If someone recommends a movie to me, I'm certainly going to be influenced by whether or not I've liked other movies that the person recommended to me. And if I read a review of a movie by a known critic, I'm going to feel the same way. I won't go purely by whether the review is well written but ultimately I'll be more influenced by whether I feel the reviewer has steered me right in the past.
The same applies to poetry critics. I'll naturally be more inclined to read poems recommended by a critic who has pointed me in the right direction before.
I was not previously familiar with Salemi, however. And something different was going on with Salemi. I didn't have to know anything about him to register his snide tone and his personal disgust with "nicey nice" attitudes and to associate it with people who rant on about the evils of political correctness, etc. He was very up front about his attitudes, etc. And, in that sense, it was an honest and useful review, because it allowed me to conclude "I might like these poems better than Salemi does because I'm not actually bothered by the complaint he describes." Salemi did, after all, allow that Rhina produced some wonderful poems and exhibits admirable craft in her writing. He just didn't like her subject matter and her attitudes, which he described enough for me to decide that I liked even if he didn't.
The best reviewers of anything, in fact, disclose enough of their reasoning and biase to allow the reader to form a conclusion other than the one the reviewer formed. Sometimes I read a book or movie review that is "negative" but which presents a fair enough description that I can rationally conclude, "I think I'd like this." And so I've sometimes bought a book or seen a movie based on a "bad" review.
|