[Richard Wakefield]

Over at the Ask the Poet forum we've been commenting on Logan's review of Davis's new book. It seems to me that an important question lurking in the background is, "What is criticism for?" Along the same lines are the questions, "What does the critic legitimately hope to accomplish?" and "What do readers go to criticism for?"
We've talked about these in the past, I know, but in my twenty or so years of writing criticism (and many more of reading it), although I've come up with working answers, the questions remain very much alive.
I'm not interested in facile, cynical answers. Let's assume that criticism plays a useful role, or at least that it can.
For my part, I try first to get readers closer to poems that are worth getting close to. In the process, often as not, I find myself getting closer to them as well.
RPW

[Carl Sundell]

"I'm not interested in facile, cynical answers. Let's assume that criticism plays a useful role, or at least that it can."

No doubt it does. The critic's role ideally is to praise and help preserve the work of the good or promising artist, and to discourage and bury the work of the poor artist. When critics go sadly wrong in their judgment, they can hardly bury a good artist and are more likely to bury themselves. However, they can make it harder for the innovative artist to be noticed if he or she is swimming against the stream. Usually, though, the better critics keep the inferior ones in line, since the inferior ones are lackeys for the most part and few people pay attention to them.

I don't thinks critics can teach artists much of anything, since most of them do not practice the art they judge. But by their commentaries they are able to bring the artists to reflect more intelligently about their work, which may tend without commentary to bog down in subjective solipsism. I do not know who tend to be the better critics, the ones who do it for a living, or the fellow artists commenting on each other's work. There can be plenty of bias to go around, and I suppose jealousy can be a factor when artists are commenting on each other's work. Could be a crap shoot.

I know you don't like facile, cynical answers, but here is one from Twain that I just couldn't resist:

"The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it."
- Notebook, 1904

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Well, getting away from facile, cynical answers takes away a lot of the fun, but here goes.

From what I've seen, critics fall into three categories: peacocks, messiahs and fans. This has no bearing on their writing ability or intelligence, though of course it's nice when they write well and have incisive comments.

Peacocks are into the concept of the critic as a star. The scream, they shriek, they show their colors, if on television they parade around in flamboyant outfits, and while they may provide some actual information, the main thing they're concerned with is making themselves look clever and entertaining the audience. Very often they do this quite well, though often at the expense of honesty.

Messiahs are most often found in accademic settings, but can be found everywhere. They have a particular axe to grind--usually some political or social agenda, but occasionally the championing of a particular literary form against all others. The standards of whether anything is worthy or not depends on how well it matches their pet belief and lets them preach about it. Sometimes they can be very insightful, usually when criticizing something created by someone who subscribes to the same or very similar beliefs, but they are worse than useless for genres or forms outside of it. (A particular subtype of the Messiah is the Prophet, who finds a particular creator of art, usually dead, then criticize any and all for not being like The Master, unless someone tries to immitate The Master and gets too close, in which case this person is the Anti-Christ and must be destroyed.)

Fans know the work they're familiar with and love it. They are usually narrowly focused on a particular genre or form, but very knowledgable in it. They review and critique work within their genre and nothing outside of it, freely admitting they are not the authority on other subjects, unless they are a fan of more than one genre. Their comments are very useful for people familiar with the genre or form, and often incomprehensible to those who are not. Not being generalists, fans are not generally employed by large media or accademic institutions or publications, but are sometimes carried by small specialty publications.


Kevin

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited June 13, 2002).]

[Roger Slater]

My favorite kind of criticism is that which stems from an admiration of the work in question, and which helps the similarly admiring reader understand what makes the work admirable. I have little interest in a critic who wants to introduce me to a poet's work only to tell me that the work isn't good.

As a writer, I also look for critics who can explain someone's work in terms that cause me to reflect on my own efforts and give me some insight into the making of a fine poem.

What I most assuredly do not look for is the kind of criticism that we discussed on the Dick Davis thread, the kind that puts the critic to the forefront and asks us all to laugh complicitiously with the critic's arch wit and clever put-downs. One-liners have absolutely nothing to teach me about the poet or poem under discussion. "I've seen better poems than that on the bathroom wall of a home for retarded dyslexics" doesn't cut it with me because it doesn't illuminate anything about the poet's craft other than the fact that the critic saw in it the raw material to show off his own questionable cleverness.

In a related sort of complaint, I hate when a critic acts as though the poet is doing something wrong or immoral or reprehensible just for writing poems that the reviewer doesn't like. Though I may (and do) find 95% of Jorie Graham unreadable, for example, and I might say so very clearly in a review that would be far from positive, I would never suggest that she is not seriously engaged in an ambitious attempt to write the kind of poems that she is interested in writing. In effect, she is "one of us" in the sense that we are all trying our best to get some worthwhile poems onto the page. I hate when critics forget such things and direct their barbs at the serious poet rather than the seriously flawed poems she produces.

Hell, I don't even fault an unserious poet like Jewel for doing what she does. The poems she writes are rather awful, of course, and it's easy to get resentful that she sold 2 million copies of her book (!), but I'm pretty sure she never meant to hurt anybody and that her desire to write and publish poetry is as admirable as mine.

[Carl Sundell]

"What I most assuredly do not look for is the kind of criticism that we discussed on the Dick Davis thread, the kind that puts the critic to the forefront and asks us all to laugh complicitiously with the critic's arch wit and clever put-downs."

Yes, Roger, and we've seen plenty of that especially, I think, during the last couple of generations. But it must have been since the beginning of art that a critic's itch is to put himself above the artist. And perhaps it was that itch that provoked Goethe to comment somewhere that no statue was ever raised to a critic.

[MacArthur]

What should critics do?
I can tell you what I wish they'd do-- a kind of Siskel and Ebert thing: thumbs up, thumbs down. And of course, that's never "fair". Except that it is-- it's useful and necessary and therefore fair.
Logan is one of a handful of critics who seriously attempt to do this. Most poetry criticisms are puff-pieces, book-promos and favors for friends....entirely dishonest and misleading.

Logan's specialty is evaluating mature poets: the "third book". Most novelists and poets you've ever heard of are on that third book (or fifteenth). They wrote a first book considered promising...or you wouldn't have heard of them.

Usually they stumble along the way, and that's forgiveable.

Eventually, they are publishing work that's apt to be as good as anything they will ever write. The time has arrived for assessment.

Of course, most don't measure up. Logan himself didn't, and he's quick to spot this in others.
And he's usually right.
And someone has to say this.

[Roger Slater]

Mac, I never said that a critic shouldn't point out the negatives. I only meant to say that a critic shouldn't attack the poet with barbs and mean-spirited one-liners. I want to read criticism, not insults, and I want a review to give me a sense of the book itself and not so much a sense of how witty the reviewer is. Saying that a given stanza in Dick's book sounds like it might have been written by "Frost's deaf yardman" is simply lame and self-aggrandizing (not to mention the fact that Mr. Ward has taught us all, i.e., that the deaf can have an excellent ear for meter).

[Len Krisak]

Did Frost ever have a deaf yardman?

[MacArthur]

Logan's reviews aren't harsh. Not by any absolute standard. They only seem so because they practically stand alone in being negative reviews of living published authors.

I spent much of the afternoon cruising everything I could find on the net. All I could think was: "If you're crying about this, you're a crybaby."

Almost the only review I thought was unfair was the Sharon Olds, whom he genuinely seems to dislike. Hell the Jorie Grahm review wasn't harsh-- it was negative, but not mean or belittling. I can easily imagine someone attracted to that sort of thing being inspired to check out her work.

Neither the Dick Davies or Wilbur review was unreasonable. He just didn't like the books...and he's prob'ly right. (Of course you love the latest Wilbur-- especially 'cause it's probably his last. I love the weaker work of my favorite authors too...who doesn't?)

Dana Gioia said the besetting sin of post-war American poetry is the absence of candid reviews. He's right: statistically, 95% of published reviews are positive. If it were two-thirds you might think that was appropriate...but 95%? You've gotta be kidding!

Gioia doesn't take any big chances either. His negative review is Robert Bly-- famously the man with no friends...not exactly an act of daring!

In the small world of the American Literary Game living published authors are essentially off-limits, taboo and untouchable. Logan breaks the rules-- that's all there is to it.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

The word "critic" descends from the Greek verb krinein: to separate, judge.

When a reviewer merely states an opinion without supplying supporting evidence or an exploration of his reasons for having that opinion, we nonetheless may know that both, separation (of some aspects of the poem, poetry, or poet, by and in this person's mind) and judgment have occurred. That person is indeed a critic. However, if these separations are not also displayed, but only the result of these separations is displayed--i.e., quick and vague one-liners, Logan's vague "Frost's deaf yardman"--then we can rightly say, imo, that the communication being offered to us by the critic is not necessarily criticism but might only be a result of some anterior critical assessment. In this case, the communication of a summary judgment can be assumed to be the result of criticism coming from a critic, but when separated from the critic & the anterior critical process, it will not necessarily be a criticism itself. Certainly, this is only one possible definition of "criticism," but it is the most useful, imo.

Communication being what it is--always partial--what a critic writes...will communicate different things to different people. Someone quite familiar with a critic's aesthetics and cant might possibly be already familiar with that critic's reasoning processes, so even summary judgments might convey discernments (those "separations") to a particular reader. I might think that Logan's pronouncements cannot be called "criticisms," but someone sufficiently familiar with Logan's cognitive processes and cant would be right in calling his pronouncements "criticism."

Of course, a critic who writes for an unfamiliar audience ought to take these things into consideration, imo. If we are only writing for our closest peers or for our immediate acquaintances, a simple "I like the fractal image structure" will communicate a valid criticism if both critic and poet have a sufficiently long history of correspondence or of mutual appreciations (i.e., if they are sufficiently familiar with each other's work and aesthetics.) Someone who posts reviews for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with the reviewer cannot hope to communicate criticisms so easily. In the case of online workshops, responding to strangers with vague one-liners is not likely to be valid criticism, imo, but only spurious opinion at best and at worst an incitement to brawl--maybe such a critic will get lucky, post such a review to a lurker or someone already sufficiently aware of that critic's aesthetic stance, but why assume familiarity?

What should "criticism" do? What can criticism do? I enjoy seeing things from a fresh perspective, learning new ways of looking at a piece of writing. I can easily exhaust myself (financially and mentally) by reading anything and everything just to find one or a few gems which might be hidden among all the crap being published. If I have found a critic I trust, I am quite loyal and require less explanation in their criticisms; but I also don't wish to limit myself to one or two critics. The search for a useful critic is even more important than the loyalty I will give to any one other critic. In fact, the degree of familiarity is so important to such loyalty, it also has a tendency to promote stagnation and limit my choices if I give in to a desire for familiarity over a desire for new experiences; and, I can only experience fresh critical perspectives from unfamiliar critics. But first, they must justify their pronouncements--either I will love their own creative endeavors; or I will love the way they "see" the works which they are reviewing (they will display their discernments); or possibly by taking a chance and reading what they have reviewed, I will begin to understand their critical authority; or some combination of these things.

My feelings concerning criticism on workshop sites such as this site...are the same. Whether the criticism is used for broadening my reading habits or my writing habits seems to make no difference--or narrowing those habits, too, I suppose.

Curtis.