When was the last time you read a truly scathing review of a book of poetry? What was your reaction to it? Anger that someone would go out of their way to trash another poet? Or did you respect the reviewer for taking a stand on their beliefs about what good poetry is? As the Kenyon Review Online continues to grow, it will offer more and more book reviews, so this got me thinking about the negative review and why it exists. Or doesn’t exist, as the case seems to be.
I spent some time cruising through the websites of journals that I know regularly run reviews (Poetry, Boston Review, Rain Taxi, etc.) and through the miscellaneous journals I have around the house, looking for negative reviews. It was slim pickings. The closest I got was Joel Brouwer’s review of J. Allyn Rosser’s second book Foiled Again in the March 2008 issue of Poetry. He praises her first book, and claims that in essence she tried to repeat herself in the follow-up and in doing so she has lost the magic of the original. But that was one review out of about thirty that I scanned through. Why so few negative reviews?
There are some pretty obvious reasons: it’s no secret that most reviewers of poetry are poets themselves, and understandably people want to avoid making waves, or even possibly damaging the careers of others. Also, why would a reviewer choose to spend time with a book that they didn’t like? Isn’t it much more rewarding to recommend to the reading public work that you believe in? I am relatively new to writing book reviews; I’ve published a number of them, and they were all books that I chose to write about and that I enjoyed. Each time it was a great pleasure to spend an extended time with the book and to get a chance to explain why I thought the poems were worthwhile. Perhaps this is another factor why negative reviews are scarce: maybe many poets are casual participants in reviewing books, and only have the time, interest or energy to review a few books a year, so they are especially disinclined to review work they don’t like. Or, since reviewing is an entirely different skill than writing poems, maybe casual reviewers don’t feel like they have the prose chops to write a negative review.
My impression of negative reviews (granted this is only based on the journals that are on my radar) is that they are often written by people who do lots of reviewing. I’m thinking of poet/critics like Stephen Burt, Dan Chiasson, Peter Campion, W.S. Di Piero and William Logan (once referred to by a former teacher of mine as “an assassin”). This makes sense: if you adopt reviewing as part of your identity as a writer, you are more likely to want to establish an aesthetic that is yours, with some work falling inside your personal canon, and some falling outside. There is also this: if you have a regular reviewing gig at a magazine, you might be assigned to review certain books, or at least have a limited range of choices, as opposed to a casual reviewer who can pick any book they want, write a review of it and shop it around after it’s done.
The fact is that we need negative reviews. If book reviews basically become the same thing as a really long blurb, then the whole enterprise of reviewing would be extremely silly. This is certainly no call for more negative reviews, but I think that taking a stand against something can be just as important as advocating for something. If negative reviews can stay above of the fray of bitchiness and cliquishness, they can remind us that poetry matters enough to take a public stand against trends you see as detrimental to the art. Or, at the very least, negative reviews and the controversy they often spark can open up new discussions, which is always positive.