting only Poe), gave up on meaning so easily"(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On sound (or any other device) when effectively deployed becoming the possible meaning where diction and/or syntax makes meaning difficult:
"No man writes phrases like “fubbed the girandoles” who doesn’t want to be taken as a bit of a dandy, an aesthete in yellow kid-gloves—but, unless he’s also a kook, he has something precise in mind. I’d quarrel with Blackmur that the words Stevens used in Harmonium (“diaphanes,” “pannicles,” “carked,” “ructive,” “cantilene,” “buffo,” “princox,” “funest”) were always the most exact or exacting available, but, even if so, words have an effect beyond their meaning."(Logan)
It's also a difficult topic in poetics. Does the effort justify the end? Each reader or reviewer has to make the call, alone.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've included the following extended passage, because taken as is, or even with the rest of the essay, there are those who'll still see it as "snark". If that's the case, then Logan would be a waffler, or the intellectual equivalent of a manic-depressive, because he loves Stevens as much as most.
"Much of Stevens is tedious, refractory, pompous, or ponderous; even his masterpieces are full of bombast and puffery. As he got older, he fell into blank-verse philosophizing no less like boilerplate than the reams of legal documents that presumably issued from his office. He’s a poet whose words you want to get behind: the language is as much an obstacle as a pleasure. But, when you parse those phrases, when you go to the Palaz of Hoon and come back again, you’re often a little disappointed. The philosophy of his poems, the grand ones as well as the pleasingly trivial, are those of a freshman class in ontology, epistemology, or aesthetics. Stevens had a high opinion of his philosophical gifts—he was prickly and childish when a late lecture was rejected by the Review of Metaphysics. Eliot, who was a trained philosopher and possessed the subtlest mind among the moderns—perhaps the subtlest mind in all American poetry, if you exclude Melville—knew enough to leave the philosophy out, or to bury it deeply."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is my highlight of the piece. I love it. I'm reminded of Stevens' "gloomy grammarians", and I think his wild wordplay was often a purposeful ploy to trip up those academics who pedantically stumbled and puzzled over reconciling wit and nonsense with "deep thots". Logan, though often showing humourous discrepancies between an author's lines and reach, hasn't much of a sense of play. And Stevens may be successfully playing him, too, at times self-satirizing philosophical overreach:
"The critical response to Stevens has itself so often been abstract, so full of critic’s legalese, it has made him more a great cloud of being than a man who at times played with words."(Logan)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On not trumpeting a solidified "vision", especially for poets contemporary or from the same clique or poetic school, or within a friendly relationship.
"Like Swinburne, like Hart Crane, like Ashbery, Stevens is reduced by explanation."(Logan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the assertion and inevitability of individual taste:
"If I prefer poems more complicated the more their effects are exposed (consider Eliot, or Lowell, or Hill—and think of Shakespeare), that is a preference armed as a prejudice."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a reviewer knowingly contradicting him- or herself if the context justifies it, or even if the reviewer's own mood is temporarily changed (see above: "the poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities...."):
"It’s a pity that you have to wade through a great bog of minor work to get at poems that sharpen the responses of the imagination."(Logan)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On "oh my! more snark":
"The magnificence of Stevens comes at a cost, the same cost we pay for Whitman: logorrhea of an uncharming and embarrassing sort, absurd notions, passages too private with their own pleasure, tone-deafness, lofty ambitions insufficiently grounded, and gouts of gimcrack philosophy. The longer the poems, the more likely they were disfigured—even defeated—by these defects."(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the curious fact that I don't see too many Canadian poets of the anecdotal lyric even attempting to review postmodernists:
"Stevens requires the condition of taste merely to begin, because he’s not well served by his weaknesses"(Logan)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On humility, when genuine and appropriate:
"But Stevens is so capacious a poet, he has room for my obtuseness."(Logan)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On evaluative audacity:
"[Stevens] remains one of our great poets."(Logan)
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