to review or not to review

that is the question. i hadn't asked it, but it comes up every now and again. why write reviews, why read them? i recall back in the day when i was the manager of the university recycling center there was a large bin for magazines. remember those? in the pre-digital days? well, one mag i fished out of the bin was the alumni pub for boston university. on the cover was a photo of a round-table discussion with seamus heaney, joseph brodsky [i was heavy into brodsky then, and still have an enormous affection for his writing], robert pinsky, derek walcott, saul bellow and christopher ricks. i think i still have it packed away somewhere.

the discussions ran from the role of the poet and poetry in society and so forth. i remember ricks telling heaney how much he admired the poet and how ricks thought one of his roles was to demolish the creative division between writing criticism and writing fiction and poetry. at the time i thought derrida had been doing that all along. and there are french poets [that i was reading quite a lot of at the time, in translations] that also didn't seem to give a flying fuck about whether their writing was in prose or lineated verse or whether their works were lyrics or essays. french poets seem to be saying, who cares, it's writing, okay.

so perhaps ricks was behind the curve a bit re his concerns about what is creative writing. maybe he had something else in mind, i don't know. what i do know is that eileen tabios just released the latest iteration of her reviews zine galatea resurrects and it is, as the kids like to say, a real doozy. i don't know about you but i get a real pleasure reading reviews and criticism and i have my favorite writers, and for the most part my favorite review writers usually happen to be my favorite poets. check out this tidbit by jim mccrary:

First things first. Grandpa out here wants Dana and Nicole and Juliet and Lucy to send to him some of what they are smoking because whatever it is I need it. I am your elder out here. You got to respect that you know. If it wasn’t for guys like me running mimeo machines 40 years ago…blah blah blah. Okay sorry for that. But geez, this group of publications, every one of them has juice…lots of juice.

that's the same high-powered writing in mccrary that i see in his poetry. and whatever mccrary is smoking i want some of it too.

for me, poet/critics/bloggers are doing what ricks wanted back in the past century: breaking down those barriers in writing. and for the record, yeah, reviews do work if the point is to illuminate writing, poets and books. after reading a review i will google for that writer under review and i've even ordered their books and return to their blogs. i do so because, in the words of u.k. populist poet tony harrison, SIR I HAM A BAD HAND AT RIGHTING.