[Richard Wakefield]

Over at Accomplished Members there's quite a discussion of Joseph Salemi's review of Rina Espaillat's book; the review was published at the Expansive Music and Poetry site, I believe.
One accusation is that Salemi slammed the book partly because of WHO wrote it and partly because of what the book ISN'T about; in other words, he wasn't reviewing the verse qua verse. Those accusations might very well be correct. The responses have been in many cases attacks on Salemi, in other words, attacks not on WHAT he wrote but on WHO wrote it -- or, more accurately, attacks not on the accuracy of what he wrote so much as on his supposed limitations or motivations.
The responses in many cases are no less ad hominem than the attackers accuse the original reviewing of being. At the same time, we often like things -- genuinely like them -- partly because of the way we feel about the writer. I suppose that's a pro hominem response.
To get to the point: How much does your opinion of the writer influence your opinion of the work, pro or con: the writer's class or politics, sexual orientation, proximity to you in various senses, whatever. I'm not asking whether these things SHOULD influence your opinion. A secondary question is, Do you find yourself rationalizing your opinion, looking for more or less objective criteria to support it, even when your opinion arose from circumstances that had little to do with those criteria?
Example: If a poem or the poet already has my empathy I'll likely see departures from the established meter as somehow expressive; if not, I'll likely see them as sloppy.
RPW

[Roger Slater]

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.

[bear_music]

Richard,

This bears a lot of thinking about. I had noticed the same thing on the Lunchmeat Guy thread (how's THAT for ad hominem?), but refrained from commenting much. The tendency certainly was to attack him for attacking her, with little attention paid to the validity of his criticisms.

Regarding your question on how much our response to a work is colored by our familiarity with, or sympathy for, its creator, that's a thorny problem of human nature. For sure, a "great" poet can get away with stuff that an unknown can't.

At a more mundane level, my short but frenzied lifetime on this board, to date, is a bit of a case in point. My entrance was greeted with howls of denial from a few regular posters, who insisted that what I was writing was neither metrical or, in one extreme case, even redeemable as poetry. As I have become an established (?) participant in here, the consensus has shifted to the point where the very same sorts of liberties that were derided are now more-or-less accepted as effective.

Is this because people understand what I am trying to do now? Is it because I have "educated" them to other possibilities? Is it because I am better-liked, or better-respected, than before, when nobody knew me? I am danged if I know. I do know that one of our regulars PM'd me and rather plaintively remarked that I seemed to be able to "get away" with stuff that he is ripped to shreds for trying. Is this because I do it better? Or am I allowed more leeway? And if so, why?

In any case, in a broader sense we are always more comfortable with the familiar, and always prone to defend it against "attacks". In the poetry world, there seems to be a lot of promoting of "new" things by attacks against the "established order" — in other words, there's a tendency for adherents to the alternative to engage in attempting to "unseat" the incumbent, rather than seeking a place "equal to".

I'll think on this some more. Am curious what others have to say.

(music)

[Richard Wakefield]

Roger: You make a good argument for honest bias, or frank subjectivity, perhaps. That always risks having the review be more about the reviewer than about the reviewed, but with balance it can not only work but be more entertaining to read as well. And with time we get to know a critic and find that she or he does us a service even when our own taste is very different. Still, I like to be surprised by a critic whose work I thought I knew, just as I like to be surprised by a poet I thought I knew.
Bear: There's another possibility, and that is that good poets, good artists of any kind, teach us to read them. Read a few Dickinson poems and they don't get easier, exactly (in fact if anything they get harder, in some ways), but what seemed at first like infelicities become expressive. I remember hearing an interview with a musicologist in which he was asked which of the Beethoven symphonies caused the most consternation at its premier. I'd have thought it would be the nineth, maybe the fifth, but he said it was the first because no one knew how to listen to it. But learning to listen to a poet requires that we be receptive to being educated, and that means, I believe, approaching the work with openness, maybe with the courage to risk being taken in by trash.
Richard

[Roger Slater]

Richard, your Dickinson example strikes a real chord. Just last weekend I was waxing tedious with a friend, explaining how I loved reading even her "bad" poems because her countless great poems had made me fall in love with her voice, and that often one encounters a few great lines within poems that don't succeed all that well overall, and always one gets to hear someone who can be no one other than Emily Dickinson. My friend, a composer, countered with a similar observation about Mahler.

I also find that knowing ED's great poems provides a gloss on her lesser poems, and vice versa. My "bias" for ED, which is rather pronounced, is thus not a true bias but a passion formed and deepened by familiarity.

I'd agree that in some ways she becomes more difficult the more you read her, but I do recall my first encounters with her (in high school, when I first started reading poetry) were scarcely different from encountering an entirely foreign language, or maybe pages of Chinese ideograms, and now I feel very much at home with her language and its difficulties are more philosophical, not the kind that exclude me from the poems but the kind that bring me deeper within them. She speaks a language that I now understand, though I don't understand everything she says in that language.