I am all for poetry reviews that take on a decidedly personal, tangential, poetic point of view. Rote standardization of verse's qualities is boring and anachronistic, but in a way it's easier. To respond to a work of writing in a personal, associative way—and do so without tripping over yourself or shoving a foot in your mouth—is hard, but it is worthwhile. This style of review is almost entirely found when writers review writers. It's all they/we/me can do to not spar with the text. The powers of observation and oneupmanship blur into a weird beast. Poetry begets poetry, but the hope is that the latter poetry actually serves the role of describing/championing/chiding/analyzing the former poetry.Â
That's how a review remains a review in its gentlest sense. The reviewer ultimately tells you something about the reviewed work. In fact, I prefer criticism of any genre to go this route. Music, theater, dance, you name it. I want the personal voice in the thick of it.
And you knew a "but" was coming. Here it is: the risk is you end up not actually reviewing the work in question. You end up with something that amounts to the product of a writing prompt. The original work has vanished except for a few sparse lines. It essentially becomes an act of erasure.Â
At The Fanzine, Mark Baumer has a review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood. He opens by referencing her "most popular" poem, titled "Rape Joke." He does this without naming it, and when he quotes a line from the poem that references the title of the poem, he takes the title out as well:
The “most popular” poem in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia “God Poem” Lockwood says, “if you write a poem called ______ you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.”
It's unclear what point this deletion serves. It's unclear why "God Poem" appears in the middle of her name. Why is erasure necessary? There is no internal logic to guide us.
The majority of the review that follows—where Baumer takes random lines out of poems and accompanies them with his own line of random association—is predicated with:
Anyway, a large shirtless masculine college bro just climbed on the roof of my forehead and yelled “Let’s do this,” before leaping into the pond waters of this review below.
I don't know how to read this. I imagine calling himself (or the part of himself that is a reviewer of a collection of poetry) a "large shirtless masculine college bro" is an act of self-deprecation meant to allow the reviewer to say any old thing while removing himself from the actual content. None of the quoted lines appear in their original stanzas; there is no attempt, cursory or roundabout or obtuse or otherwise, to summarize what the collection is about. That process is subjective, sure, but without it, Baumer's piece isn't a review (it's listed under the Reviews section, for what it's worth), it's just a contextless reaction. It's crappy, masturbatory writing, which brings us to the last paragraph of the piece. It's the longest paragraph in the review, and it is nothing but a half-baked thread of edgy-alt-bro flash fiction revolving around male politicians and auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Punch up any one of Baumer's eight other pieces on Fanzine and you'll find only writing on music. You'll find hundred of words devoted to the representation and analysis of said music. You'll find actual reviews of art that, when you're done reading, you'll have a decent idea of the content in question. In this poetry review, Baumer sounds like he's trying to sound like a poet reviewing poetry. It's a serious disservice to the poetry at hand; it is insulting in its glib off-handedness. Poetry deserves a better attempt than that.
