Rebecca,
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 14:46:11 -0600, you wrote:
I don't know Muldoon's work well enough to
>comment upon the debate over its merits, though it might be
>more interesting to follow the debate if a few representative
>lines or passages were quoted.
I'm not sure representative passages would help - but I would recommend
whole books of his - starting off with 'Why Brownlee Left', 'Quoof'
and 'Meeting the British'. (I don't think Robin's tirade should put you
off, and I don't see why his proper respect for Paulin's work should be
used to attack Muldoon with. It reminds me of a vicious review by John
Carey which lambasted Muldoon because he wasn't Heaney.)
>However, I am interested in this debate over critical judgement,
>I am a bit perplexed why a review that was published, wherever
>that might be, would be apologized for by the reviewer. Surely
>if such more temperate considerations were needed, they should
>have been accomodated in the review. I'm a little uncomfortable
>at the idea of the reviewer letting fly in the review and then
>explaining and apologizing for the review in other forums. As
>a reviewer, I'm aware of the pressure to say something interesting
>and how this can drive one's remarks toward the definitive or the
>exagerrated, where the balanced consideration is somewhat tilted
>by the desire to write a provocative review. And also reviewers
>are often driven by their own sense of poetry, their own agenda
>and sense of the ills of the po-biz, and so may be replying to
>some general tendency rather than the particular work itself. But
>despite my sympathies for anyone under these pressures, I think
>that the reviewer should say no more or less than she would
>say anywhere to anyone.
I think this puts the whole issue very clearly. But having said his review
of Muldoon was "intemperate", Tony now says he stands by his judgement -
that is, he stands by his intemperateness.(In the case of the
Muldoon 'review' if I remember right there were no arguments to back up the
statement - but as I said it's his e-zine...and no Tony, it makes no
difference whether you're a poet or not, a critic should have similar
standards.)
I partly disagree with you though when you write:
>As for calling someone's work "execrable," I think that's often
>used in critical reviews. It's not abusive, though one might
>consider it mistaken or perhaps part of the tendency toward
>linguistic extremity, toward which not only critics, but writers,
>are prone. If I were to complain about the word, along with
>other commonly used critical words, it would be because they say
>so little specifically about the work in question.
It's not that "often" that reviewers use the word, though some do: it's
about as condemnatory as possible - "execrable" comes from the Latin -
exsecrari - to curse (ex + sacer), and though it may have lost some of its
roots in English parlance it still seems to me abusive, and, yes, "part of
the tendency towards linguistic extremity" that wants to silence debate
rather than encourage it - the latter as far as I can see being the main
useful purpose of any criticism.
Because I'm pressed for time, I can't properly reply to the mails that
followed except in brief. There's a little surge of glee when others are
blamed for what you've done, but I'm sorry that you were given
responsability for what I'd written.
Though I may not share all of the same areas of interest as Todd, his
pleas for a bit more tolerance and openness within the poetry world struck
a chord with me. Where there's condemnation of a particular poet,and why
shouldn't ther be?, there should at least be (and this goes back to your
first request) some instances and some argument.
Alison's generous-spirited retraction shows that tolerance and openness
to debate isn't dead on this list,
Best,
Iain.
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