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.”
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.
