You may be right, Dave, but where, then, does that leave us? Here, I
can see that effect in some areas, but there remains a fairly strong
crowd of writers & readers who keep their eyes & ears open for
interesting new stuff. And there are reviewers who seem to try to
serve that wider community. I admit that I tend to review positively,
because I get books by poets I already know quite well. But I can say
when I dont think things are working; & it is possible to both
criticize a work & still find some aspects of it to praise.
But then, in talking about what I do, I guess I miss the point about
what many others are doing.
Or what they want. I think even Ron Silliman, with all his biases,
still takes a quite wide look at what is happening. I have just
reviewed, in various places, some fairly avant work, & a terrific
traditional lyric volume, John Glenday's Grain, in which he achieves
some pieces tht sound ike theyve just been there forever.
And I dont think Ive in any way refuted your worries there...
Doug
On 28-Dec-09, at 1:17 PM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> I don't know but I wonder if one of the things that is happening in
> some
> 'Western' societies is that, because of the way the role of literacy
> is
> changing, poets are looking for extended peer-groups, approval
> networks,
> rather than 'audiences' in the wider sense, so that the desired
> target is
> conformity to, and approval from, the language-identity of
> groupings. It
> certainly seems to me poetry reviews in some places work like that:
> the
> review confirms the writer as one of an 'us', an 'us' which is
> rather hard
> to define but everywhere implicit. The performance poetry circuit
> seems
> to have unwritten criterion like that too, but without the
> apparently formal
> reviews.
Douglas Barbour
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The artist has no right to waste
the time of the listener.
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie
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