I’d like to build on Deborah Bacharach’s guest author post from January 24, 2021, “My Year of Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” especially what she says about not writing a review that declares whether a poem (or a volume of them) is good or bad but saying what a poem does. The most honest and useful way to do this is from the personal point of view.

In academia, Bacharach’s background and my own, we often shy away from the personal, turning the “I” who is experiencing the poem into “we,” as if anyone who reads the poem can see the things to which we are calling our readers’ attention. But that can make a reviewer feel unworthy and perhaps obligated to include details they don’t care that much about. The personal, on the other hand, can make a reviewer feel too free, forgetting their obligation to select details and explain why they’re important because it’s all just “personal opinion.”

How do you get across a personal viewpoint and show how the poem brings you to it? You can use your personal experience as a lens. In literary theory, this is usually called “reader-response criticism.” The reader-response critic comes to a poem with past experiences, thoughts, and ideas, while at the same time the poem shapes the reader’s experiences by functioning as a blueprint that selects, limits, and orders those ideas. Through the transactional experience of reading the poem, the reader and the poem produce something new, an aesthetic transaction. For reader-response critics, the reader is an active participant along with the poem in creating meaning.

Here’s an example. In my volume Postcard Poems, I include a poem about a Magritte painting found on a postcard, The Therapeutist, and several of my readers have asked if it is a poem about a miscarriage. My answer is that I have not experienced a miscarriage and didn’t base the poem on that experience, but that doesn’t mean that the details aren’t there to allow them to read it that way. It’s certainly a poem about children and loss.

For a review, of course, you need to both express a personal point of view and support it with relevant details from the poem(s). In my review of Amy Nawrocki’s volume Mouthbrooders the viewpoint I express is that the volume is “an exploration of the relationship between the creature self and the life of the mind” and my examples from the poems show how I see that relationship.

To think about the best ways to select and explore examples of what you see from your viewpoint, would-be reviewers might want to think about academic writing. In the class I teach, “The Art and Craft of Analytical Writing,” I sometimes bring in advice from creative writing and think it’s clear that academic/analytical writing techniques can be similarly helpful to creative writers. In particular, I recommend three books: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power, and Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say. Look at what Lamott says about “shitty first drafts” and perfectionism. Pay attention to how Elbow points out that “writing calls on two skills that are so different that they usually conflict with each other: creating and criticizing” and his argument that “the two mentalities needed for these two processes–an inventive fecundity and a tough critical-mindedness–flower most when they get a chance to operate separately.” And finally, contemplate the heuristics Graff and Birkenstein offer for telling readers “what is at stake in a text and why they should care.”

One of the reasons we read poems is because we want to experience other ways of seeing the world. That should be the main transaction of reviewing, too.

Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and ailurophile. She directs the writing center at Kenyon College and plays violin in the Knox County Symphony. Jeanne earned her BA at Hendrix College, and her doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation addressed The Development of Ironic Personal Panegyric in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, her conference presentations include “A Survey of Reanimation, Resurrection, and Necromancy in Fiction since Frankenstein,” and “Climate Change Predictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents,” and her volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books, is entitled Postcard Poems. Jeanne posts about poetry and fiction at NecromancyNeverPays.com.