Jessica Smith wrote a post about the incivility in the comment stream at Ron Silliman’s blog, and in comment streams in general. Silliman has since turned off his comments, and I can’t say I blame him. Comment streams can become ugly places, especially when you get the kind of traffic Silliman does, and you can find yourself spending so much time moderating that you don’t have time to do anything else. It’s also a little soul-crushing to deal with that much bile over a long period.
Brian Henry argues that poetry criticism is in a perpetual state of crisis, but what he seems to suggest is a bug–“It’s not just that critics cannot agree on which poets or kinds of poetry are the best, but that poetry critics often have no common ground”–I see as a feature. Maybe I’m oversimplifying here, but I can’t think of anything more boring than a world of poetic criticism where critics were all coming from the same stating point, or agreed upon set of values.
Elisa Gabbert asks if poetry is boring.
Have you joined The Rumpus Poetry Book Club yet?
2 responses
I totally agree with you, re: “I can’t think of anything more boring than a world of poetic criticism where critics were all coming from the same stating point, or agreed upon set of values.” Though it might seem like it from the beginning of the piece, I wasn’t arguing for that. Sorry if it wasn’t clear. I began with that point, and with a link about the topic, because it was a convenient place to start, and because it seems like poetry is unique not in its lack of common ground or common values, but in its constant hand-wringing and fussing about poetry criticism (and the lack of common ground is part, but certainly not all, of the reason for that). For me, the real problem is that criticism gets more attention than poetry. And criticism about criticism gets more attention than criticism. The two pieces from the Poetry Foundation site that I mentioned are just a couple of examples. And unfortunately my blog entry is now another (my three previous entries last week were on Pablo Neruda and the Slovenian poets Edvard Kocbek and Srecko Kosovel, and there’s been no interest in those). Later in the piece, I offered my personal view of what poetry criticism should do more of. And though I wish more critics focused on the How as well as the What, I wouldn’t want (or expect) a common starting point for critics. It’d be boring. Anyway, I wanted to clear that up. This is a great site.
An answer to Elisa Gabbert’s question to long to post here:
http://toulousestreet.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/odd-words-43/
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