BACK ALLEY / BOOKSTORE / CONTESTS / EDITOR'S COMMENTS / ESSAYS / EVENTS / FICTION / INTERVIEWS / GALLERY / POETRY / REVIEWS / SHELF SPACE / SUBMISSIONS The Semantic Jungle:
How Poetry is Being Undermined by Inept ReviewsA Commentary by
Frank S. Palmisano, III
TRY to buy a book of poetry nowadays and it’s like reading the fight card for a trumped-up boxing match. The marketing of poetry collections has been taken to new extremes, with seasoned poets promoting one another like Don King parading his latest boxing acquisition.
From reviews that express the poet’s pugnacity to reviews that tell the reader how indescribably well the poet has captured the language of the street, the unwary consumer is hard-pressed to find a bookshelf that has not been victimized by this trend. With back covers often stamped out with short blurbs praising the poet’s street savvy, his rough-and-tumble meter, the eloquent way he delivers a drug overdose or a barroom fight, the man of letters is crafted into a keen observer of an underground culture by the reviewer.
These strange approbations leave the astute reader to puzzle over how the poet escaped the suffocating environment of the university long enough to clue us in on a world that’s hard to believe he can fit in between classes and paperwork. Yet, the approach is not a new one. In a society soaked in marketing ploys where movie marquees dangle overhead with superlatives like omens on a dark horizon, America plays host to a ruse that is inconsistent with the reality around it. More puzzling is the fact that most prestigious reviewers (many poets themselves and the same who hammer us with the age-old call to write from our own experience) create fantastic parallel worlds in which their poets inhabit all aspects of heaven and hell.
The problem herein lies in the language being used to describe these poets and their poetry. In many ways, it is a condescension so subtle that it slips under the radar. And quite frankly, it is offensive. Poets, who traditionally choose their words so carefully are finding their poetry brutalized by insincere reviewers whose misguiding and pretentious words of praise lend nothing to the content inside. As a result, these reviewers do a disservice to the poet by either showing that they haven’t understood what they read or haven’t cared to take the time to understand.
Though marketing is still a dirty word in some artistic circles, the issue of establishing an audience is a critical one and not to be overlooked. Yet often times, the hydra of “elitist” poetry rears its ugly head just when we think we’ve severed them all. It’s enough to flummox a would-be reader and stifle other potential ones.
To a culture saturated with images of Arnold Schwarznegger and other tough guys, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that poets just don’t fit the profile. Yet, many reviewers continue to insist on describing the poet and his words with these labels. Moreover, the poet is portrayed as some kind of heroic force, to which a society with its accepted definitions of bloodied knuckles and barroom brawls must shake its collective head and revert to that hopeless cry that poets hate to hear: “I don’t understand poetry.” Newsflash: sometimes, neither do the poets.
I hope to take to task a number of recent and randomly selected blurbs and yet in doing so not compare them solely with what is actually being written, but rather treat them as if I were a consumer in a supermarket looking for a good buy, browsing the shelves and reading the “boxes” to see what the product promises.
This presents a challenge to reviewers and poets who allow such reviews to go unchecked. To say that it is entirely the fault of the reviewer is misleading. After all, poets have a responsibility to keep vigil over their work as well. Although we scoff at the poet who denounces the reviewer who looked upon his (or her) work unfavorably, poets should be equally interested in those praiseworthy reviews that fail to capture the essence of what he or she is trying to say.
Poetry has enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity over the last couple of years. If it will continue to push into the mainstream in the years to come, it must stop creating for itself a closed society where semantic relevance is in the eye of the beholder.
In particular, the issue of the “poet’s toughness” has produced a string of reviews proclaiming a new generation of “tough” poets. But, I am yet to find clarification as to what this might mean. After reading batches of reviews, I am often left to wonder if the reviewer had a Steven Segal toughness in mind or was merely supplanting traditional toughness with a new form packaged in old paper.
The “review” is first of all the fault line upon which rests the careers of many a poet. It is a bilateral agreement in which the reviewer (usually a poet) will promote the newer poet’s work, the latter receiving kudos for that work, while the former is hoisted into the authority structure of poetic elite. There is an underlying political system in poetry just as much as Washington, where certain ritual customs are observed and others are not.
The following are a few samples taken at random. The first is a review of Mary Jane Nealon’s Rogue Apostle by Four Way Books as written by Tom Sleigh:
“Emancipated in the mess of it [the collection] is an apt description of Mary Jane Nealon’s relation to the world she describes with such stringent accuracy, toughness, and compassion. I can imagine Chekhov reading these poems, especially the ones that recount her experience as a nurse, and nodding his head at the odd surreal rightness of the scene in the ward, the operating room, the pathologist’s lab, the morgue.”
Anton Chekhov? the profession of nursing? the mortician? These hardly conjure images of toughness. From the review, we as the audience gather nothing of the quality of the work except Sleigh’s own mental connection wrought in the confusion of his mind. This is a prime example of the misleading superlatives used by reviewers and strung together like a bracelet full of charms.
Pushing the envelope of this strange dynamic is Billy Collins’ review of Tell Me by Kim Addonizio (BOA Editions).
“Many of the poems in Tell Me can be read as intensified versions of the barroom ballad-songs of good and bad love, songs of the allure and the failure of the drink. But regardless of the subject, Kim Addonizio’s poems are stark mirrors of self-examination, and she looks into them without blinking.”
One wonders what bars Mr. Collins is frequenting where the patrons simultaneously break out in song and mirrors of self-examination hang from the bathroom walls? And what are these degrees of separation in the barroom ballad-song? From Collins description we know only of an “intensified version.” I guess the others will remain a revealed fact only to him. Once again the reader is left to wonder what Tell Me is all about, since Mr. Collins has decided to remain silent on the subject.
Too bad for Ms. Addonizio. May I remind Mr. Collins that the bar is one of the great last bastions of debauchery and sleaze in our culture. It is a place where carnality and sin play out on the same stage. The image of patrons singing or weeping or writing poetry for that matter is something created in the mind of the poet and fails to capture any truth of our barroom culture.
In another appearance, Mr. Collins entertains us again with a review of Ron Koertge’s Geography of the Forehead (University of Arkansas Press). Here, there is no wiggle room to escape. Collins is blunt and forward in his delivery and thus characterizes his poet in the same way.
“Nobody writes poetry like Ron Koertge—nobody has the nerve.”
Taken at face value, it’s a pretty powerful statement. One would assume that Koertge has tapped into some dormant power of bravado that most of us in our lifetimes fail to apprehend. But, when the great majority of the civilized world thinks of nerve, I guarantee that poetry does not appear in their Top Ten list. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it’s still hard to imagine Ron Koertge as the tough guy Collins wants him to be with characters having names like Dr. Cuty Bug in his poems. It’s hard to say when this timebomb of roiling male testosterone will explode or who he’ll take with him when he does.
And then there is the most visible poet-laureate of our time, Robert Pinsky, giving a lackluster review of the periodical AGNI.
“It’s tough, it dances, it’s ‘top of the world.’”
It’s tough? It dances? Bronson meets Barishnikoff? What is Pinsky talking about? Are we speaking of the dexterity required to land a triple lutz or the toughness required to land a punch? I admit that AGNI is usually a good read, but the blatant lack of scrutiny expressed by Pinsky moves me to believe that he isn’t reading the same thing I am.
Sure, Pinsky is not a marketing expert, nevertheless, he is there to market. There’s no getting around it. As for toughness, I would guess that the only physical action Pinsky has experienced recently is dragging himself to poetry readings. No wonder AGNI looks like a Tyson/Spinks fight to him.
Alan Williamson gives this review of Linda Dyer’s Fictional Teeth (Ahsahta Press).“Witty and tough, drawing on science and street argot, she at the same time has a feeling for the inner magic of the word, the quirky phrase, in the manner of Plath or Hopkins.”
Once again, one is not entirely sure what to make of this phrase, “witty and tough.” And as for those scientists and magicians that inhabit the streets of Williamson’s mind, I can only say I feel for them.
Perhaps, in one of my favorites, Sherod Santos gives this memorable review of Ryan G. Van Cleave’s Say Hello:“Out of the ‘indifference and ash’ that surround so much of our lives at the century’s end, Ryan G. Van Cleave’s poems rise up ‘Ileno de dientes y relampagos/full of teeth and lightning.’ Streetwise and hip, bilingual and alive, they come to praise the lost and abandoned, the overlooked and undone, and for all the hard truths they’re determined to tell, they speak in a voice like ‘starlight spilled golden upon [a] dark tile roof.’ That starlight is every reader’s blessing.”
Santos describes Van Cleave’s poetry as streetwise and hip and goes on to give us an example of what streetwise and hip sounds like. According to Santos, this is the sound of “starlight spilled golden upon dark tile roof.” So much for the sound of the pimp slapping his hooker, or the racket of gunfire during a drive by shooting. It is easy to see the insincerity of the review and general misapprehension of the urban condition by Santos.
In reading this review alone, I tried hard to remember the last time I was rapt by the starlight spilled golden upon dark tile roof as I readied for a fight, but could only recall seeing stars at the end of a clenched fist. Eloquence sometimes does not convey the hard truths of life accurately, it can in fact sugarcoat them.
From her book House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois Poetry Series), Dorothy Barresi writes:“Jane Mead is [a] young poet capable of conveying the world’s rawest dangers to soul and sanity through her use of soaring rhetorical brilliance…
I may be stretching here a bit, but I don’t think Wake Forest University (where she is poet-in-residence) or the Whiting Writer’s Prize has exposed Ms. Mead to the world’s “rawest dangers to the soul and sanity.” I can think of a couple of them right now, and one is in the Middle East.
Turning to another well-known poet, Garrett Hongo comments on the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa. Standing next to this review, we all pale in comparison:
“Komunyakaa is perhaps the single most original poet of his generation, and one of the most brave both in stylistic innovation and commitment to handling difficult subjects and dark emotions.”
Having read Komunyakaa’s poetry, I don’t find anything particularly brave about his work. And I doubt he has ever been called to suffer for what he’s written. Granted, he is an excellent poet, but the discerning critic must wonder if his words have ever touched off the kind of controversy that exposed him to danger in such an absolute way that his very life was at stake?
The jury may not be in on this one yet, but here again is another example where the appraisal seems slapped together haphazardly with no thought for semantic relevance. Is this Komunayakaa’s doing? It doesn’t appear to be.
In a world where censorship is becoming less and less customary, when everything said has already been said, when edginess has become the trend rather than the exception, things like “bravery” are hardly the first thing you think of when reading poetry. How does one brave a market where one is already considered one of the best? Consequently, it is plain to see why it’s easier to accept writers like Bukowski who began his career in his forties and unquestionably had an untainted dose of life before he struggled to make sense of it all.
And yet, as we machete our way through these semantic jungles, it is clear that not all these reviews are meant to be taken seriously. Some are written for pure entertainment value. Maybe Collins, whose talent for light verse seems to escape him when it comes to his heavy-handed reviews, can take notes. As such, we can take heart and humor with Nathan Graziano’s review of Ultadim Illumination by Scott Gordon, poetry by the editor of the small, yet well-worn Staplegun Press:
"Gordon’s poems hit you like a sucker punch in a barroom brawl. The people he writes about are real and disturbingly familiar."
As someone who has been involved in a gang, been in more than a few fights, sold drugs and has been arrested, it’s hard for me to write without circumspection and deference for what I’ve seen and been through. There’s no question that this is why the most hardened veterans of war are hesitant to report the things they’ve seen. The existential question of one’s selfhood looms far above the trappings of language.
Somewhere poetry has gone wrong. It is no different than the middle-aged man who reinvents himself by throwing off his suburban existence for the joy of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
The problem is that what poets/reviewers perceive as toughness is not what the greater world perceives. By equating toughness with each and every experience we run the risk of equating it with nothing. Without contrast, all distinctions cease to exist. So one must navigate these semantic jungles cautiously.
Poetry should never justify the lack of living. To the inordinate ranks of poets who went from undergraduate to graduate school to a doctoral program, I say this: “Get out and live a little!” Soak in experience. Do not write about life at the expense of living it.
In the end, I think when I want “toughness,” I’ll make mine believable. I’ll know enough about the poet to know whether he’s blowing hot air or has something to say. I’ll read The Rose That Grew From Concrete, the late Tupac Shukar’s collection of poetry. It may not be the best, but it comes from the heart of one who walked the walk.
To those Oscar Wildes that say the purpose of art is to conceal the artist, I say that the unavoidability of the modern biographical blurb alongside such vaunted truisms reminds us that even with products of the imagination, there is a reality factor.
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