Genre and critiques

To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and interpreters. Alastair Fowler goes so far as to suggest that 'communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre' [1]. It's difficult to separate Mainstream pieces from Genre pieces - the mainstream's only a loosely related mass of more popular genres. There are even people who look upon each piece as a unique sub-genre, self-defining a way in which it can be read. Genres make life tricky for critiquers though. Pieces by Agatha Christie or Robbe-Grillet don't have character development - should we worry? Plot-driven works like Harry Potter use character development as a filler between action scenes - is that better? Gertrude Stein's repetition and restricted vocabulary are part of her game. Were Hemingway's later mannerisms as vital?

Once you're inside a genre, sub-genres appear, sometimes replicating the genres in the higher layer. Within Science Fiction for example there's hard-SF (written by highly qualified scientists), speculative-SF (idea-driven), comic-SF, space-opera, "1984", "The Handmaid's Tale", etc. Each sub-genre has implicit rules and priorities - it's easy to pluck a paragraph from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and enrich its variety of structure and vocabulary, but doing so may well be counter-productive. There's no reason why expert scientists should make expert SF writers, though as readers they're best placed to offer the kind of factual critique which fans will appreciate much more than the rewriter's literary suggestions.

In this context where do criticisms like "sloppy writing" stand? Van Gogh's a terribly sloppy painter compared to Vermeer, and Vermeer's a mess compared to some Hyperrealists. And yet one doesn't want "it's a genre piece" to be a license for any type of writing ("so what if my story has a few spelling mistakes - so has Finnegan's Wake"). The genre competence of an experienced reader needs to be both nimble and creative. To readers who've read Fantasy and Realism but nothing in between, a piece of Magic Realism may seem an unfortunate mix falling between 2 stools.

Criticising a text might be tantamount to criticising the genre, and someone with no previous experience of the genre will have a hard job. Genre-sensitive criticism (aware of, but not subservient to, the demands of the genre) tries to relate the piece to its genre, using terms like

• "Good of its type" - a description sometimes applied to a good example in an unappreciated genre.
• "Stylist" - a writer whose elegance of prose exceeds what the genre promises (Forsythe for his spy thrillers?)

Because of this genre-related complication, some critics try to focus on factors which are common across genres. "Well-written prose" may not be a requirement for swashbuckling SF but surely there are some standards which apply to many genres. However, the value of elegant prose in itself is contestable. We're used to the idea that dialog can legitimately contain errors - after all, we're only human. The omniscient narrator is just another voice, and it's a genre issue (rather than one of quality or sophistication) as to whether that fact should be hidden. One can "show the working" - in a sense, all narrators are unreliable. A work's uniformity of narrative mode (or point of view) is also used as a supra-genre indicator of writerly skill, as is the writer's ability to make all readers think the same thing, or the author's ability to carry out his/her putative intentions. These too are genre-bound concepts though, considered ideologically suspect by some.

John Hartley argues that 'genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text' [2] . Key psychological functions of genre are likely to include those shared by categorization generally - such as reducing complexity. This is a price we pay when trying to communicate, but genres can play a role in innovation too (in "The Name of the Rose", perhaps), providing familiar ground for readers to stand on while they come to terms with the unfamiliar.

New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge

• Mutation - a variation on an existing genre: often a change in the proportions of the ingredients
• Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some hybrids may be sterile.
• Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
• New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres

As usual, once a reader strategy is identified, writers will exploit it. Readers look for categorisations that increase coherence and satisfaction. Writers such as Borges take advantage of this desire, leading the reader into one genre-context before surprising them with another. More radical genre experiments abound - "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations" [3].

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1. "A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216
2. "Cultural Studies (Studies in Culture & Communication)", O'Sullivan et al, Routledge, 1994, p.128
3. "The Ideology of Genre", Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University Press. 1994

The WWW and Literary Standards

In Acumen 24 (1995!) I wrote an article called Poetry, Technology and the Internet. Though the Web's growth has been explosive since then, it hasn't been matched by increased Quality Control. This article (an update from one in Acumen 63) looks at how such mechanisms might e-merge.

I hope I'm not oversimplifying the past too much by suggesting that once upon a time, hierarchies of periodicals, publishers and review placements established a scale of achievement. Further selection for school books, anthologies, awards, and interviews in non-literary media confirmed these indicators of quality. The people who made these choices generally did so as part of their job.

Several 20th century developments fractured this framework. In the US, many authors started working within academia, and with the growth of literary theory the poems to be studied were not always chosen for quality but for how usefully they illustrated a hypothesis. The avant-garde (particularly Modernism), sporadic popularity of performance poetry, and the influence of minority and international poetry popularised new aesthetics that sometimes diluted (or even disabled) mainstream opinion. This fragmentation of genres led to fragmentation in evaluation too. Meanwhile, the poetry book market contracted, so even less significance was attached to poetry's remaining mainstream practitioners and critics.

The Web accelerated and exaggerated these trends, and is increasingly becoming the predominant mode of distribution, but mechanisms of judgement are slower to make the switch. Prestigious web-sites have come into being mostly by prestige transfer - they're Web off-shoots of accredited print magazines or newspapers. Small press examples include Sphinx (Happenstance) and Envoi (Cinnamon), both of which have dozens of reviews online. Sites like www.reviewsofbooks have collected online book reviews which mostly come from sources originating from the paper world. The Web has produced native alternatives - sites like Ron Silliman's (whose authority depends on an individual) and Jacket (which has gained a reputation by the traditional virtues of quality and longevity). However, few web magazines have a reviews section (reviews tend to be in blogs) and there's no hierarchy of reviewing sites, no Web equivalent of "reviewed in the TLS".

As long as traditional paper bastions of canon-formation survive, the Web will have trouble establishing credentials. Prestige depends partly on longevity, which gives paper magazines an edge, and printed magazines because of cost are constrained by space which forces selectivity. If a paper magazines transfers to the WWW with the same editor and amount of material (Stride, for example) one might expect the quality and prestige to be unaffected, but the nature of readership and submissions is likely to change which in turn might have a detrimental effect. In practise, the online magazine is likely to be poorly funded and under new editorship (see the TriQuarterly story).

Each medium sometimes reviews works from the other, but the traffic's mostly one way; paper magazines might only be quarterly, and newspapers no longer have room for much poetry. As paper magazines disappear, the centre of gravity will shift towards the Web anyway but how can the migration of judgement mechanisms be managed and encouraged? Unless an effort is made to preserve informed opinion and debate, reviews will disappear, replaced by adverts or a poetry equivalent of "Richard and Judy". The respected arbiters of taste in the paper world could be singled out for assistance - they need to become visible and active on the Web, not just use e-mail and google. By committing themselves to the Web they'd enhance its authority. Pivotal institutions need encouragement to migrate web-wards in such a way that their influence isn't eroded, and grants could help key review-orientated publications to be put online.

However, the Web isn't a mirror image of the paper world. Some concepts won't translate well, and attitudes might have to change

• Popularism - The people who equate "popular" or "free" with "bad" in the paper world will need to adapt when they use the Web
• Quality - The whole notion of monolithic Quality Control is already an out-worn concept, and of course wasn't even true in the past. The Web is an excellent "word-of-mouth" medium, and there's no shortage of opinion on-line - each blog is a soapbox, and Amazon hosts thousands of opinions. This may not be a bad thing, some say - power will be snatched from the grip of a small clique - but how can consensus emerge?
• Changed Author/Reader relationship - The distance between authors and readers is reduced by social networking, thereby changing the nature of reviewing - it becomes more immediate and viral.
• Archiving - Who will archive? How will poets be rediscovered if by forgetting to renew their service-provider subscription their work disappears?
• Education - What will set-texts look like? How will copyright issues and loss of revenue be dealt with?
• Measuring success - Booksale figures will be replaced by download/hit-rates, and review-counts replaced by blog mentions, but what other criteria will be used?

Behind all this change is the issue of who pays the new "gatekeepers". I'll conclude by listing some possibilities

• Readers may have to pay for some Web publications. The TLS, PN Review and Contemporary Poetry Review already work this way to some extent, and many American magazines are available online to academics, at a price (Poetry is free but that's a special case).
• Perhaps the free-viewing/paying-for-submission model could be adopted - there's talk of using this in the academic world.
• Maybe editors could be bypassed, replaced by an online readers voting system (after all, the TLS poetry competition was run that way).

I think where paper has the advantage at the moment is the quality of the readership - people (often older people) in an influential position are likely to be paper-biased, but not for long.

Writing Book Reviews

Why review?

Contents

• Why review?
• Writing reviews
• Nasty Reviews
• Practical Problems
• Opportunities
• Responsibility and the Law
• Online Reviews
• Books and Articles

It's not easy being a critic - you might be the first person ever to read a work which might be a masterpiece or a mess. But someone has to do it for the sake of literary standards. The signs are that criticism isn't all it used to be.

• In an April 2005 Guardian piece, Paul Farley said that his generation (those born in the sixties) got 'marketing not criticism'.
• Amanda Craig (MsLexia) feels that "the popularity of weblogs and reading groups springs in part from the distrust many readers feel for literary critics".
• Robert Fogarty in The New York Sun (June 29th 2007) wrote "The collapse of the book reviewing structure is emblematic of the technological and cultural changes that have occurred in America over the last couple of decades. These changes have led the National Book Critics Circle to launch an initiative to save book reviewing as a genre".
• Bruce Bawer wrote "On the American poetry scene these days, the only thing rarer than a fine poem is a negative review."
• In "Columbia Journalism Review" (Sept / Oct 2007 issue) Steve Wasserman (ex L.A. Times book review editor) wrote "Over the past year, and with alarming speed, newspapers across the country have been cutting back their book coverage and, in some instances, abandoning the beat entirely."
• In 1999, Jay Parini in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" wrote about the state of contemporary newspaper book reviewing - "Evaluating books has fallen to ordinary, usually obscure, reviewers ... Too often, the apparent slightness of the review leads inexperienced reviewers into swamps of self-indulgence from which they rarely emerge with glory."

In this age of hype and puffs we need more quality reviews, and more people reading reviews. We also need more reviewers. Perhaps you've never thought of writing reviews, or don't know how, or don't know the markets. I think review writing is good for you. Why?

• free books!
• makes you read more carefully
• helps you assess your own work more critically
• helps you get friendly with editors so that they're more likely to accept your stories and poems.

I think reviews are an important and neglected literary genre - an art in its own right. In the States this is recognised in the form of the annual Randall Jarrell Award which gives $10,000 for poetry criticism that is "intelligent and learned, as well as lively and enjoyable to read".

But there are minus points too

• "Burdensome artistically, exhausting over time ... poetry reviewing is an enterprise only a few people ever do credibly or well, and then rarely for long periods", Mary Kinzie, "Poetry", January 2004.
• There's a view that if you can't write, you become a critic - "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." - Ken Tynan. "The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write." - JB Priestley (quotes collected by stas wnukowski)
• Authors are liable to seek revenge. Lord Archer sends reviewers letters via his lawyers. Anthony Burgess put a reviewer into his next novel on a "Wanted" poster. Chrichton in "State of Fear" put a reviewer in as a character with small genitals. Jeanette Winterson has been known phone reviewers and to turn up late at night to berate them. Norman Mailer punched Gore Vidal because of a negative review. Vidal supposedly responded by saying "Once again words fail Norman Mailer".
• Reviews can kill! Well, Byron thought so. He became obsessed by the idea that Keats died from a burst blood vessel after receiving a savage review in "The Quarterly". Would you want to live with Keats' death on your conscience? Even if reviews don't kill, they can hurt. Writers are sensitive people. In The Anglo-Welsh Review, Winter 1967, Roland Mathias wrote "apart from a tendency to look back in pretty general terms, and to muse on the night or the wind or lost friends, he has nothing very much to say - all is grandiose, vague and over-spoken". He says some kinder things later on, but what he said was enough to stop the poet in question (a friend of mine) writing for decades.
• Not everyone likes reviewers.
  • Artists don't like them: "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs." - Christopher Hampton. "If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter." - Chekhov. "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me." - Max Reger
  • Some Publishers don't rate them. Some publishers say they only push hardbacks for review because they want quotes to print on the paperback cover. Steve Wasserman says that "their own marketing surveys consistently show that most people who buy books do so not on the basis of any review they read, nor ad they've seen, but upon word of mouth. What's worse is that most people who buy books, like most people who watch movies, don't read reviews at all."
  • Some Booksellers don't like them. Scott Pack (Waterstone's buying supremo) writing in "The Bookseller" thought that broadsheet book pages were dull, out of date, lacking diversity and not much good for selling books.
  • Not all Reviewers like them! Amanda Craig in a recent MsLexia wrote "When I first became a published novelist in 1990, I did not realized [sic] just how mired with politics and corruption the reviewing business was". She pointed out that peer pressure's strong - "There are only about 100 regular reviewers for the national press, and sooner or later we all meet" - and that "Men review, and are reviewed, differently ... Women only get to review books by other women - or, once in a while, gay men".

Writing reviews

But let's not dwell on the downside. Reviews can be good to write, good to read, and good for culture in general. Before we look at writing reviews, I think we should consider the readers. Do you read reviews? Why? What are reviews for?

• so people can decide if the book's worth reading
• to help the writer
• to advertise books
• to explain the book to the reader
• to encourage people to buy books
• to be a good read - after all, most of the audience will never read/see the reviewed item, they'll only read the review.

What should a review contain? Well, reviews can be short announcements or long analyses. Usually they contain the following information

• publishing details
• extracts
• description of the plot (Some people will buy any novel set in ancient Rome, or anything involving orphans, etc)
• description of style/genre
• a judgement
• description of target audience
• background about the author and their previous works?
• cultural context - if the book comes from Greece (say) perhaps the review should say something about the Greek literary scene?

I'd claim that a lot of this isn't difficult. Judgement may be, and it's difficult to be selective about what to say while remaining readable. What shouldn't a review do?

• merely advertise - if a magazine is going to review a book they might contact the publisher asking if they'd like to advertise. Sometimes it's the publisher who makes first contact - "we'll give you a good review if you advertise".
• give a false representation
• be aimed at the wrong audience.
• let the reviewer show off - though reviews shouldn't be boring, I don't think they should have too much fun at an author's expense.

Nasty Reviews

Savage reviews sell newspapers and make the critic (usually male) a feared - hence powerful - person. Rousseau wrote a poem called "Ode to Posterity". Voltaire said "I do not think this poem will reach its destination". Maybe Voltaire was right, but posterity sometimes has the last laugh

• the book "appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine" (The Sporting Times, 1922 - of Ulysses)
• "the work of a drunken savage" (Voltaire - of Hamlet)
• "crazy, mystical metaphysics... the endless wilderness of dull, flat prosaic twaddle" (Macaulay - of Wordsworth)
• "The phrenzy of the Poems was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion. We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable." (Lockhart - of Keats (from Blackwood's))

Writing about the living takes some courage. Would you write these?

• "The execution would embarrass a conscientious GCSE student: XXX teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia" (Acumen May 2006, p.93)
• "nothing could prepare us for the tendentiousness, the unjustified formlessness, the ghastliness, of Haddon's verse" (The Guardian, Nov 2005)

John Updike's first rule of reviewing is "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt". It's not a rule that should always be followed, but ignoring it can lead to unfair criticism - a book for children should be judged as such.

Practical Problems

Given enough space, time and security, it's not so hard to write an informative, readable review. Many of the difficulties when review-writing are less to do with what to write than with personal and commercial pressures.

• Space - Reviews must compete with other material for column inches. Often reviewers have to use shorthand ("Chandleresque", etc). It's a particular problem with poetry or short-story collections. In practise, the reviews editor is sent dozens of books. Often they'll send a bunch to a reviewer asking them to write about 3 of them in 300 words. This gives them the chance to pick a mixture of good and bad pieces, or pieces on a theme. The ability to find themes and similarities helps when trying to make a multi-work review flow. It's especially important when reviewing poetry/story collections.
• Audience - Coupled with the space issue is that of your intended audience. As the space devoted to reviews in mainstream publications shrinks, the temptation to dumb-down and compete for attention strengthens, though can be resisted. Steve Wasserman wrote that he "wanted the Book Review to cover books the way the paper's excellent sports section covered the Dodgers and the Lakers: with a consummate respect for ordinary readers' deep knowledge and obvious passion for the games and characters who played them. ... Its editors neither condescended nor pandered to those of the paper's readers who didn't happen to love sports"
• Editors - Sheenagh Pugh (Facebook 1/3/15) wrote "I've sent a lukewarm review and been asked to make it more enthusiastic, because the editor thought the poet was a rising star. I said I couldn't and the editor sent it for review elsewhere. I've also been asked in advance whether I liked an anthology; I said I did and the editor wrote back that in that case he'd get someone else to review it because he wanted it slated."
• Balancing a personal response with an impersonal opinion
• Spoilers - it can be hard to review whodunit plots
• Having to review books you don't like (some major magazines don't give reviewers a choice). The writers can't defend themselves, so should you show restraint? Damn with faint praise?
• Fear of being taken too seriously - You may think you're only giving your opinion. Others may think your views are more significant than that: "what right have you to say whether the book is good or bad?", they say. The question should be addressed to the Editor.
• Fear of making enemies. Editors won't always check your work or back you up - they may enjoy a lively letters column. In the "London Review of Books", 22nd September 2005, Eric Griffiths (Trinity College, Cambridge) had a letter about Helen Vendler's review of his book on Dante. "Helen Vendler (LRB, 1 September) does not like the way I write; I can't blame her, there are days I don't like it myself. But there it is, we can't all have her style. I in my turn deplore the way she reads - Vendler fears that I will think her 'humourless and pedantic'. Let me assure her that nobody could accuse her of pedantry."

Opportunities

Who should write reviews? Usually only published poets write poetry reviews, but I don't think one needs to be a novelist to review novels - certainly one doesn't have to be a famous (or even good) novelist. Though children write reviews of children's books, parents usually do. Non-writers have some advantages when reviewing

• They're not constrained by the genre they write in (SF authors aren't taken seriously when they review non-SF)
• They needn't fear revenge from writer-reviewers. Herbert Leibowitz - editor of Parnassus for nearly thirty years - wrote "what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers".

But it's an understandable reaction. W.G. Sebald said "I think it is totally wrong if writers review each other's books. I find that idiotic, Truly idiotic", (Pretext 7, 2003 p.22). So I think there's hope for us all. Remember, you needn't be beautiful to judge beauty competitions. Some US publications insist (contractually) that the reviewer has no strong connection with the author, but in specialist areas (and UK poetry) that distancing is hard to obtain.

But where are the outlets? Even a little literary magazine like Ambit gets over 1000 books a year to review, but very few of them get a mention. Newspapers give ever less space to poetry reviews. The situation's not so bad with novels. Options open to us include

• Amazon (online bookseller)
• Small magazines - editors say that good reviewers are rare, and that they burn out. "Acumen" even ran a regular reviews competition for a while (with free entry!) to find new talent. Reviews are mostly about poetry and genred prose. Note that most small mags want to encourage, so they tend not to publish slating reviews. "Staple" for example wants reviews that "focus on the work rather than an overt display of the reviewer's erudition and opinion" and are "generally positive, though absolutely not anodyne and ultimately will engage the reader enough to interest them in reading the whole book."
• BBC Radio 5's book reviews on Monday afternoon let you give reviews live over the phone!
• Rattle poetry magazine is prepared to send you a book if you send back a review. See their list of books available. Tarpaulin Sky do likewise

You might start with local, free publications. Note that many people offer their services as Film Reviewers. If you have a specialist subject, exploit it. As ever, one needs to study the market. Julie Eccleshare in "A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels" notes that "Reviews of children's books in the UK are rarely other than positive". Other markets may be different!

I'm told that it's common for would-be reviewers to offer their services, sending in examples of their work. Strangely, men do this much more than women do. I think editors want critics who are well read and have sound judgement. They want reviews that readers want to read even if they're not interested in buying books. And I suspect they prefer controversy to sitting on the fence. If you get poems/stories (and especially letters/articles) printed in magazines, there's a chance you'll be asked to review by the editor. If you put some reviews online you'll sometimes be offered books to review.

Note that magazines usually receive just one review copy, which the reviewer keeps, so the editor doesn't have a chance to check the reviews (in particular the accuracy of the quotes). So take care.

Gender might be an issue. David Wheatley pointed out that the Summer 2008 issue of Poetry Review contained reviews of 20 men's books and 21 by women. All 20 of the men's books were reviewed by men, and all 21 of the women's books were reviewed by women.

Responsibility and the Law

Some magazines (the TLS at times) publish anonymous reviews. This side-steps some of the problems faced by reviewers, but can also lead to irresponsible reviewing. One needs to be aware of the legal situation (e.g. the 1996 Defamation Act). Libel is the publication of a statement which exposes a person to:

• Hatred, ridicule or contempt
• or which causes him to be shunned or avoided
• or which has a tendency to injure him in his office, trade or profession

in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally. If you start writing about the author rather than their work, you may be straying into dangerous territory. Writing something that might damage the author's sales could be risky too. Authors tend not to take legal action (they know what happened to Whistler and Wilde) but there are exceptions. For example, Dan Moldea sued the New York Times for $10 million, claiming that a review damaged his reputation. He won, but the NYT successfully appealed.

Online Reviews

• complete review
• Contemporary Poetry Review
• The Critical Flame
• Echo from the Canyon
• Happenstance Reviews
• Jacket
• Rattle reviews
• Reviews of Books
• The English Assocation Poetry Reviews
• Tower poetry reviews
• Tim Love's reviews - a review of "How do you spell Bl...gh?" was published in Staple, and reviews of Bonnefoy and Etter appeared in Poetry Nottingham
• Reviews of short story collections (from "story")
• the short review
• WritingForums.Org - forums about how to review, etc

Books and Articles

• "Writing Reviews", Carole Baldock, How To Books Ltd, 1996
• "Are we being served?", Amanda Craig, Mslexia, Jul-Sep, 2005
• "Critics, Ratings and Society : The Sociology of Reviews", Grant Blank, 2007 ("the first full-length study of reviews" - THES)
• "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (George Orwell) - "The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews - 1,000 words is a bare minimum - to the few that seem to matter."
• A.L. Kennedy's responses to reviews of her books
• "'Terrible Things': The In-Clubs of Poetry Criticism" - in Wolf 15, 2007
• "Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America", Gail Pool, University of Missouri Press, 2007
• National Book Critics Circle (see their tips, and their Blog)
• "The Death of the Critic", Ronan McDonald, Continuum, 2008 (a plea for more expert, evaluative (academic?) critics)
• The Future of Book Coverage (from The Millions)

Blindspots

"You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse" - Tolstoy to Chekhov

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me" - Nabokov

I've been wondering whether the "I don't like it" vs "I don't get it" distinction is if not artificial then at least unknowable (to self and others). Or which predispositions and situations make people say one rather than the other, what the motives and consequences might be.

"I don't like it" vs "I don't get it"

Can this distinction be made? Sometimes surely, but it depends on the context.

• Social situation - In the tutor/pupil situation perhaps it's easier for the tutor to say "I don't like it" and the pupil to say "I don't get it". In judges' reports you might not often see lines quoted that the judge admits to not understanding. Of course contestants are happy to accept that judges have preferences, but if they have unadvertised biases it's more awkward. Perhaps judges should be more upfront about their blindspots beforehand, or return the entry fees of poems that they feel unqualified to judge :-). As a ploy they might be prepared to say that a particular poem is "good of its type" but then dismiss that type for reasons they don't explain.
• The Artist - it's easier to admit to blindspots about some artists than others. Stockhausen, Larkin, Prynne, and Olds are fair game. However a dislike or incomprehension of Neruda might be viewed with more suspicion. Perhaps there are poets for whom the only acceptable reason for disliking them is that you don't understand them - to know them is to love them, though they may be difficult to get to know. Shakespeare? Geoffrey Hill?

In practise the distinction might just be another way of saying something else - whether you'd bother re-reading the work, for example. Maybe "I don't get it" can mean "I don't like it but famous people do, so I'm inadequate".

There are some poets' work I find easy to like but hard to love (Glyn Maxwell maybe). There are poems I'd rather read about than read (Les Murray's maybe). If I understand and like a poem I may not agree with it (it may be a Political poem, for example) but that's a different matter.

Attitudes to Blindspots

I heard Philip Hensher (novelist and reviewer) being interviewed recently, saying that he didn't get Ian McEwan's work and hence didn't review it. I think he said he was happy to accept that people had blind spots - big ones even. But perhaps he doesn't really like McEwan's novels. Such meta-judgements are going to be error-prone though. I'm not keen on Olson. I'd go so far to say that I think he's more important than good, that I don't have a blindspot as far as he's concerned. Whereas I think there's more to Heaney than meets my eye.

Moreso than judges, magazine editors can afford to have blindspots - they're what give their magazines character. Practising writers perhaps have the most license. Even so there may be repercussions. Nabokov said - "[music] I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds". With the benefit of medical advances we'd tend to label this as a medical condition, a handicap. But Nabokov's admission didn't affect his work's reception. Larkin's dislike of modern jazz is treated more as a personality defect, though some people read aesthetic limitations into it. I prefer even "Frankie goes to Hollywood" to Mozart. Ok, so I like some JS Bach, Barber's Adagio, Bartok's quartets, but surely my statement exposes a lack of taste.

de gustibus non disputandum - but career poets had better not advertise too many of their poetry blindspots if they want to judge competitions, or if they don't want to discourage people coming to their workshops.

How to fake it

Whether the blindspot's related to emotion, empathy or intellect there may be remedies. Firstly there may be an underlying perception problem - if you're totally colourblind you're not going to be able to respond to blue or even "blue". Readers won't see syllabics unless they count the syllables, and some readers don't listen to the sound of the words. Sometimes these perceptual deficits are due to inattention and can be remedied.

But the problems may lie deeper. Psychology tests nowadays can reveal all kinds of individual quirks in our visual and language processing. The effects show up in contrived laboratory conditions. In everyday life we manage to compensate for them - e.g. the face-blind pay more attention to gait, clothes, etc. It's not surprising that poetry would reveal individual differences in apprehension. I think my poetry appreciation is a patchwork of blindspots - from poem to poem or even from line to line. I approach texts with a mishmash of innate and learnt behaviours, but usually act as if the unevenness is all in the text.

How can one compensate? Give a computer enough examples of so-called good and bad art (in a limited field) and pattern-matching software can often judge future examples pretty well (though it may not be able to give explanations). You can train yourself in the same way - working by analogy and general principles. In poetry, where there's a wide range of tastes anyway, it's not too hard to bluff one's way through one genre or facet of poetry, especially if you've acquired credibility in other genres. Indeed, opinions by newcomers and outsiders might prove valuable. If I were to judge Mr World I might well make a less controversial decision than if I were judging Miss World - fewer hormones and idiosyncrasies get in the way, and I'd use more general principles and cliches/archetypes.

Can fakery be detected? It's not as simple as that. For a start, some people think that any use of the intellect rather than the heart is "faking it". Also one can begin by faking it then end up loving it. But if poets on R4's Saturday Review or BBC2's Review Night say that some Art Exhibition's "Extraordinary" (inarticulate gushing being a common enough strategy to cover ignorance) it would be interesting to see if they subsequently go to similar exhibitions. Maybe. Maybe eventually it's possible reach the stage when one can say (as amateurs also do) "I like all sorts of poetry as long as it's good" and get away with it, but I don't see the point.

The language of reviews

• Blurbs are one thing, and review another, but they share vocabularies at least - Vitally Urgent: The Game of Blurb is fun.
• Here are some extracts from 2 reviews in "Envoi" issue 151 (2008).

  June Hall reviewing June English	Jan Fortune-Wood reviewing Nigel McLoughlin
  "dares"	"daring"
  "brims with energy"	"brimming with energy"
  "authentic"	"authenticity"
  "sharp eye for detail"	"attention to detail"
  "vivid"	"vividly"
  "ironic", "irony"	"irony"
  "sentimental"	"sentimental"
  "exploration"	"explored"
  "juxtaposition"	"juxtapose"

  In addition the pieces include some other standard review features

  	June Hall reviewing June English	Jan Fortune-Wood reviewing Nigel McLoughlin
  clichés	"chronicling", "evocative", "challenging"	"within the themes that both weave and compete within and between the sections", "at once familiar and strange"
  self-repetition	"captures her bewilderment", "are caught by", "catches the rage"	"dissonance(s)" 4 times, "resonate with a stance towards language", "resonate across the discord"

• I sometimes get the impression that there aren't many things to say about poetry, so one needs to resort to metaphors to add variety, to make the review more readable. And often reviewers, even good ones, have to tell rather than show because of space constraints. For example, Judy Brown in "Poetry Review V103:4 (Winter 2013)" values
  • exactness and precision - "engineering exactness", "carefully laid trail of thematic markers, "how precisely they achieve their friable effects"
  • structural order and control - "the thematic patterning is surprisingly insistent", "The formal and syntactical control is resolute", "sound drives the construction of his poems, creating a distinctive, allusive architecture", "poems ... unfold on syntactical recipes using repetition"
  She writes that "Names are a common trick in contemporary poetry, but Warner is doing something entirely individual, far more to do with sound and widening the screen, than the usual stab at specificity and grounding". An example might have helped.
• Menus and reviews share a style -
  • "a subtle hint of truffle"
    Why "subtle" rather than "slight" or simply "weak"? The same trick is used in poetry reviews, especially with comic verse written by famous, non-comic poets. "weak" implies a lack (in quality or quantity) of ingredients. "subtle" is more to do with perception than final significance. It describes something that's hard to initially discern, perhaps because there's little worth discerning (i.e. the effect is weak), but it may describe something that though well masked has a strong effect once it's detected (e.g. a sigh that means so much). You need to be an astute observer/taster to notice something subtle - the recipient is being flattered by the writer.
  • "Rutland beef in a white sauce"
    Why not "beef in white sauce"? Detail and particularity are valued in poems. In poetry it won't do to give someone a flower, or see a bird pull at a worm. Use African pansies, and magpies. There might not be significance in the choice of detail - in this menu example the extra "a" adds no information, and there's no reason why Rutland beef should be prized. What matters is the evident attention to detail - a reason for the poetry reader to be optimistic.
  • "with a smooth articulation of aftertastes"
    Beware when a word representing an admired quality in one context is used in quite another. Wine in particular needs to import terms, given the limited range of raw materials at its disposal. As soon as more than one factor is involved in a meal or poem, terms can be used from other domains (often engineering) to indicate successful integration - cogs meshing, etc.
  • "clean-flavoured, relaxed, precise cooking"
    Precision is valued in many disciplines. Poetry precision is harder to define and measure than precision of musical performance or realistic art (look no further than the tolerance granted to line-breaks), and yet poetry reviewers, even good ones, praise exactness without explaining the term.

In The Poet Tasters Ben Etherington noted a uniformity of structure in the reviews he read -

More often than not, reviews follow this formula:
1. Introduce the volume, the poet and their previous publications.
2. Describe the poet’s overall aesthetic with reference to European and / or North American antecedents.
3. Quote approvingly from two or three choice poems with some technical commentary.
4. Express reservations about one or two poems.
5. Affirm, nevertheless, the worthiness of the volume as a whole.

A template I often see is a review that begins with an observation about poetry, then shows how it relates to the book in question. My current pile of magazines-to-read has examples. Here are 3 starts -

• When you are young, and full of verse, there seem so many subjects for poems: the self, the other, the leaf on the pavement, the scent of the mock orange: all present themselves as thrilling and new. And when you are old, for many poets, the world fills again with the urgency of imminent loss, and you enter another phase of intense creativity. But in between there is middle age: the era of responsibility, and consistency, and matrimony, and parenting, and imminent not much - Kate Clancy, The Poetry Review, V103:4, p.104
• In 2004, Dr James Kaufman of California State University published his study into the varying lifespans of writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Along with statistical evidence suggesting that the business of poetry contrived to bump off poets at an average age of sixty-two (four years earlier than novelists), Kaufman concluded that "Poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their twenties as novelists do". While novelists of the late modern period were shown to improve through a good long stewing, poets of the same era tended to flash fry, then overcook themselves - Jack Underwood, The Poetry Review, V103:4, p.125
• Do writers describe places, or create them in their work? Perhaps that question should be can writers describe real places, or must they write them into existence? - Matt Ward, New Walk 10

Mixed Reviews

How should one deal with reviews and critiques that don't all agree?

Books dealing with the issue

• Many years ago I.A. Richards wrote "Practical Criticism" (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929) in which he analysed the comments of a group of students who blind-read poetry.
• I think P. Hobsbaum in "Theory of Criticism" also covered this issue. He suggested that a good poem can support many interpretations (indeed, benefits from them) whereas a bad poem can't.

Critics vary because there are

• Inarticulate critics - people who can't find the right words for what they feel. I think in general critical language lags behind the works it tries to describe, but in any case, critics are more articulate in some areas than others (e.g. maybe some are sensitive to rhythm without having the terminology for it)
• Insensitive critics - Critics are likely to be more sensitive to some aspects of a work than to other aspects (and quite often they're more articulate about the aspects they respond to more strongly). When I use the word "sensitive" I don't mean just a traditional emotional reaction - people can be blind to form, the value of generative devices, etc. Critics may be unaware of their blind spots.
• Biased critics - Again, this is a limitation we all have to a lesser or greater extent. I think I tend to be a cynical critic: a shit-detector
• Inexperienced critics - It may be that better critics agree with each other more than worse critics do. Alternatively, "Lesser critics try to normalize, to chastise the poem for straying outside the expected parameters. Bad poets want to be certain more than they want to explore where a poem might be going" - Mike Alexander

A particular poem's best feature might be one that a particular critic's insensitive to but articulate about.

Comments vary because

• Some poems are prone to multiple-readings
• People misread poems or miss things (e.g. that the poem's an acrostic). People can correct themselves if they have a chance, and they should be given a chance (rather than being told they're wrong).
• People have different styles of commenting - I tend to deal with pattern before content. Others look for a human-interest angle first, etc. Some people ignore previous comments, others try to summarise views so far. Some people like saying the opposite of what others (perhaps particular others) say.

Convergence proceeds by

• Reducing the number of opinions. Sometimes a person's misreadings can be corrected, or minor differences ignored.
• Reducing the scope of differences - sometimes it's not the whole poem that attracts contrasting opinion but just a stanza (or final line)

In an interpretive community (a workshop) the various types of critic can be mutually beneficial - articulate critics can provide phrases for the inarticulate; the cynic can bring to light features that were overlooked in a gush of praise, etc. An online community is a miniature, accelerated version of culture at large.

Group dynamics has long been a subject for psychologists. Cults led by charismatic leaders (Jim Jones, Kuresh) might form one model for literary groups, as might self-help therapy groups. Obedience and conformance have been investigated. Some groups by their nature will contain people who dislike disagreement. Literary groups (like protest groups, etc) might attract those who are comfortable with lively debate - people join because they like being different. Asch's classic experiments have shown how easily people can deny the evidence of their own eyes when assessing something objective, submitting to the majority opinion. With poetry, where judgement is more subjective, more socially-defined, some people want the certainty that authority can provide, and trust the "leader".

Work has also been done to see how minorities can influence majority opinion. Flexible negotiation is best when differences are large. If differences are small, the minority often succeed best if they rigidly stick to their guns, though this risks accusations of dogmaticism.

A minority in a literary group can often hold views (about obscurity, obscenity, etc) which are held by a majority in society as a whole.

Another documented effect is that of "group polarization" where the group comes to an opinion that is in the same direction as the individual opinions, but more extreme (lingering self-doubts abated).

Online/Offline workshops

• It can be hard in a workshop context (especially amongst strangers?) to decide how to act upon contrasting comments. In a room it's easier to be one's own facilitator and to find out whether people in the light of the discussion have changed/converged their views.
• In an online forum one's never sure whether a critic has taken in what others have said. In a room, everyone hears all the comments and maybe there's more of a tendency to clump into factions even if there's no consensus.

How Facilitators can help

Though a diversity of interpretations is to be welcomed, it can be confusing. Facilitators can help by weeding out erroneous interpretations, consolidating similar interpretations, generalising interpretations, and trying to reduce the influence of egos on the course of discussions.

Richards (p.13) prioritised areas of interpretational difficulties as follows (note - the subgroups are mine)

• "Making out the plain sense", "Sensuous apprehension" - these concern recognition (we could perhaps add recognition of allusions to this). As Richards says (p.336) "Language is primarily a social product, and it is not surprising that the best way to display its action is through the agency of a group... We must cease to regard a misreading as a merely unlucky accident. We must treat it as the normal and probable event". By sharing perceptions a workshop can reduce the differences between members. The sooner this is done the better - sometimes a misinterpretation based on false initial perceptions remains even after the perceptions have been corrected.
• "Imagery" (especially visual), "Mnemonic irrelevances" (misleading personal allusions), "Stock Responses", "Sentimentality/Inhibition", "Doctrinal Adhesions" (e.g. the truth of political poems) - these concern reactions. There's more scope for individual differences. A workshop can help point out where reactions are idiosyncratic, but with these issues opinions can rarely be termed right or wrong. Much of the discussion is likely to be centred around these issues.
• "Technical presupposition", "General critical preconceptions" - Preconceptions lie behind the interpretations offered, and one of the benefits of workshops is that members can become aware of their preconceptions. But whereas people might in the course of a session change their opinion about an issue in the second subgroup, general preconceptions might take much longer to dislodge. The facilitators' aim is not so much to change preconceptions, but to challenge them enough for other preconceptions to be given a chance, thus widening aesthetic sensibilities.

Workshop poets usually want to know if their poem's any good and what parts they should re-write. A group can agree on the merit of a poem and which parts need work even if the members' justification of their opinions vary widely. In these cases facilitators can focus on outcomes.

The use and abuse of literary theory

Theory

The cute thing about knowing lots of theory is that you can use it to prove whatever you like - you can applaud "clarity" or you can mock its naivity; you can claim that disorganisation is amateurish or that it emulates our troubled times; a joke can be "weak" or "subtle" depending on how you like your humour served. There's a workshop exercise where one first gets the group to "objectively" list the technical features of a poem, then breaks the group into 2 - one subgroup being told to use these features to show why the poem's good, and the other subgroup using the same features to show why the poem's so bad. It's fun.

Fashion plays a role here. One of the more common swings in taste involves what might broadly be termed "flashiness" (or "foregrounding language and technique") versus transparency - sometimes Donne is a showman, sometimes Larkin's inhibited. With some writers (topically Derrida) opinion can remain divided for decades.

Much depends on context - the context of a trope in a poem, of a poem in a book. If one reads a poem as a peep-hole into society or psychology then a poem can be seen simultaneously as "interesting", "useful" and "bad". A poem that we thought was written in 1890 suddenly becomes a different poem when we find it was written yesterday. In some contexts the confessional authenticity of the poem matters.

Justifying

Students are sometimes told to make a list of good and bad points, and base evaluations on that, but in practice judgement often precedes reasons. Judges do this when delivering sentences, teachers do this when marking a pile of essays, people do it when sizing up people, and poetry-readers do it. There's a school of philosopy that recognises this "gut reaction" approach - American Pragmatism. If the reasons that critics give are post-rationalisations, then it's often insufficient to refute the evidence that the judgement was based on. The critics merely substitute a new set of post-rationalisations.

Workshops

In the general context of a workshop some poems are critiqued in the context of the poet's oeuvre - the poem of a good poet who posts his/her first humerous piece is more likely to be thought subtle than weak. And in this age where unless we keep improving we're going nowhere, poets plateau at their peril. In a workshop more than elsewhere, I think intentionality is relevant - if a poet is trying to (or even seems to be trying to) write a serious poem but it appears to readers as a funny poem, I think the mismatch is worthy of note. Genre identification matters - a poem for children should be read as such, initially at least. Theoretical/technical considerations need to be applied in workshops, but with more than the usual caution, and there might be a clear difference between the nature of the criticism given to Formalist and non-Formalist work.

Formalist/Free Verse

Though both styles of verse can be analysed using the concepts of rhythm, metaphor, alliteration, repetition, voice, etc, the priorities assigned to these concepts are often different. You could apply these concepts in the same way to both Pope and Prynne (and WCW?) just as you can apply the concept of draughtmanship to Raphael and Warhol, but it's inefficient.

Some decry the lack of technique in free verse and in free verse criticism. There's a tendency to consider formalist poetry "higher" than free verse which in turn is more elevated than prose. This tendency to "elevate" is there in the general public (9/11; Lady Di's death) but also within poems, where at crucial moments some lines rise majestically from their surroundings - for example, a final rhyming couplet in an unrhymed poem. Whether one allows such stylistic variety within a single poem is another matter of taste. There's a matching valorisation of the corresponding types of criticism - the close reading used for formal pieces might be considered the highest form of criticism. Yet it's easy for beginners to be "technical" when dealing with Formalist poetry - they just count the dumdees. If discussion proceeds beyond that, it might well go onto another "technical" topic involving sonics. When discussing free verse I suspect that other effects have greater prominence and more space is taken up by what some might not even call technique - outward-looking discussion of class, race, gender, etc.

Though I think Derrida used Formalist poems much more than free verse poems in his examples, I suspect that in general this attention isn't reciprocated. My guess is that in practise non-Formalist criticism when compared with Formalist criticism uses more theoretical/technical considerations that also could be applied to wider spheres - other uses of language, and other cultural/idealogical considerations. For example, free-form has at its disposal a range linguistic effects that are also used in prose - rapid tonal shifts, quotes, etc - but are hard to deploy in Formalist works, where the restrictions often impose more uniformity than is strictly necessary. The sound/spelling-based "techniques" may not need to be as central to poetry nowadays as they used to be.

In Formalist work the choice of form is sometimes questioned, but (I feel) not often enough. The odd rhyme or line of meter may be effective but much of the rest is there for the ride (similarly in free-form, a poem may have an effective line-break or 2, seemingly forcing all the other lines to have line-breaks in similar places). Free verse might not be as unstructured as it seems. Structuring may be over-rated anyway (I found "Modernist Form" (J. S. Childs) and "Problems and poetics of the nonaristotelian novel" (Leonard Orr) useful eye-openers). Also it seems to me that readers nowadays sometimes decide early into a poem to ignore the line-breaks, essentially reading the piece as prose, but reading more carefully. Perhaps we shouldn't get worked up about gratuitous line-breaks: blame the editors who don't accept prose-poems rather than blame the poets.

Over-theorizing

Theorizing can have a detrimental affect on one's writing. For a start, it can make you realise that you're writing rubbish. I've found theory useful when

• it helps me begin to appreciate something that's otherwise too alien for me to get a handle on
• it helps me understand the source of my prejudices, limitations and misconceptions
• I can use it to debunk the un-thought-through theories of others. Statistics can debunk the pretentious/opinionated views produced by lazy theorists and critics alike.
• I can use it as an alternative to reading the source material (a poor alternative of course, but sometimes all I have time for)
• it comes up with quirkly findings that I can use - a study of verbs in poetry showed that "The great change in the last five centuries is the loss of 'find', 'tell', 'think', and the gain of 'hear', 'fall', 'lie'" - I could make a poem out of that.

References

Finally, 3 quotes on the value and multiplicity of criticism

• "if it is indeed the case that people approach literature with the desire to learn something about the world, and if it is indeed the case that the literary medium is not transparent, then a study of its non-transparency is crucial in order to deal with the desire one has to know something about the world by reading literature", Salusinszky, "Criticism in Society", Methuen, 1987, p.166
• "We appreciate most works in part, some in so far as they correspond to our own predilections, others to the extent that we can recreate them in our own terms. But this is not the way in which we appreciate a masterpiece", P. Hobsbaum, "Theory of Criticism", Indiana University Press, 1970, p.30
• Criticism "might contribute in a modest way to our very survival", "Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism", T.Eagleton, NLB, 1981,p.124