Thank goodness the light’s still good and golden-hot here, and that deer still walk through my backyard. But the days are getting shorter.
The other night I was carping into my cell phone about the 9 o’clock twilight, walking my dogs through Gambier’s shining white buildings and green-lawned cemetery, when the ghost of John Crowe Ransom curled up like smoke from his student-laureled tomb. He put a burning-cold finger on my chest and he asked me what I felt to be the role of the critic in contemporary poetry.
It’s a poser! Even the critics–big or blog, brittle or jolly–don’t agree.
Fortunately, I could ask Phantoms and Joy, my dogs. Phantoms has published criticism and book reviews in Pleiades, Cranky, Mare Nostrum and The Laurel Review; Joy writes poetry and Dungeons & Dragons fiction, and co-edits a newbie literary magazine called Thermos. Here’s what they said.
Then Ransom’s ghost–well-dressed and smelling of camphor–smiled at Phantoms and Joy and ignored me, slowly dissolving in the warm Ohio breeze. I looked up. It was dark; I walked my dogs back to the house I’m staying in.
This morning Joy told me Thermos has started a blog of its own, and Phantoms emailed me (on his doggie-Mac) recent forays in criticism by Stephen Burt, Michael Theune and Matthew Zapruder, along with some critics-of-the-critics. The dogs do seem a little smug this morning, but I’m still the one drinking out of a glass; I’m still the boss.