WHAT WOULD MAKE ANYONE continue to review poetry for going on three decades? I asked myself this question as I was selecting my own “selected.” Two hundred thirty-seven books, or an average of around 9.5 books per year; for every one reviewed, at least three more read; for every book read, at least another three considered. We’re into the thousands. My answer seems so simple: I’ve enjoyed it. From the time I was small, I had a passion for poetry, reciting it as I flew up and down in the swing. In junior high, I had a fierce argument about Frost’s “Mending Wall” with my Uncle Willy. In high school, I once “taught” a class on Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that was, I now suspect, roundly unpopular. In college, I was elated with the close reading that opened the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman even as it was just being published. When I began writing, I turned to poetry first, and only after that to nonfiction. So my tenure as a reviewer for The Georgia Review has been a natural extension of my ongoing interests. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed thinking about what poetry can do, about what each book I looked at did, or did not, accomplish. I’ve enjoyed encountering new voices; and I’ve enjoyed assessing new work by established writers. I’ve loved writing the introductory material, finding topics, gimmicks, whatever—an umbrella under which the essay-review could help me to see different poets from a new perspective.
Most of all, I’ve enjoyed the freedom to be who I am, to break all my own rules, to be cantankerous and celebratory in the same review. For this collection, I’ve selected eighteen, approximately forty percent of my output in the past twenty-five years. These essay-reviews represent the range of my taste. They also reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, into today’s political climate. They chronicle my personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry. Cumulatively, they reflect a larger context.
I had always felt that I knew more about poetry than I was able to articulate, and it was Stanley W. Lindberg, then editor of The Georgia Review, who gave me the opportunity to learn how to talk about work that excited me. In 1990, I was paired with Fred Chappell, each of us writing two in-depth reviews per year. I read Fred’s reviews avidly, wishing I could see what he saw, say what he said. Maybe the most agonizing fun I’ve ever had were the long phone conversations with Stan as, together, we sorted out my cries that “that was not what I meant at all.” We argued over commas, semicolons, word choices, you name it, and at least I was able to reject the word “whomsoever,” which I said would never—ever—come out of my mouth. But I was grateful for the chance to learn how to say what was on my mind.
So now, after a quarter century, I look back. Early on, for the Fall 1991 issue, I talked about the act of reviewing itself:
Essentially there are two kinds of reviews: those that tend to categorize and those that offer a “reading.” The former passes down a “verdict.” The latter does not attempt to judge in terms of abstract ideas, but rather attempts to show the reader why a particular work is worthy of attention, and to suggest what sort of attention the work demands. In such a reading, often a pattern or shape will emerge as the reviewer attempts to map the contours of the writer’s imagination; at the same time, the aim of the review is to open this particular landscape to as many others as may wish to follow. Such a review should open responses rather than close them.
Clearly I was sorting out just who I wanted to be, and I know now that I most definitely wanted to become the latter type of reviewer. I wanted to discover what I was thinking as I wrote, and I wanted to feel my way toward a full sense of what was important in and about the poems. Over time, I learned more and more how to respect the writer’s cues. This came about, in part, because of another astute editor at GR—Stephen Corey. I have him to thank for the fact that my dictionary is now far more ragged at the edges, and the fact that I have learned the need to clarify just about everything I think I’ve already said. Over the years, his penetrating questions have made me go back in to make it new again. He has been my staunchest supporter and harshest critic—and every critic (like every poet) needs both.
My generation has lived in a comparatively dull time for poetry. After the great modernist movement, after the confessionals and post-confessionals, just where could poetry take us next? Not surprising that confession devolved to “story,” followed by a retreat into new formalism. Not surprising that the line lost some of its power or that experimentation was relatively mild, that we ended up with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry as our only true “movement.” Not surprising that, as theory invaded the academy and the ranks of critics thinned, the two would seem almost interchangeable. As early as the Winter 1997 issue, I had had my fill:
The cleverness with which many of [the critics] treat the poetry they talk about is terrifying. . . . Such sentences as “The phrases seek a continuum of organic time, always mindful that what is organic is gendered” and “My analysis of metaphoric configurations . . . suggests the subtle but precise permutations of signification that occur through historical markings within metaphoric significance” use scholarly discourse to perpetuate certain assumptions—that the reader already agrees with the statement and that the critic’s job is simply to point out the instances where it applies. As with so much of this sort of writing, the style is so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Those reviews functioned . . . as places where the critic could show off a kind of knowledge that helps neither writer nor reader.
Dullness has its advantages. It enables you to see what stands out—and why. It allows for retrospection and prediction. You can see the forest and the trees.
So what do I make of my efforts over the years? I see that over time my reviews became more assured. I also see that the early reviews have a kind of energy I now envy. I realize that my taste in poetry has changed over time. The more I learned about craft, the more I admired poets who were masters at rhythm, or slant rhyme, and forms used so subtly you almost didn’t notice, then did. Naturally, my taste in content changed as well. Where before I had been hungry for a poem as expansive as Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” now I find myself drawn to quiet lyrics that catch me unawares. I’ve enjoyed charting my discoveries, and I can only hope that my readings have helped both writer and reader alike.
Throughout, I was encouraged to discuss work by older and younger American poets who were not yet part of the contemporary “canon.” In short, I was given free rein, and I took it. I used my personal life and my other interests as background music; I held the poetry I was reading up to that light, to see just what role poetry played. And now, gritted teeth and pulled hair aside, I see that my struggle to “get it right” has paid off with my own oddball brand of criticism. I came at poetry from every possible angle, tackling a little bit of everything, including poets from other countries: Australia, Wales, Ireland, Hungary, Norway, Israel, Jordan. I took the liberty to review novels, essays, novels in verse, prose by poets, anthologies, letters, even volumes of selected poems. I commented on prizes and awards, the academy, readings, quotations, other reviews—all the requisite ephemera that constitute the life of poetry. I revisited the work of Robert Lowell when the Collected Poems came out; I revisited Sylvia Plath when she became the topic of a book on women; I introduced reviews by talking about Frost, Pound, Stevens, along with Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, and I was able to muse about grandchildren, soccer, snow, rain, landscape, spies, politics, science, family anecdotes, my own illness—all in the service of the poems I was reading.
What do these selected essay-reviews say about poetry today? At the very least, they show what a wide range of poetry is being written—by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared. I see poets whose work I admired suddenly being recognized years later. I even see a resurgence of interest in poets who died over the course of my tenure. I hope to have been a source for some of this renewed enthusiasm. There were several poets I looked at more than once, and I felt it was my obligation to note whether they were changing direction, deepening an aesthetic, or possibly just marking time. Some poets have one great book in them; some have more, and then more. Some continue to write what they have always written well. Some change gear, rev up, move into new territory. And I have had the wonderful opportunity to delve into—and comment on—it all.
How did I make my selections? I had to make sacrifices, including discussions of poets whose work I admire, even revere. In the end, I took the straightforward route and chose to retain the recognizable essay-reviews as opposed to the more eccentric variations. I decided to represent nearly every year with the widest variety of poets I could muster, hoping that time alone would speak for the future health of our nation’s poetry. I tried to ring the changes on the specific topics with which I began my reviews, omitting those that seemed to me to be most dated. But I couldn’t resist adding an appendix to offer a bit of their flavor and provide information on other books and writers I had found myself discussing. Perhaps readers will find something there.
So thank you, Stephen, for persisting with those persistent questions. You made me think around the edges of my own claims. And thanks also to my husband, Stan Rubin, who was always there to force me past my vagueness into something that resembles insight.