On the Power of Positive Poetry-Reviewing (Part I)

{ADDENDUM: In the comments section below this post, I address some of the confusion this post has caused. The most important items are these: First, every review bears the responsibility of telling you exactly why a series of poems is doing important work, and exactly what that work is; second, blurbs and reviews can by no account be confused, for many reasons, but primarily because two absolutely essentially ingredients in the sort of reviews I'm speaking of are a) the reviewer has no substantial personal connection to either the poet or the work under review, and b) the reviewer is selecting work for review out of an enormous archive of submitted and unsubmitted work, rather than being solicited to write on just one book without in any sense comparing it to hundreds and hundreds of others. There are many more/other distinctions drawn in the comments section, below.}

Also, A Plan to Put a Poetry Review Column in Every Media Outlet in America and Bring About a Golden Age of American Poetry

[Find Part II here].

We've heard the case made, again and again, that poetry reviews offering unqualified praise of the books they consider are without merit. Most recently, noted academic Marjorie Perloff observed, with evident disdain, that these days "[f]ew poetry books get reviewed at all, and when they do they are almost always given unqualified praise." So what's the opposing case? Is there any justification for this avalanche of positivism (in both senses of that word)?

Imagine, for a moment, that driving a car is one of the most important things in your life. It's not actually that hard to imagine, as in certain respects it's probably already true for many of us. Now imagine that we live in a world in which -- for whatever reason; say, because the lifespan of cars just dropped dramatically -- purchasing a car is a monthly necessity rather than something you do every five to ten years. Now imagine, finally, that there are 70,000 individual car models to choose from in the United States. Under those circumstances, how much use could or would you make of a prancing, prattling idiot who only told you which cars not to buy, two or three cars at a time? You might well tell such a person, "Look, telling me not to purchase a Ford Flex or a Honda CRV still leaves me with 69,998 car models I know nothing about, and I need and want to buy a car now, so how is this helping me?" And you might well add to that admonishment, "Can't anyone out there help me figure out which cars I should buy?"

There's reason to believe that, in the 1940s and 1950s, 5,000 or fewer poets were regularly publishing their work in the United States. The number of venues in which such work could and did appear was very small; Ashbery has said that when he started publishing it was basically Poetry or nothing. (And while much of the best work of the time was, we now know, appearing in tiny magazines sold only in certain locales, a poet-critic in New York City advising a poet living in Tulsa to read some obscure 125th Street rag entirely inaccessible to Oklahomans only carries us so far.) It's also true that in the 1940s and 1950s literary studies departments were dominated by New Critics, which meant -- in other words -- that literary scholarship was heavily invested in what now would be termed "mainstream" poetries (i.e., poetries whose rhetorical schema lay squarely within the classical lyrical tradition). So if it happened that you were reading Poetry in 1955, and saw in its pages a few "positive" reviews but also some pretty historic takedowns, it was neither a surprise nor a disaster -- as you could pretty well wade through the poetry then being published yourself, and if you couldn't you could still use the parallel discourse happening on college and university campuses to augment your knowledge of the vast middle swath of American poetics. As to the liminal spaces of poetry, those could be talked about to death in the press (not that they were) but without the Internet it hardly would've mattered to you, as you wouldn't have been able to get your hands on their limited-edition press-runs anyway unless you lived within a few blocks of the shabby apartment those hundred copies were issuing from. (Most of which went to friends and family and well-networked Others, anyway.)

Today, there are over 70,000 working poets in America, countless thousands of online and print literary magazines, and no possibility whatsoever that anyone could have a handle on what's out there. Being told what not to read is an increasingly pointless proposition, as "What's actually out there?" has replaced "What are people saying about what's out there?" as the most pressing question on every poetry-reader's lips. The poetry reviews of the 1940s and 1950s were appropriate for their time; not just for the reasons stated above, but also because the close connection then evident between literary studies and working writers -- as this was before "creative writing" would drive a permanent wedge between the two -- meant that poetry reviews in Poetry actually were contributing to the then-extant scholarship on American poetry, creating a unified (if contentious) discourse that had multiple access-points for average poetry-readers.

The poetry reviews of the 2010s are being asked to meet very different demands. For instance:

1. Increasing competition for the dwindling and/or overextended pecuniary resources devoted to American poetry, and the diminishing audience size for individual publishing efforts (simply because there are so many) provides additional incentive for cronyism to replace the sort of "subjective objectivity" normally at the heart of public literary assessment. Consequently, a worthwhile poetry review series has strong policies in place to prevent books being reviewed by friends of the authors assessed.

2. The increasing diversity of American aesthetics and poetics means that poetry-readers' tastes are (likewise) more diversified now than at any other point in American history. Consequently, a worthwhile poetry review series is also one that reviews a large number of books of varying aesthetics and poetics -- the better to reach a panoply of audiences and to speak to myriad tastes and predilections.

3. A good literary critic is one whose real-time access to a wide range of literature is significantly greater than the average reader, thus ensuring that the critic is serving the vital "culling" function most poetry-readers cannot adequately meet themselves due to time, inclination, and monetary constraints. Consequently, a worthwhile poetry review series is one whose submission and eligibility policies are broad enough to ensure that books are being compiled from every available source, not merely selected sources (for instance, as would be the case with, say, a poetry review series which only accepted work from publishers, or only reviewed work published in the last thirty days, or exhibited clear favoritism toward one particular type of press -- independent, university, or trade -- or one particular geographic region, like New York City or California).

4. Given all of the above phenomena, the average poetry reader has less time and capacity to determine what's worth reading than ever before -- not because of a lack of critical faculty (in fact, the ubiquity and range of critical faculties has probably been raised, on average, by the rise of "creative writing" in America) but, as noted already, a lack of time and energy and resources and the impossibility of coming into direct contact with even a fraction of the poetry being published today. Consequently, a worthwhile poetry review series offers advice on what's worth reading and why, and which views the critical function as operating at the level of selection-for-review, rather than at the level of the book (the former methodology being one which implicitly contains the latter in any case). Another reason this development is an important one is that an ever-increasing percentage of poetry-readers are also (often MFAed) poetry-writers, and if there's one thing poets feel qualified to determine under their own steam, it's what they don't like. Most poets are far more invested in finding the next big thing they're going to absolutely fall in love with (for the obvious reasons, but also because most poets I know secretly admit to getting "bored" with poetry faster than a non-poet might) rather than rehashing -- or butting heads over -- their personal tastes and distastes.

5. Given the hundred-year process of specialization and marginalization that American poetry has undergone, a worthwhile poetry review series is also one that makes a conscious effort to reach the broadest possible audience. We have more resources at our fingertips now than ever before to broadcast any message across the widest possible spectrum of listeners, so there's no excuse any longer for poetry -- or poetry criticism -- to self-ghettoize in its selection of which media and media outlets to employ.

I can appreciate the wariness with which one naturally approaches any form of poetry criticism whose economy of scale is at the level of the archive rather than the level of collection -- even if it's this sort of attention to "the archive" that distinguishes today's most exciting and well-received avant-garde movements and first principles. Still, we historically have imagined critics as ornery so-and-sos, and not spirited, experienced, (possibly) trained or educated enthusiasts who've simply done so much reading of contemporary poetry (helped along by superlative access to recent works in the genre) that they might well be able to start winnowing down those 70,000 contemporary poets to an entirely non-exhaustive yet still more manageable list of (say) sixty or seventy per year. If there's one thing we've learned from macroanalytical criticism like Franco Moretti's -- an Italian scholar who imports quantitative methods from the social sciences to analyze literary phenomena on a historical spectrum (rather than entrenching, instead, the New Criticism-inflected obsession with the [single] book) -- it's that certain data, such as the number of practicing poets, the number of presses and magazines, the number of graduate creative writing programs, even the number of scholarly dissertations written on generally "mainstream" poets today as compared to 1945, is absolutely essential to deductively acknowledging localized phenomena. With the literary studies sector of the academy now broadly retreating into consideration of only a very small number of avant-garde movements, poets and other poetry-readers are left without any bona fide opportunity to receive assistance in culling down their reading lists even a bit. If today's poetry critics choose to indulge their egos rather than serve their communities -- and make no mistake about it, it's far more satisfying (and far more consistent with the native temperament of the poet-critic) to skewer a colleague's work -- today's poetry enthusiasts will not be better-served, but worse.

But there's one other aspect of poetry-reviewing that hasn't yet been noted: It's almost entirely online, now. Even print publications are publishing their reviews largely or exclusively online.

And here's another (related) thing: America now has the largest population of aspiring poets and writers willing to do poetry-related stuff for free -- witness the flowering of new small presses, poetry-in-the-schools volunteer programs, state-prison poetry workshops, and so on, many of which are staffed by MFA students who've learned through their programs that poetry is as much a community as an art-form (something the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation also believed) -- which means that America now has the largest population of potential poet-critics in its history. (Because these days poetry-reviewing is hardly ever paid for, and those who insist on payment either don't review for long or else receive mail addressed to "William Logan").

And here's one final (also related) thing: Most media outlets are now online, and are desperate for content. So someone tell me, why aren't thousands and thousands of MFA graduates querying the San Jose Mercury News, the Houston Chronicle, the Arizona Republic, the Tampa Bay Times, or the Detroit Free Press offering to write, for free, an online poetry review column for these websites? Any of those media outlets would, if they ran a poetry review series, immediately become one of the most visible media outlets in the nation to consider contemporary poetry on a regular basis -- as right now their competition is largely comprised of well-intended but variously obscure entities like Bookslut, Coldfront, Ron Slate's personal blog, and several even smaller venues. So what does the editor of the Detroit Free Press have to lose if a terminal-degree-holding MFA graduate with a few literary publications under her belt says to herself, "Hey, I haven't yet figured out what to 'do' with my MFA, and I'm still working on becoming the best poet I can be, but in the meantime why don't I give back to my community by bringing writing about contemporary poetry to an audience of millions? I have the time, the love of poetry, and the ready access to contemporary works, so why not?" The worst the editor of the Detroit Free Press says to that poet is "no." Well, so what if she does? Our hypothetical MFA graduate just moves on to the 3,000 other newspapers in the U.S. which would constitute more visible venues for poetry criticism than the ones we presently have.

And if even a handful of MFA graduates take up this call -- which taking-up, need I point out, would benefit them as much as it does their community and the poets they advance in their archive-attendant criticism -- suddenly contemporary American poetry might just have its first Golden Age. Not too shabby.