Contemporary Poetry Review: Resuscitating Poetry Criticism

Here are just a few excerpts from essays available in the CPR Archive:

Garrick Davis, the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review:

On Ezra Pound: "A strange dichotomy now pervades literary criticism. In an age that disowns the Catholic Index and the obscenity trial, that embraces every scandalous work from Petronius to Leautréamont, The Cantos almost singularly retains its evil reputation."

On Language poetry: "Most of these poems have such a tenuous relationship to meaning, with their compound narratives full of American slang, French phrases, esoteric leftist ideologies, and electronic equipment--are so full of references to Lenin, Las Vegas, Le Corbusier, and cash--that one imagines a professor in the Social Sciences department at Berkeley decided, as a lark, to publish his vers libre attempts at automatic writing."

Ernest Hilbert, founding editor of the Oxford Quarterly:

On the Beats: "Although he spent a short time in Paris en route to New York from Tangiers with an early version of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in his knapsack for a potential Parisian publisher, Keruoac never felt entirely at ease away from his native hangouts and, after the publication of On the Road, rarely ventured far from his mother’s Long Island home (readers often forget that the laureled bard of the open road spent most of his time drinking beer in his mom’s living room)."

On Geoffrey Hill: "Hill is unrelentingly difficult, and though his detractors might see behind this difficulty the maneuverings of an arch-conservative, even imperial attitude, it is more correct to see in it the modernist distrust of language and a pressing fascination with the savage and mysterious origins of the English people. Hill has been deemed elitist by members of the British literary press--who are, frankly, always sniffing around for anything not laid out in accordance with the simplest tastes--but in his defense one will surely point out that Hill has never equated ease with democracy. He seems downright baffled by the thought that accessibility should be intimately linked to democracy. In other words, the demotic and democratic do not wear the same cut of suit at the funeral of modernism."

Justin Quinn, co-editor of Metre:

On the Black Arts Movement: "Was Gwendolyn Brooks really kow-towing when she wrote sonnets? Was she really innovative when she stopped? African-American poets unfortunately never seemed to pose the right questions so that their art could prosper, and the result is that they still feel that they must engage in a kind of boosterism, a boosterism which would be unnecessary if the achievements were significant."

On Allen Ginsberg: "For many people, his poetry was part and parcel a lifestyle that required a low level of personal hygiene, poor taste in music and clothing, indiscriminate sexual activity and the ingestion of large quantities of mind-expanding substances. In other words, Ginsberg gets written off with the 1960s."

James Rother, contributing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review:

On John Ashbery: "The signature effect of an Ashbery piece continues almost instantly recognizable: a somewhat surreal non-sequitur bounded on either side by rapid cuts, low-slung montage, and time-delayed gags bereft of both set-ups and punchlines. His manner today, as in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, persists in being not so much a style as the verse equivalent of Marcel Duchamps's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2."

On Alan Dugan: "Who kidnapped the feisty and promising son of W. C. Williams, A. R. Ammons and Robert Creeley, the hustler who could put away rivals like Fast Eddie while sweettalking the muse as 'a guy what takes his time?' Where did that poet go? It's an enigma that just will not up and leave and so sticks in posterity's craw like a pill that will not go down. How could Dugan, having so smartly refused the bit, the snaffle and the curb, become the bloody horse's ass that in 40 years of writing verse put enough un-negated negativity between covers to set even a Hegel on his ear?"

David Wheatley, co-editor of Metre:

On poet-critics: "Molière's Monsieur Jourdain was pleasantly surprised to learn that everything that is not poetry is prose; judged by this generous standard, most if not all poets could apply for summary reclassification as poet-critics. After all, who has not dabbled in his or her time? Craig Raine has compared light verse to self-abuse ('it may not be the real thing, but it has its own peculiar satisfactions'), and most writers extend the same tolerance to the occasional bout of reviewing. But does it make them poet-critics?"

On Tom Paulin: "A republican whose loyalty is to 1798 rather than 1916 and with scarcely a good word to say about the Irish Republic, despising mainstream Ulster Unionism but fascinated by the wilder fringes of Presbyterian dissent, a crusader for radical Enlightenment values and scourge of liberal humanism and modish literary theory alike, Paulin drastically fails to conform to the identikit picture of the contemporary Irish poet. Edna Longley has suggested that Paulin has perfected a type of counter-stereotype of the graceless Ulster Prod, gleefully putting the boot in on the BBC's Late Review and in his never less than opinionated criticism."

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