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Going negative is good
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Jason Guriel
I'm brimming with things to write, but one, a quickie (I hope), about Jason Guriel's endorsement of "Going Negative" when a reviewer takes on a book of poems he or she is not so enamored of, has lain about for too long to ignore.
Guriel's endorsement, atop three negative reviews he wrote in the March issue of Poetry, followed on a letter to the editor from Michael Theune who took Guriel to task for lambasting Jorie Graham's poetry in a review Guriel wrote in the October Poetry.
Go to Guriel's March piece in the digital edition of Poetry and you'll see his snarky words generated 97comments posted by readers. Several of the comments came from Michael Theune, who has obviously kept up an extended correspondence with Guriel since last year.
In essence, in March, Guriel claimed negative criticism of poetry is rare, yet valuable to poetry and poets. He's right. Critics are supposed to separate good from bad, and the absense of harsh criticism allows too many poets to ignore standards for what is judged good — at least at the time of publication. Great poetry has often been ignored at the time of publication and recognized as great only years and years after it was written.
Since most poetry critics are also poets, and poets often collect themselves in schools or communities of like-minded writers, harsh criticism of colleagues is often difficult to sustain within one those poetic communities.If a critic becomes an industry "bad boy" — or bad girl, for that matter — the critic's very sustenance may be at stake.
All of which might serve as introduction to a review I will post here soon of Denver poet Michael J. Henry 's collection "No Stranger Than My Own."
I've already told Henry personally that I enjoyed some of his work, and I had asked him if he had read any of the dialog between Guriel and his readers about "Going Negative." Henry had not. So he asked me to be gentle.
I said I would try.
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