John Donne, 1837
"Of his earlier poems, many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much."
Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe
Reviews originally compiled by Bill Henderson in Rotten Reviews.
Category: Think Outside the Lament (Page 5 of 7)
Hart Crane’s The Bridge, 1932
"A form of hysteria…One thing he has demonstrated, the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before and it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again."
Yvor Winters, Poetry
Emily Dickinson, 1892
"An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar…Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly
Reviews originally compiled by Bill Henderson in Rotten Reviews.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Review, 1828
"We cannot name one considerable poem of his that is likely to remain upon the thresh-floor of fame…We fear we shall seem to our children to have been pigmies, indeed, in intellect, since a man as Coleridge would appear great to us!"
London Weekly Review
Years ago a friend of my gave me a book called The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo. We were going to read it together but we never did. I'm about 50 pages in now and each little section begins with an affirmation, many in verse. As I read the book, I'm compelled to share.
Here are the first few:
"The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to what has always been." — Helen Luke
"What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same." — Mark Nepo
"I learn, by going, where I have to go." — Theodore Roehke
"The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one." M.N.
"We tend to make the thing in the way the way." M.N.
"The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break." M.N.
"If I had experienced different things, I would have different things to say." M. N.
"His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things."
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs
Chaucer Review, 1835
"Chaucer, not withstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman or Thomas Erceldoune."
John Byron, The Works of Lord Byron
Charles Baudelaire Review, 1953
"In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention (this work) as a curio."
Emile Zola, Emile Zola
I want to take a break and talk about ways of being as a poet. One of the things that gets me down from time to time is the negativity festering in any circle of creative people, poets, filmmakers, studio artists.
If you run a website, you get a lot of spam. Here is a piece of classic spam I received on Big Bang Poetry's blog before I added CAPTCHA to my commenting procedures.
I'm impressed, I must say. Actually rarely to I encounter a blog that is both educative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head. Your notion is outstanding; the issue is something that not sufficient individuals are speaking intelligently about. I'm extremely happy that I stumbled across this in my search for some thing related to this. Michael Kores.
Wow, Michael Kores took the time to be so vague about my deep thoughts! Alas, spam disguised as false flattery is very bad energy. It's a waste of everyone's time (who buys shoes from a link on a blog comment?), and it's pandering to our endless hunger for compliments. And failing miserably to boot. So it's bad marketing and it's bad flattery. And it's a jerky thing to do. I wrote a poem about this spam for NaPoWriMo.
Last week, I finished the first draft to my next book of poems. And as I'm re-tooling and re-configuring, I'm also wondering (with some trepidation) where I can go for some good feedback. Commonly you turn to your trusted readers, your friends. I'm going to a "writing sequester" in a week and a half in Phoenix, Arizona. Two writer friends are coming from Los Angeles and my cousin is coming from Alaska so we can all meet, write and talk about our writing projects.
My husband and I have been discussing being friends with artists, getting encouragement for your work, giving encouragement to others and the psychology of the age we're living in. I'm going to talk more about this later. I have a theory about this age of artists and what our legacy will most likely be (stay tuned for that).
This all came up because my husband, Monsieur Bang Bang, the archaeologist, has been working as a historical consultant for a new television comedy western called Quick Draw. He spent years as a TV writer in LA and two of his best friends are television actors. He's been involved with successful projects of his own and also projects that didn't get picked up. He's been through the whole production process and the gamut of emotions that ensues. He also knows how hard it is to get anything made and on the air.
Not only did Quick Draw get picked up but it's first few episodes are very funny, testing on the show went great and the show is full of enthusiastic guest stars like Frangela, Tim Bagley and the band Eagles of Death Metal. So who knows how it will all turn out but you hope as you go along with any proejct, you'll get encouragement from your friends. It's interesting to me how often you're disappointed.
It seems to be human nature to secretly want your friends to fail. Ultimately, their success reflects on you. These feelings rob you of any potential enthusiasm. I've gone through this myself when former classmates succeed. I see my former classmates go through this, too. Monsieur Bang Bang reminds me that success can also bring to you a bad form of false flattery, people who want favors. That's like it's own kind of spam.
When I started this project of Big Bang Poetry, I decided I would channel one of Oprah's big lessons: consider your intent in everything you do. Are your intentions good or bad? This idea has clarified my entire approach to poetry, all my projects and even my relationships. I used to fret about how my relationships were going. I used to second guess all that I said or did. All this anxiety has disappeared for me because I constantly know what my intent is and I try to keep it positive. I may be misunderstood from time to time but I'm walking forward with a positive intent. And I'm at peace with that.
This means I'm not trashing schools of poetry, I'm trying not to make snide remarks about other artists (sometimes this is hard because snarkiness can be some bitchy fun), and I tap into my enthusiastic support for all my friends and fellow artists. Honestly, it is there; it's just buried under knee-jerk jealousy.
This, like any other way of being, takes practice. You'll start to notice when you support your friends with their projects, you'll get silence back from them on yours. Then you have to decide for yourself how to handle that. I do believe the cumulative amount of good intent you put out into the universe will come back to you. Negative people tend to get negative returns. It's classic karma.
And yes, bad things happen to good people. But I believe karma stretches over many lifetimes and you must do what you can with the life you've been given (thanks Gandalf).
Bottom line: if you want to be at peace with yourself as a creative person among other creative persons, practice generous feelings toward them. Sometimes I get a little bummed and wonder who I can share my success stories with (few as they are at the moment). I want encouragement from friendly artists and I think ultimately that's what want that from me. Finding each other is part of the whole process of being human.
Matthew Arnold Review, 1909
"Arnold is a dandy Isaiah, a poet without passion, whose verse, written in surplice, is for freshmen and for gentle maidens who will be wooed to the arms of these future rectors."
George Meredith, Fortnightly Review
I am now having a hard time not imagining all those gentle maidens scrambling to drag their fingernails through those side-burn forests. I was so impressed with them, I added Arnold to my Pinterist page of Poets with Sexy Hair.
"Mr. Auden himself has presented the curious case of a poet who writes an original poetic language in the most robust English tradition but who seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy."
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light
I know, that's what I like about him!
And what a face. Try to carve that in glass, Paul J. Nelson.
Last Friday I met my cousin at a Santa Fe used bookshop going out of business (he refuses to sell online, via mail and his prices were too high). I did buy a stack of books there, a biography of Marcel Proust, a book of celebrity poetry (to be reviewed here later) and two books called Rotten Reviews which are flabbergastic gold! I'll cull out the poets for you.
The first review I found was for Sylvia Plath's book The Bell Jar from 1971:
"Highly autobiographical and…since it represents the views of a girl enduring a bout of mental illness, dishonest."
Atlantic Monthly
I'm gonna love these.
I came across a link on a poetry group announcing the news that Salt Publishing was discontinuing its single-poet publications. Chris Hamilton-Emery says, "We have tried to commit to single-author collections by funding them
ourselves, but as they have become increasingly unprofitable, we can't
sustain it." I agree, this is sad news when a publisher gives up selling these types of books.
Many business owners all over the world agonize over compromises they are asked to make between what they want to sell, what customers want to buy and how to bridge the gap with marketing. I responded to the poster, saying
"Poets need to market, I hate to even say the
words, outside of the box. I've been working on speaking in front of academics
in science and other fields to show the value of poetry as a part of their
overall scheme of research. We are living in such a practical-based world where
(a) people seek practical enlightenment in their free time and (b) they are
buying all their books online. Poets need to make their books appeal to this
practicality and make sure poetry books can be found via online searches. It's
a challenge but I won't give up hope…
I've blogged about:
– Using Poetry for Research
Projects
– Supporting poetry-based projects on
Kickstarter
– Tagging to Serve Poetry: I also feel we can help each other out but
tagging our favorite poetry books on Amazon and other online storefronts so
someone searching for a topic like PTSD or motherhood or whatever will find books of poetry on that
subject and possibly get hooked.
Again, traditional methods won't solve the situation."
The poster responded thusly:
"i think the situation is very complex and not
merely a matter of sales and marketing but lies at in the changing fabric of
cultural importance and the role of art in a totally commoditised environment. The questions that need to be asked are not just
of poets or even publishers, but of educators and society as a whole."
I get a shudder down my spine reading this. This argument is basically that it's the customer's problem, not ours. You recognize it instantly if you're ever watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsay goes into a failing restaurant to try to help the owners turn things around. Invariably the owner states to Ramsay that the restaurant's problem is not their food quality, is not their decor, is not their levels of service or their menu selections.
Their ego can never take the next step of logic: you have no customers because…(your food sucks, your decor is outdated, your service is slow and your menus are uninspiring). Customers are not stupid. It just makes you feel better to believe they are.
"The questions that need to be asked are not just
of poets or even publishers, but of educators and society as a whole" is another way of blaming the customer. And contempt for the customer never works in turning a business around. Like…never.
And selling books, reality check, is a business.
We must question a phrase like "the role of art in a totally commoditised environment" because both art and books are commodities…unless you give your books away for free or strap them up on a public monument. In fact, some would argue that books and poetry are part of the whole art/information/entertainment glut of trash we produce in this world. So if we could stop pretending and pretentiously sanctifying what we do for a moment, we might relate more effectively with our customers. Or at least be in a position to listen to them.
The paradigm of publishing is transforming just like the sales of music transformed a decade ago. And it's transforming similarly because publishers haven't been listening to their customers or serving their authors (my husband is at this moment reading a University of Oklahoma Press book full of confusing typos and grammatical errors).
The poetry biz is a long shot of long shots, especially considering even new novelists are struggling to find an audience. Actors, producers and directors are struggling to get an audience. Poets for years have been only marketing to other poets who cry poor and don't buy books of poetry. Meanwhile, in the outside world poetry has lost its moral authority and barely retains any intellectual authority. How does any business turn around a slump or a bad reputation: marketing.
It's all about marketing for everybody. And if you keep on denying reality and stubbornly adhere to the techniques that have been failing for the last 20-30 years, the same lame excuses about how society doesn't value poetry, you will sink.
I've been watching old episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show this week on DVD. Even in the first season's episodes from the early 1970s, the characters were complaining about the same things we complain about today: nobody watches the news, insurance companies are a racket, it's hard to find time for our heart's pursuits. Not much has changed in all these years. New technology just provides new ways for us to be who we already were. And even technologies are failing to better technologies. Cable TV has ignored and gouged their customers so long, Hulu is threatening them. Amazon has finally crushed the big book superstores who once crushed your small, independent, local bookstores. Nothing has changed fundamentally, including all the hand-wringing from the complainers and excuse-givers.
"They have bad taste and it's not my fault."
That's okay to believe if you want an empty restaurant.
Listen poetry peoples, you took this boat out on the bay and you've been sinking for years. Stop blaming the water.
