Two Thoughts on Criticism

Neither my own.  But recently two poets have made comments regarding their thoughts on the purposes of criticism.  The first is John Gallaher on his blog Nothing to Say & Saying It:

A recent series of posts and the resulting comments stream on Johannes Göransson’s blog has gotten me thinking about the role of the critic in “taste-making.” I’ve not come to any great realizations on this topic, but I have decided that absolutely a role of a good critic is taste-making. Ron Silliman’s advocacy for certain poets on his blog. Johannes Göransson’s posts. Those are all a form of taste-making. Whenever I put a poem up from a book here, I’m really wanting people to go out and buy that book, and to value that poet, hopefully, as I value that poet. We’re all just waving flags, trying to get attention for what we think should be paid attention to.

On the Harriet Poetry Foundation blog, Thom Donovan has a related view:

Throughout the past couple years I have had a few different answers to the question of what criticism does. Or rather, what it can do. Criticism, not unlike poetry and art, for me should be an art of the potential that intermixes desire with conscience. Criticism recalls Baruch Spinoza’s basic proposition: “we have not yet determined what a body can do.” By engaging poetry, poetry criticism engages the limits of what the poem as an expression of culture or embodiment can do.

In terms of ‘negative criticism’ (so called), I rarely see the use of it. If it is to dismiss a work of literature/art as unvaluable/irrelevant, don’t we already do this by not attending it, or by not investing our desires and passions in it?

Related statements, but coming to a related point from different angles.  Both Donovan and Gallaher seem to be relating criticism to attention, and the act of paying attention in and of itself being a positive act, thus putting negative criticism in somewhat precarious ground.  I think that both of them make a good argument, and one that as I continue to write reviews and criticism, I am at least opening up to somewhat.  I have not written what amounts to a scathing review anywhere for I think reasons that Donovan and Gallaher both bring up–I would rather ‘invest my passions’ so to speak i.e. time and energy into what I do like.

There is part of me, though, that wonders if by never writing a bad review, so to speak, I might be reducing the power of the positive review.  There is something to the negative criticism in the film world, for instance, that is just part of the greater conversation.  The difficulty making this comparison, though, is that the film review is a bit different from the poetry review.  The film review is necessarily part of a larger conversation, with many people reviewing and discussing and interacting at least statically via publishing about the film.  Not that many books of poetry receive both that amount of attention or that amount of attention in such a condensed period of time.  A book of poetry might eventually rack of 10+ reviews, but they are distributed over the span of a year or more, across a wide range of platforms from blogs to online journals to print journals that are not widely available to, at times, newspapers that typically are not widely read across the nation (the NYTBR does not review poetry very often, and the Washington Post has been ratcheting back their coverage as well).  In a sense, then, whereas the film review or even the fiction review (for at least the semi-mainstream to mainstream fiction) exist in a greater conversation, each poetry review exists in its own self-contained bubble for its own self-contained audience.

With that in mind, the need for negative reviews becomes a little bit less important, I think.  I do not need to ‘balance out’ the overly positive review from some other blog in the same way that a film critic from the LA Times might need to balance out an overly positive review from the NYT.  There is not a review aggregator for poetry reviews like Rotten Tomatoes does for film (though it would be awesome if there were…).  It seems that with film, there are more critics than films, whereas with poetry there are more books than critics.

I think that as long as I am tending towards the generally positive review due to time and energy and passion constraints, then that is a good reason.  If I am writing good reviews because of some deluded fantasy that by writing blanket-positive reviews I am ‘helping’ poetry ‘get attention,’ then I need to reassess my purposes.  I think that my general purpose at the moment is to place the book into some sort of perspective and describe what it is doing, how it works, and why one might read it.  This allows me to avoid the outright positive/negative binary and, ideally at least, present people who read my reviews with a reason why someone would read a book so that the reader can then determine whether that reason matches up with their desires and purposes.

I do like how Donovan ended his article, with a quote from Gilles Deleuze, a favorite of mine:

Such publications embody Gilles Deleuze’s equation of love with the flowering of desire’s productive powers:

“What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials…every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 35)

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