It's been a banner fortnight for bad reviews of artistic output. First, Bruce Springsteen took a fair amount of flak for his latest album WORKING ON A DREAM being, in some critics' viewpoints, little more than nonessential pop music with subpar lyrics. Then, Ron Rosenbaum (a critic/essayist I used to read when he still wrote for THE NEW YORK OBSERVER) weighed in on Slate.com with an angry takedown of Billy Joel...an artist who basically said good bye to pop/rock in 1993 and surfaces only occasionally to do play-the-old-songs tours either by himself or with Elton John. Rosenbaum christens Joel as "The Worst Pop Singer Ever" here: http://www.slate.com/id/2209526/
And then, it became my turn.
G. Murray Thomas, who used to publish the NEXT poetry-reviews-and-events-calendar magazine, now is a reviewer for poetix.net. Recently, he reviewed a chapbook of mine called YELLOW TREE RED SKY. The review can be found at this link, along with deserved praise for a chapbook by Pasadena's Mary Torregrossa and a peeved, he's-coasting take on Billy Collins' recent BALLISTICS: http://poetix.net/reviews.htm
This is the first time I've experienced an in-print review of a book of mine--and if Murray had given it boundless praise, I would have written a blog column about it too.
Essentially, Murray disliked the book overall, while offering some praise for a couple of poems and meant-to-be-constructive criticism (which, whether taken or discarded, should always be welcomed by reviewees).
But it seems like one particular poem in the book caused an inflammation of discomfort in Murray. The poem is called "it's not just you" and I'll reprint it here:
it’s not just you
I read the news today, oh boy
about the lucky poetry venues
that made the grade
it made me kind of sad
to know you ushered me in
ten years ago
and are now letting me and others know
about the poetry venues
that are too highfalutin
for cheap entertainers like me
I remember a lot of poets
no longer active on the scene
(or in some cases not on the scene at all)
who were mainstays ten years ago
now even if a few of them came back
they probably wouldn’t be accepted
in the new poetic order
it’s not just you that’s making things clear to me
I’ve been told to get educated
and upgrade my craft to be taken seriously
but I like being a cheap entertainer
and committing the sin of being easy to understand
so it’s time for me to go quietly
into that gentle night
reserved for sig rumanns and margaret dumonts
declaiming into microphones
about their hot new pantoums
as the audiences go
mmm, mmm, mmmm
in approval
if it doesn’t make most hosts
and some audiences go
mmm, mmm, mmmm
it just isn’t poetry anymore
[The poem makes a brief reference to a column Murray wrote citing favorite LA/OC poetry venues: http://poetix.net/reviews_of_venues.htm ]
Now, let's print a few excerpts from the review to examine Murray's references to this poem:
Terry McCarty is up front about his ambitions for his poetry. In “it’s not just you” he states “I like being a cheap entertainer/ and committing the sin of being easy to understand.” This would seem a pretty easy ambition to live up to.
Yes, he is easy to understand. There is not a single poem here where I wondered, for even a second, what the poem was about. (With the possible exception of “shya lebuff,’ but that’s only because I’m not up on my pop culture -- who is Shya Lebuff anyway?) That’s fine. I’m not one who considers being easy to understand a sin in poetry. In fact, I believe that the audience should be given, at the very least, an understandable entrance into a poem.
However, if a poet makes being easy to understand their ultimate goal, he or she is usually in trouble. More on that in a minute.
But in all his poems, he refuses to go very deep. His poems skim across the surfaces of his subjects. Also in “its not just you,” he writes “I’ve been told to get educated/ and upgrade my craft to be taken seriously,” an option he rejects in favor of being the aforementioned “cheap entertainer.” While it would be easy to read this as mere laziness, I prefer to take him at his word —that his ambitions like somewhere other than “well-crafted” poems. But he seems to have confused depths of meaning with craft, and rejected it as well. The result is he prevents himself from even hitting his own modest goal.
If McCarty doesn’t want to make his audiences think, I guess that’s okay, But if that is the case, I do wonder why he’s writing poetry.
Philosophical differences aside, I do like the poetry of Murray's I've read and even recommend his one sold-in-regular-bookstores-and-Amazon compilation COWS ON THE FREEWAY.
[And, for some further context as to Murray's poetry ideals, here's a rave review for Milo Martin (ex-Onyx reading host) by Murray in this column from November of last year: http://poetix.net/reviews_1108.htm]
But I do take some exception to being called lazy (even if its just an inference) and having questions put to me as to "why" I'm writing poetry.
When I began going to open-mikes almost eleven years ago, there were coffeehouse and independent bookstore readings that made room for just about everything, like a variety show: "serious" literary poetry, traditional rhyme-and-meter verse, monologues, stand-up comedy, musicians, etc. etc. And Murray seems to have cast his lot with the hosts and influential poets in LA/OC that seem to think that only "serious" poetry should be allowed with the other subsets I mentioned above actively and/or tacitly discouraged.
I remember a few years ago at the Moonday reading at Village Books in Pacific Palisades when, after reading on the open-mike, Holaday Mason (a well-known L.A. literary poet) performed her five minutes. The late Anne Silver (then a Moonday co-host) spent a minute or two copiously praising Holaday for her work--and, to me, the message was ultraclear; I was too depth-free and craft-poor for such a distinguished reading. I got Ms. Silver's message--and never returned to the reading again.
Time to say it again: for poetry to flourish--particularly at a time when there will be renewed jeers over the idea of the arts being essential in a near-Depression economy--a big tent needs to be pitched.
It's not to be expected that all poetry will be to the liking of everyone--tastemakers, professional/amateur poets or civilians who prefer merely to attend.
But at some point the "poetry community" needs to stop pushing the poetry-eugenics nonsense that poems should be nothing more than gilded creations engineered to be admired for their complexity and intricacy--sort of like building a scale model of the QUEEN MARY in a Sparkletts jug or (to steal a phrase from the late Robert Mitchum) construct a replica of the Taj Mahal from matchsticks.
Otherwise, there's going to be an increase in boring, arid, intended-more-to-impress-than-enlighten-or-even-stoop-to-entertain "craft-conscious" word art which will likely go unremembered a month from now--let alone a decade or even a century.
[UPDATE 2/4/09: Here's an example of what I described in the last paragraph. One of Robert Pinsky's weekly poetry picks for SLATE: http://www.slate.com/id/2210318/]
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