Oh, Ron!

We felt that this comment deserved special attention. If we can dish it, we can take it, right?
(this is a comment on our last post)

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Ronald Says: June 18, 2009 at 4:38 pm e

Based on the content and quality of the Canda Verses themselves, I have only one question for you.

Who the hell do you think you are?

This sort of writing and review reads uneducated and personally unreflective. I couldn’t imagine even my freshmen level poetry students thinking they could get away with producing this. You are making a bad name for yourselves.
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Ad Hominem Ron teaches poetry at the college level somewhere, it would seem, but we don’t know where because he didn’t deign to tell us. Also, Ronald gave his email address as notgivingyoumyemail@email.com, which isn’t terribly creative, but it does prevent us from selling his actual addy to Nigerian princes.*  Ah well.

Okay, so who the hell do I think I am? Since I (Andrew) wrote the review that piqued Ron’s ire, I’ll tackle this. I was a National Merit Scholar who received a full scholarship, including room and board, to a private university. While there, I was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society during my junior year. I’ve held all kinds of jobs, from roofing to writing for a major international tour operator. My GRE scores were in the 99.9+ percentile. In August I’ll be heading to a top creative writing program, having been awarded a fellowship. Tacky as listing all of that was, I hope I’ve made the point that you, Ron, aren’t operating leagues beyond my intellectual level — just so we’re clear on that.

Now, as to the Canda Verses, you seem to have misunderstood its nature and purpose entirely. They aren’t finished pieces by any means, which is explained on the About the Canda Verses page. A lot of it isn’t even poetry — it’s prose or observations from life. Additionally, all of that material is FREE. We don’t expect payment or even kudos for the project, which, by the way, has helped various writers by offering interesting ideas and phrasings that they are free to take and reshape as they please (see the creative commons license). It’s a sounding board for ideas, and while they aren’t all gems, I find it a little disingenuous to say that nothing on the site is as good as what your freshmen produce. I mean really, Ron, come on.

“I couldn’t imagine even my freshmen [sic] level poetry students thinking they could get away with producing this.”

Well of course your students couldn’t “get away with” an honest analysis based on their native tastes in your class. Besides, the work of a freshman should be explication, but that is simply not what this is. This is criticism. And, to paraphrase A.E. Stallings, any criticism that fails to come out and say “I like this because” or “I find this distasteful because” is either vacuous or dishonest. The vast majority of contemporary criticism falls into that category, so I try to express what I do and don’t like and why. What few readers we have know for certain that we’re laying it out for them plainly, even at the express danger of “making a bad name for [ourselves].” By the way, that kind of obnoxious threat is cited by Dana Gioia as one of the reasons why the art of criticizing poetry is in such dispiriting condition these days. Everyone is so afraid of losing a publishing or academic connection that the range of assessment has been reduced to a scale that runs the gamut from lauding all the way down to “merely” accepting the work. The hell with that. We aren’t afraid and we’re stretching that scale back into its original shape. If the work is awful, we’re going to put our weight into the punch.

Both critiqued poets (negatively) and readers have responded to us in a positive way, which does not mean they have necessarily agreed with us, but that they have opened an honest discourse. We welcome opposing viewpoints that address our arguments and assertions. My views aren’t static and I can certainly be convinced by a good point to revisit a poem with a new perspective.

But to end, Ron, in the words of one of our greatest living poets, Marshall Mathers, “I’ll be damned if I won’t stand up to a bully.”

*For the record, if you disagree with us, even if you’re ten times nastier than Ron, we won’t abuse your email address and we won’t harass you. Would you believe it, we have better things to do.

Review of what is this thing called love (Book) by Kim Addonizio

Review of what is this thing called love by Kim Addonizio

With a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, plus a Pushcart, Ms. Addonizio’s accolades would seem to speak for themselves.  Still, since she will be selecting the poems to be included in best new poets 2009, we thought we should pick up something of hers and have a look for ourselves.  We bought our copy of what is this thing at a second-hand bookstore, so it did not come with a pistol attached as a it would have had we purchased the book new. No, this is too harsh, although Addonizio is probably the most frustrating poet we‘ve tackled so far. It’s not that her work is inaccessible; her work is readily understandable or at least rarely oblique. But whereas Hopler is vapid and Lerner is ridiculous, Addonizio is painfully narcissistic. There’s little room for the poem with her ego in the mirror. And yet some of it’s good. To put it anecdotally, this is a book that I literally threw down on the floor in disgust, but I picked it up again. In the end, you have to decide whether the bad outweighs the good or vice versa. The trouble is, I discovered, that the book is back-loaded with the cringe-making material, turning what could have been purposefully astringent into something gone sour.

But even from the beginning there is a carelessness in her writing. Take this example from “What Was”:

“Nearby, a man decants / a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way / through a tune meant to be melancholy.”

Decant means to pour slowly for a specific purpose and connotes a certain skill or at least attentiveness.  It certainly isn’t synonymous with “dump.” And yet the man is somehow both decanting the notes and honking through them, screwing up the would-be melancholy air of the song. There is a bald amateurishness in such a mistake.

In “31-Year-Old Lover” Addonizio compares a younger lover‘s body to a stick of cold butter (anyone else have county fair butter sculptures pop into your head?) and lists the muscles that particularly appeal to her. The list includes “hip flexors,” oddly the one time that she avoids the anatomical name. But unlike the others in the list, hip flexors are not superficial muscles. Unless she’s flayed her boy toy or he’s a bona fide bodybuilder / Olympic sprinter, it would be very difficult for her to perceive fine development in these muscles. Additionally, while hip flexors can of course be strengthened,  their flexibility is more an indicator of impressive fitness. But details like this come from knowing what you’re talking about rather than glancing at a color-coded diagram at the gym. The choice to use the common parlance “hip flexors” is also interesting when juxtaposed with the decision to use “gastrocnemius” — an almost ludicrously unpoetic word for “calf.”

But far worse than the occasional technical slip up or seemingly bizarre word choice, there is a mirror-enraptured voice that pervades the book. “Ex-Boyfriends” reduces all ex-boyfriends to people traveling “familiar routes of loneliness,” because, naturally, they’ve lost the greatest thing they have ever had or could ever have — Kim. The thin veil of the second person does little to gauze-over such flagrant narcissism. “Romance” offers another obnoxious example of wonderment-at-self that becomes Addonizio’s hallmark. After semi-vulgar reminiscences about adolescent sexual experiences, she writes, “still, here you are, in middle age, stunned / to find yourself in a sushi bar in California / with a man kneeling before you.” Oh gawd. Well, while Kim’s busy being amazed with herself and her life, would anyone like some coffee? Maybe some ginger to quell the nausea? In “Augury” she’s infatuated with her daughter’s overwhelming sex appeal. Really, it never ends with some people.

But to conclude on a positive note, “You Don’t Know What Love Is” uses sex and death imagery in a novel, compelling way. “Cat Poem” has a strange voice, but the tangentiality is arresting rather than glib, and the piece succeeds in eliciting a profound feeling of sympathy. “California Street” entirely avoids the self-absorption that prevails in most of the book, which is refreshing. It hints at a sensitivity that perhaps helped her win her heap of accolades. “One Nation Under God” — what can I say other than I like it. The poem starts off a little slow but builds and builds until the accumulated energy at the end makes the final couplet hit like a ball peen hammer. No, I’m not going to give it away.

So yes, this book of poetry flooded me with passion. Three quarters of that was anger and disgust, but it was passionate anger and disgust.  Which might not be so awful, when I think about how lukewarm most poetry is these days and how often my reaction is merely a tepid “oh.”

Review of Obscurity and Regret by C.D. Wright

Review of Obscurity and Regret by C.D. Wright

Let me tell you about the first time I got drunk.  It was the summer after high school graduation and Ender was dog-sitting Lacey, a black lab with strong flanks and nice breath for a dog.  We’d bought some steaks and a case of Labatt Blue and the weather was perfect for underage drinking.  Now, Ender was a pushy drunk and had opened my second beer before I’d even finished my first, and I had trouble enough getting the bitter stuff down.  I had to keep chewing pretzels to clear my palate after each swig.

Eventually we moved inside and started playing a drinking game with the dog-owner’s vanity press poetry book, a thick volume titled Best Poems in America which included 4,000 exemplars.  Even back then we’d fallen in deep with the poets and the drinkers and we played a game where each of us would read a poem until we got to a line that was so awful, so inept, a line that failed in every way a line of poetry could fail, that we had to stop, at which point we’d drink.  This was first class garbage, real “I am the lone wolf of loneliness” crap.  Rarely, we’d get to a second or third line.  We ended up in the backyard, drifting off listening to Billy Joel, and I remember that freedom that comes from urinating outside, like in Sexism by David Lehman, and that “high August sky full of stars” has always stuck with me since that night.

So, with that completely unrelated anecdote out of the way, let’s talk about poetry in the The New Yorker.

Imagine the best poem you’ve ever written, the one that will be anthologized–even if you haven’t written the poem yet, envision it, the sweet feeling of having contributed something of lasting import to our hemorrhaging culture, to share page space with Shakespeare and Tennyson and Yeats until the very end of history (circa 2012).

And let us say that you have this poem published in The New Yorker, and even 1/1000th of its over a million subscribers reads it–you’ve probably just decupled your current audience.  Of course, it’s somewhat of a running joke that the quality of poetry in The New Yorker is more akin to a frat house keg than the craft-brewed dark malt your poem is an example of, but if anything, that should be encouraging–if only your work can ascend a slush pile resembling Vermont in mid-March, it stands a chance of being read by an actual audience, not locked into the strictly small-time ghetto of a university press or some obscure Quarterly that boasts a hundred subscriptions, if that.

Imagine an attractive law student reading your poem on the morning bus as she heads to her internship with Moribund & Stasi.  Imagine a middle-aged man in a business suit reading your poem in order to prolong his bathroom break after digesting a lengthy article on Singer’s critical reputation with which he disagreed.  Imagine a lanky high-schooler with greasy hair reading your poem as he waits in the current periodicals section of the library for his girlfriend to finish researching some guy for her German class she’s told him about twice but he’s forgotten.

Just think of all the perverse places your poem could pop into people’s lives if it was in The New Yorker, people who have no relation to poetry at all beyond the assigned texts in English classes, people who, if pressed, would probably say Robert Frost was their favorite poet because his is the only name that springs to mind when the word “poet” is mentioned.  We have no beef with Robert Frost–he deserves to be the illustration next to the word in the dictionary–but imagine if, after reading your poem, these people discovered they really enjoyed it, perhaps might enjoy reading more poetry, by you and by others.  So they turn to the next poem in The New Yorker, but find only Obscurity and Regret .

What can be made of a poem whose very title warns us like a No Trespassing sign to steer clear?  And what do we, curious delinquents, find when we disobey?

Truth in advertising, of course, and that faint shame that comes from recognizing perhaps we should have listened to authority; for indeed, within the grounds of the poem we find only the obscurity and regret promised us at the outset.

Mercifully brief, Wright’s meditation swirls a jar of caterpillars, infested apple trees, and a shoe together into a mixed drink so cloudy and noxious even Dylan Thomas would hesitate before quaffing it.  The first image–a close up of “the hand without the glove” (implying another hand with a glove) tightening the lid on a jar of caterpillars despite the fact that the apple trees are infested already raises questions which the rest of the poem does not answer.

The lack of actual characters in what, at least on the surface presents itself as a narrative, acts as a hurdle to the reader.  Why are there no people, only hands and shoes and larvae?  And the larvae themselves–from whence are they “streaming”?  The sealed jar?  This refutes causality.  The infested apple trees?  But why fore art they streaming?  Are the apple trees on fire and the poet just neglected to mention it?  If so, we can forgive such a beginner’s mistake.  Even accepting this difficult image, a stream of larvae would not be stomped by the same action as a shoe extinguishing a cigarette on a rug–these images aren’t consistent with each other.

Is this the stupid idea?  Trying to stomp a mass of caterpillar larvae while holding a sealed jar of caterpillars beneath infested apple trees?  Or is this the point where we abandon all hope of logical narrative and embrace the poet’s bigger point on the topic of obscurity and regret?

The gloriously opaque sentence which concludes the poem

It was a stupid thing to say
the thought belonging to the body says to its source
stomping on the bright-green grass as it spills its sweet guts.

while a great example of the utility of punctuation, does not fulfill the implicit bargain we make when we begin a poem, mainly, that it provide us with some thought which we might carry away once we finish it.  Of course, the ambiguity (read: intentional obscurity, since there’s really only one way to read the sentence so that the words parse correctly) could be dispersed by adding a few symbols of punctuation, such as quotation marks and commas, but that would make the glaring lack of an actual resolution more apparent.

And perhaps that was by design–to craft a poem that champions obscurity and regret in order to deliver these concepts more directly than a less bad poem would.  But any poem whose real meaning is trapped deep within the poet’s mysterious subjective meanders, or cloaked by a deliberately ambiguous (or just wrong, due to ignorance or intention) use of language is not a good example of the art.

Can you honestly say you would share this poem with anyone you know?  Can you step forward and defend it?  And yet, over a million people have it delivered to their door.  Summer is here, and I’d like to think there are young poets getting drunk for the first time somewhere in this hot, wide country–I pray they recognize this jejune swill for what it is, and not seek inspiration from it.

The poet writes “It was a stupid idea”.  What can we do but agree with her?

Bonus:  If you enjoyed this poem, you may also enjoy only the crossing counts, a more cryptic exploration of the theme of obscurity.