Minimum Standards for Poetry Reviewers?

[Reply to an e-mail from Gregory St. Thomasino]

Gregory:

A thoughtful, passionate, caring response [see below] to a thoughtless, shallow, hurtful"review." Have you sent this to Web Del Sol? It's "reviews" like this,
criticism for the bite only, not the explication, the depth, the contribution to all our learning, that give reviewing/criticism a bad name. We should all have a minimum requirement that the review contain evidence of reading the work under "discussion." Otherwise any one of us could write a hundred such "reviews." What would we accomplish? Alienate those few readers still reading contemporary poetry.

[Added tonight]
Do we have standards for what constitutes an on-line review?

Do we not want convincing evidence that the reviewer has read and thought about the work under review?

Do we not want reviewers to put their personal views into the context of the larger world of poetry, its various communities, the body of work in the present and its relationships to poetry past?

Shouldn't McGrath be able to show he's aware of where eratio positions itself, i.e. what it's attempting to do? I would give his view much more credibility if he first show how eratio stumbles through its own intentions.

I know McGrath's flip comments have always occurred whether at the end of a poetry reading, spoken between friends, or in letters or other conversations between readers. But when they appear on a website such as Web Del Soul these comments have more weight than they deserve.



[The e-mail from From Gregory St. Thomasino]
ERATIO SMEARED

This "review" just up at Web Del Sol, by Tim McGrath:

"Eratio Postmodern Poetry :// View | Rating:
Eratio offers up incomprehensible postmodern fodder for critics of
postmodern incomprehensibility. Good luck finding anything
intentionally; look for links and find a blog, look for poetry and find
quotations. And when you realize that Eratio's editor, Gregory Vincent
St. Thomasino (whose name suggests either a pseudonymously guarded
narcissist or the tragi-comic hero of a Wes Anderson film) has included
his own embarrassing asseverations ("Discourse is like a river" is his
unqualified and deplorably facile, but apparently quotable, simile)
along with the words of Nietszche, Plato, and Jung, you'll start
wondering whether this postmodern experiment is, in fact, a postmodern
parody. On the same page, alongside the luminous Lord Duke G.V. St.
Thomasino, Diane Wakoski is quoted as saying, "I feel that poetry is
the completely personal expression of someone about his feelings and
reactions to the world. I think it is only interesting in proportion to
how interesting the person who writes it is." By Wakoski's logic, the
people who bring you Eratio are not very interesting at all."

[Gregory's response to the "review"]
Friends, as contributors to eratio postmodern poetry, you should
proudly count yourselves among some of the most talented and
influential writers and artists on the scene today. As editor of the
site, I can honestly say that many of the works submitted for eratio
simply do not make the cut (and I'm sorry if I've rejected your work,
Mr. McGrath, but there's always the welcome to send again). I try to
be fair when making these judgments, because I know what it means to
put your heart into something (especially something like poetry), and
how it feels to be rejected.

Eratio is a labor of love, since it generates no revenue for me (but
rather costs me time and energy and money). Each issue requires months
of work, involving coding, design, correspondence, planning, and an
immeasurable amount of frustration. Ultimately, it's very gratifying --
but I cannot say it's fun.

Still, I am proud to publish your work and hope that its presence at
eratio gives you some exposure and some degree of satisfaction that you
otherwise would not have had, and gives you some encouragement to
continue being a poet in an economy that doesn't much care about you.

I do not know Tim McGrath. But if you read him closely you'll see that
this is nothing more than a personal attack on me (based on his dislike
of my name!). I am distressed because none of the poetry or artworks
are mentioned, and in fact I do not believe Mr. McGrath even bothered
to read or look at any of it. (But can he, indeed, talk about the
poetry, or the content of the page, or the logic of the concept, I
wonder? Why the subterfuge of fixating on my name? No one of any real
insight or wit would do that -- unless he were inclined to burlesque.)

As a poet and a critic, I take great care to explicate my reasons for
"liking" or "disliking" something. More importantly, I consider it my
responsibility to try to place a work into context, to appreciate what
it is the poet is trying to achieve, and to assess whether this has
been accomplished (and sometimes I offer alternatives, but I never
ridicule and I am never disrespectful, and I always manage to point out
a poet's successes). There are several reviews in the current issue
that I took great care in writing, I hope you'll see them for yourself
now that the issue is up.

Reading Tim McGrath's personal attack (on my name, for Pete's sake!) is
an example of something a poet or a critic should never do. Mr. McGrath
has latched on to my name as something that irritates him a great deal,
and in the process has ignored your work and mine. Why does Mr. McGrath
dislike me personally? Could it be that this is payback? (Or else:
What's "pseudonymously guarded" about it? What's "narcissist" about it?
I will, however, accept that being a Roman Catholic name it is somewhat
"tragi-comic.")

Mr. McGrath's tone -- glib, cynical, condescending, and uninformed and
lacking of the requisite vocabulary to comprehend let alone explicate
or set a value upon "the postmodern" -- is indicative not only of Web
Del Sol but of the "unlettered lad" generally. I do not know why Web
Del Sol has adopted this attack mentality toward anything to do with
"the postmodern," but for sure it is the creativity of resentment.

Comments

[Roy Frisvold]

Having contributed to "eratio" in the past, I may be seen to have a dog in this fight. So, rather than dignify ad hominem attacks--poetry and the web are both big enough to accommodate each other, without rancor--I offer some short observations. Diderot claimed that to produce anything, even a mediocre thing, took great effort, while its criticism was facile by comparison. This is not to characterize the merits of any particular poetry sites, but to appreciate the efforts of those who bring what they do to the rest of us. As for the notion "eratio" parodies the postmodern "experiment": one can certainly debate whether that is even possible, as parody is the dynamo of postmodern experiment, and therefore automatically subsumed. "Discourse is like a river," for example, is more complex than the more dismissive might admit. Space it thus: "Dis course is like a river" and you couldn't tell it from an excerpt of Finnegans Wake. We have the force of citation and parody in one, with a Joycean pun. And river-like discourse--that is, the universe of discourse--harkens back to Herakleitos. Then again, the "course" in discourse means literally "to run," so there is the etymological stratum to the sentence. Finally, there is the force of analogy: is "Discourse is like a river" any more facile, any less fruitful, than Wittgenstein's saying language is a city? This is all a bit removed from any personal attack by reviewer upon writer/editor. But is there anything more conservative, more traditional, than such attacks? I think not, and I think it's not worth addressing premodernists on their own terms.

[Roy Frisvold]

Having contributed to "eratio" in the past, I may be seen to have a dog in this fight. So, rather than dignify ad hominem attacks--poetry and the web are both big enough to accommodate each other, without rancor--I offer some short observations. Diderot claimed that to produce anything, even a mediocre thing, took great effort, while its criticism was facile by comparison. This is not to characterize the merits of any particular poetry sites, but to appreciate the efforts of those who bring what they do to the rest of us. As for the notion "eratio" parodies the postmodern "experiment": one can certainly debate whether that is even possible, as parody is the dynamo of postmodern experiment, and therefore automatically subsumed. "Discourse is like a river," for example, is more complex than the more dismissive might admit. Space it thus: "Dis course is like a river" and you couldn't tell it from an excerpt of Finnegans Wake. We have the force of citation and parody in one, with a Joycean pun. And river-like discourse--that is, the universe of discourse--harkens back to Herakleitos. Then again, the "course" in discourse means literally "to run," so there is the etymological stratum to the sentence. Finally, there is the force of analogy: is "Discourse is like a river" any more facile, any less fruitful, than Wittgenstein's saying language is a city? This is all a bit removed from any personal attack by reviewer upon writer/editor. But is there anything more conservative, more traditional, than such attacks? I think not, and I think it's not worth addressing premodernists on their own terms.

Great site!

[jay]

Thanks for sharing this, Crag. The amount of sheer nastiness in the air seems to have increased greatly over the past week or so. Or maybe I'm just paying more attention to it. The opponents of "postmodernism" always seem to be the first to attack -- yet they play the victim card so well.