Poetry Reviews - should they be nice or nasty?

Via Bill Herbert, a very interesting post on the Magma Poetry Blog about the question of whether poetry reviews are becoming too positive.


Kent Johnson, an American writer, suggests that one thing restricting the publication of negative reviews is the fact that writing them 'constitutes a potential hazard to the position and advancement of the poet-reviewer.' Which sort of relates to what I said below in the Ruth Padel post : any poet wanting to promote their work may well have to do a range of distasteful things to advance their career, one of which may well be writing, in Johnson's words, 'fawning, toadyish criticism' of more established poets in order to get them to champion your work. Private Eye's cantankerous literary column, Books and Bookmen, is pretty good at spotting this when more well-known literary figures do it, and labels the practice logrolling .


Stephen Burt proposes a different reason for the dearth of negative reviews of poetry: 'it's not worth writing a negative review of a book which will sink without trace, as most poetry books do.' And he has a point. Most poetry books don't cause a huge ripple in the pond of literature. The only way for most of us to make even a modest impact is to act collectively - to network, to publicise each other, to advocate for poetry in general, to big each other up, etc etc. I don't consider this all that distasteful: questions of ethics tend to go out of the window when you and your colleagues are desperately hauling each other up onto a sinking raft, after all.


However, I think negative reviewing is justified in some circumstances, and once again Burt puts his finger on it perfectly:


'Negative reviews in poetry these days only seem worthwhile when they attack (a) examples of bad trends or (b) people who are very famous and don't deserve it.'


This is why negative reviews are sometimes necessary and justified, not just within poetry but beyond: we live in a world that is rapidly turning into a populist monoculture. Cultural product is more and more in the hands of massive, profit-seeking corporations ran by the kind of people who don't shiver when they yoke together the words 'cultural' and 'product'.

Publishers used to get by on profits of two or three per cent. To a corporate monolith like Bertelsmann, the company which owns Random House, that's not acceptable. Ten per cent profits and then, maybe we're in business. But once you have to make that kind of profit minimum, you can't spare the time or resources to service smaller niche markets like literary fiction, serious non-fiction, or poetry. So what do you do? You chase the lowest common denominator. That's why, in the last few years, we've witnessed an explosion of misery memoirs, celebrity chef books, TV tie-ins, and ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies and fiction.

Why is this important to poetry? After all, the major British poetry companies, Carcanet , Bloodaxe and Faber are independents, untainted by all this nonsense. Well, here's Adam's nightmare scenario. Those gigantic corporations I talked about are aggressive. They're always seeking out new markets. Sooner or later, they're going to start publishing poetry. But not the kind of poetry we've got used to. Not the kind of stuff that would pass muster at even the smallest of small presses. It'll be trite. It'll be sentimental. It will rhyme - obviously. It'll use simplistic language and structures without any of the linguistic and formal joie de vivre which more sophisticated poetry contains. It will actually be worse than Pam Ayres, and it will probably claim to have been written by Katie Price.

And it will sell bucketloads. You won't be able to get away from it. It'll be in supermarkets, it'll be advertised on television and massive posters on the underground, books of it with giant 'HALF PRICE!' stickers plastered over their covers will practically mug you as you come into your local chain bookstore. And I will sell it to you, because for all my pretension, when I'm at work I have the moral and aesthetic scruples of a ten-quid rentboy. But inside, I'll hate myself for it, and I'll have to watch as the big three indies and the smaller regional presses in the poetry section get forced out and it turns into just another colony of the empire of CelebLit (TM).

And I'd really rather not do that, thank you - which is where negative reviewing comes in. Because if we're going to resist the Mcdonaldisation of poetry, we're not just going to have to fight off the intrusion of the multinationals, we're also going to have to police ourselves. We're going to have to hold each other to the highest standards and ensure that we can justify any move we make artistically, rather than just on grounds of profit.

And yes, I know this means that I'm going to have to be held to the same kind of account. I accept that. And if you don't think I've made the right decision somewhere in my work? Fair enough. Say so. And if I think you've got a point, then I'll think about it and I'll try to change and hopefully I'll get better. And if I don't think you've got a point, I'll think about how I can prove it with my work and hopefully I'll get better. And if we all think about this, then maybe we'll all get better, and we can create a poetry scene strong enough and vibrant enough that it can either effectively see off the challenge of the multinationals, or at least create a good enough alternative space in which to survive when they do come.

And now for something completely predictable...

Unsuprisingly, this is what happens when you put a mentally unstable person in a situation in which she's subject, publicly, to an incredible amount of stress .

I'd write more, but I'm at work today for the first time in a week, so breakfast would be a good idea. Instead, read what The Angry Mob had to say about the SuBo phenomenon weeks ago here and here .

Whatever you say Jack, you're (far from being) the master race...

So I went to visit my folks today and, on the way out, discovered some twerp had shoved a BNP Euro Election leaflet through their door. There hadn't been one there when I arrived, so I assume some of the Aryan race's finest footsoldiers must have came up and posted it and then, for some reason, decided not to knock on the door and do some actual canvassing like, you know, a real political party. Now, why wouldn't they want to risk having someone open the door, I wonder?

Yes, yes, I know, because I would have ripped their balls off and made them eat them. But they didn't know I was in. They definitely knew there were some people in - I could hear the noise of the Huddersfield/Castleford game from the bottom of the path. But they couldn't have seen me from the window. So why else would they be afraid to debate these issues they believe in so strongly with a pair of ordinary voters?

Because, of course, the BNP are not a legitimate political party at all, but a bunch of racist losers who fear argument with the public because they know, in the twisted, shrivelled little sphincters they call hearts, that it's the quickest way for them to be exposed as the jokers they are.

Here's an impassioned polemic from Anton vowl of The enemies of reason , explaining exactly why we should all make sure this week that we use our vote, and our powers of persuading other people to change their votes, to ensure that the Boneheaded Nazi Perverts don't get a toehold in the European parliament.

And, lest you think all this stuff about the BNP being scum and bigots is just typical pinko-lefty bias from members of the liberal elite, check out this report in the Observer newspaper , in which the distasteful little creeps are condemned out of their own drooling mouths. I particularly like the stuff one of them said about the death of David Cameron's son. Classy, that.

Mail in 'decent piece of journalism' shock

As I think I may have mentioned once or twice, I work in a bookshop. I started working there with the innocent delusion that I would be serving people who, like myself, enjoyed good writing on a variety of intelligent topics. I did find myself doing that, sometimes - but more often than not I found I was providing people with some pretty questionable material: lurid true crime books about dysfunctional serial killers or thuggish cockernee gangsters, self-help books that seem to me to be patent charlatanry, and a bewildering array of porn. But as much as I find these things personally dislikable, I respect people's desire to buy them. It's their business, and they deserve to be treated with the respect accorded to any other customer.

There's only one thing I hate selling to people, and that's Britain's most hysterically right-wing newspaper, the Daily Mail .

I hate selling it to people because an awful lot of those who read it seem intelligent, personable and respectable. But they're buying a paper which, far too often, offers succour to foaming-at-the-mouth bigots like Richard Littlejohn . I feel the way I imagine Gillian Mckeith feels when she sees someone eating a cheeseburger, or Richard Dawkins when he walks past people going to church. I want to slap them about the face, grab their shoulders and shout 'look! Stop doing this to yourself! Read the Guardian! Yes, it's left-wing liberal pinko crap but it won't make you so angry! You will actually live longer if you read it, because you won't be flooding your body with stress hormones when reading badly-written crap !'

None of my business, of course: people have a right to read what they want to. I just wish the paper they read would actually do some decent reporting more often, instead of lazy, bigoted churnalism .

What's that? They have? Well, I'll be darned...

Foyle Young Poets

Via Bea Colley, a video for the Foyle Young Poets competition. Closing date 31st July 2009.

HMV = FAIL

I had planned to use this entry to review the new Tori Amos album, Anormally Attracted to Sin. However, neither the Metro Centre nor the Newcastle branch of the HegemonicMemeVendor had a copy of the deluxe edition, so I'm going to have to try and get it elsewhere. Amazon, probably. Hang on, what? Amazon don't have it either?

I don't believe this. The first time something I want to buy actually lives up to its 'limited edition' label is also the first time I decide to wait until after payday to buy the damn record. Oh well, eff it, iTunes it is then.

I remember when we used to have more than one big record shop, dammit.

Of Smears and Sestinas: thoughts on the Ruth Padel thing

I was away in York when the news broke that Ruth Padel appears to have smeared Derek Walcott in the course of her campaign for the Oxford poetry professorship. At the time I was reading Chris Hamilton-Emery's excellent 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, which I bought out of a combination of enlightened self-interest and a desire to support the Salt publishing appeal . Chris's book is wise, funny, and often charmingly cynical about the business aspects of poetry. It is, as its title suggests, a book about marketing poetry rather than how to write it, though it does often make the point that unless you're writing decent poetry in the first place you won't be able to market it.

Again and again Chris points out that marketing poetry is not a business for delicate flowers. Publicising your self and your work is hard work, easily as hard as writing, and, at times, you will probably do things in the name of getting your work out there that make it hard to look at yourself in the mirror. You will have to be nice to people whose faces you find eminently punchable. You will have to fight the fear that you are making a tit of yourself while appearing on local or national media. You will have to hustle for awards, cozy up to the right people, navigate a careful course between rival schools of poetics with all the skill and sprezzatura of a renaissance courtier, and generally prostitute your talent all over the shop. Thus do beauty and wisdom go as a whore in the night of the world, and all that.

We all do this, poets. Indeed, all writers do it to a greater or lesser extent. And most of us, in our heart of hearts, feel uncomfortable about it. We shouldn't have to do it. The work should speak for itself. Absolutely! In a perfect world it would. But in a perfect world the economy would work, George Bush would never have been President, John Ashbery would consistently outsell Pam Ayres, and Shelton Benjamin would be the WWE Champion. This is, demonstrably, an imperfect world, and as such if any of us want people to read what we write, then we have to hustle for it.

And we do, because we believe in what we write. We believe it can be good for people. We believe it can do some good in the world. We believe we advance a worldview which deserves to be presented. We believe that a tiny bit of beauty can make life in an imperfect world more bearable, or that by raging against the very imperfection of that world we can give voice to the dissatisfaction of those who lack our expressive gifts. Whatever: we believe that our writing has value, and so we suck it up and do things we otherwise wouldn't normally consider doing.

What I'm saying is, I find it all too easy to see how Ruth Padel convinced herself she was doing the right thing when she did what she did. Her poetry has value; it deserves a wider readership; getting the Oxford poetry professorship would give it a wider readership. It isn't a long jump from there to the assumption that she therefore deserved the professorship itself, and was justified in doing whatever she had to to get it. And if she had to smear - well, let's not say 'smear.' That's an ugly word. And it wasn't really - from a certain point of view - what she was doing. All she did was mention that Derek Walcott had been accused of sexual harassment. Didn't say he had sexually harassed anyone, just that he was alleged to have done. And, well, what if he had? If he had then, in a sense, he didn't deserve the professorship. In a sense, leaking the allegations was the right thing to do...

This is, of course, deeply flawed reasoning, and I've no idea if what went on in Padel's head really followed exactly this line of argument. But there must have been a flaw somewhere, because she failed to realise one thing: that while taking the action she did would have an impact on her poetry, that impact would be entirely negative. Thanks to her actions, Ruth Padel's name is known to a wider audience than ever before, and so is Derek Walcott's. But what are they now known for, to that wider audience? Ruth Padel is famous for being so desperate to win a university job that she smeared a rival in the press; and Walcott is now famous as the poet who was accused (and we all know what accused means, don't we, Mail readers?) of sexual harassment. Epic, epic fail.

So what does that mean for us - the slogging poets and writers who will probably never reach the dizzying heights commanded by Walcott and Padel? What does it mean, in fact, for writers who are on the same level? I don't know, but I can say what I think it means. I think it means that, as much as we believe in our work, as much as we believe it deserves to be out there, and as much as we use that belief to motivate ourselves to do things we otherwise find abhorrent, we should be wary. Because most of those things are only abhorrent on a small scale: they're embarassing, they're uncomfortable, they're a bit iffy, morally, but basically okay. And most of those things do help promote our work. And that's basically okay. But sometimes, when we've done a few of those things which are a little bit naughty but not actually bad, and which do help our work, we lose sight of when an option presented to us actually is bad, tremendously so, and which doesn't just harm the perceptions of our work, but that of everyone who works in our field. Maybe poets aren't as generally hated as politicians at the moment, but I'm fairly sure that telling anyone you're a poet this week is going to get you a lot of knowing smirks, and not just for the usual reasons.

So get out. Hustle. Promote your work. But be careful of what you do to do that. Because it isn't just the world that isn't perfect. We aren't, either.

Oh, and do go and buy a book to help Salt publishing. They publish work by good people, and as far as I know have never either smeared or sexually harrassed anyone, so they deserve your support. And you don't even have to scroll back up the page for the link, because I've reproduced it right here. How's that for convenient?