"My Reviews"
This editor has three aims
in writing reviews:
(1)Delineate virtues, essences,
meaning in friends' poetries.
(2)Approach and decipher the given poetry as properly as possible.
If "it does X," then explicate it in terms of its
doing X, not J, K, or L, which
may result in woefully inadequate readings.
(3)Locate the poetry's merit within the radical sociopolitical struggle(s)
most of us cannot in good conscience ignore at this time. Or, more
precisely, actually plug the poetry into something more immediate
and compelling than the mere aesthetic. I'm saying that I need something
more from poetry, perhaps outside of its traditional and
practical domain. Just the same, that "something else" possesses
me. If a given poetry does not readily lend itself to the pursuit
of that something else, then I would without qualms bend it to such
service or abandon it for a certain "irrelevance" and my
own lack of ardor for its virtues.
Obviously, I suspect, Aims
1 and 2 can easily be said to clash, even cancel each other out. Aim
2, to some extent the purview of far more practiced, polished, and
priviledged scholars than I, remains always for me more aspiration
than method. I willingly and eagerly defer to other reviewers wherever
I am not by any means the most suitable person for the task.
Aim 1 refers a good deal to
"friends." Anyone vulnerable to misperceiving my loyalties
and expecting me to pursue literary status or inhabit outworn and
ingenuous or inauthentic ideals of so-called "objectivity,"
I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint. I'm in this for the living of
a life, connecting to people who are my friends. Forgive the half-truth
cliché, but "if I can't find something positive to point
out in a given friend's poetry," then I would just as soon move
on to something else he or she has written. Life is all too short.
Last, I really am looking
for "something else," something perhaps philosophical
or metaphysical. I don't know that I should be concentrating a lot
of my search in the realm of poetry. (And sometimes all one really,
really needs is a new real life friend -- words and books provide
limited comforts.) I am the first to admit that mine may be a poor,
underschooled, and limited fellow's quest. A Holy Grail? A Fountain
of Youth? A Return on Prior Investment? I'm not even sure what I'm
after. Be forewarned, then: a lot of my reviews may elucidate more
the reviewer and his incentive for reviewing than the object, the
poetry, he examines. Apologies to those for whom that's a turn-off.
For Stephen Ratcliffe
S.T.