Yesterday’s link list included both a defense of literary criticism in newspapers and a link to a New York Times review by James Longenbach of four new volumes of verse. That juxtaposition is worth thinking about a little more closely.

The defense is an extended version of a talk given by Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press who sits on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), where he is responsible for the press’ humanities texts. As one might anticipate from somebody in his position, his argument is reasoned, well-crafted, a pleasure to read. Waters makes a defense for criticism as such without sinking to the reactionary “gate keeper” mythology that a Hilton Kramer might use – that argument is simply that the masses won’t know what to think without being told how do so by the enlightened few, so that critics are all that protect us from such barbarians as Jack Kerouac or Ron Silliman. Waters, in sharp contrast, argues for the very best in criticism, that it is simply an intelligent person confronting new work for the first time & reporting honestly about same. Waters’ climax virtually requires orchestral crescendos to accompany his prose:

Criticism is Lester Bangs. It’s Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary McCarthy, Thomas Merton, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Michael Dirda. It is Lorenzo Valla, and it oozes from crack in the pavement in the other HUP book I brought to show you today (beyond our brand-new Donation of Constantine – Howard Hampton’s Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (HUP, 2007). It’s lists, of course, it’s lists. It’s judgment upon judgment. It’s gut responses, and it’s argument. When we engage in the process of arguing about art, we devise new reasons, new ideas, new forms of thought. This is a central human activity, one that leads to the creation of new brain cells. Killing the book reviews is – a phrase I’ve used elsewhere – Chernobyl for the Life of the Mind.

I don’t think you have to love everybody on that list – I’m not fond of either Kermode or Dirda – to understand that Waters really wants you to connect to critical thinking at its best as his justification for its preservation.

And I think he’s right, at least partly, when he claims that newspapers killing off their review sections constitutes a “fad” among tabloid executives trying very hard to save their publications in an emerging post-print universe. The great irony, as I see it, is that publishers – it’s seldom the editors – who slash their review sections are being penny wise & pound foolish at a moment in history when that constitutes suicidal behavior. Their rationale is that the review sections no longer are profitable per se because fewer ads are bringing in revenue. That in turn has a lot to do with consolidation among the major trade publishers and the decline of independent booksellers. But immediate ad revenue is only one facet of the contribution a review section makes to a daily paper – driving sustainable readership is even more important.

Regardless of how good or bad a particular review section might be – and some of them, like that of the San Francisco Chronicle, are almost shockingly bad – reviews are a phenomenon directed at a particular fraction of the newspaper audience: serious readers. Driving off that portion of your audience that is most committed to writing in print format would seem to be openly self-destructive behavior. If newspapers actually think that they can generate loyalty and circulation amongst, say, the fans of Lindsay Lohan by focusing more attention on celebrity DUIs than they can get by actually reaching out to readers who already have a commitment to print formats, well, do I even have to finish this sentence? It’s like trying to lose weight by cutting open an artery – it sorta works, but the collateral damage is severe. What this trend really shows is that publishers don’t understand their product or their audience.

But poets getting all exercised about the demise of review sections is a little like poets getting all hot & bothered about the collapse of independent bookstores that carry almost no poetry & keep it hidden in the far back corner somewhere. This is where the Times review seems all too typical. Longenbach reviews four books, two by Houghton Mifflin, one by Norton and one by Margie/Intuit House. Three of the authors are issuing their first books, with only Josephine Dickinson, a widow who still works a farm in the north of England & has been deaf since birth, as the exception. Nathaniel Bellows is a 35-year-old School of Quietude (SoQ) poet & novelist (On This Day, HarperCollins 2003) whose verse has appeared in Grand Street, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Open City, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and The Yale Review. A look at the sample poems on his web site brings to mind words like “lifeless” – considering how rarely a poem gets into The New York Times, the one published there is worth looking at. Longenbach doesn’t mention this Times connection, nor does he mention that Matt Donovan, another poet with a first book at a major trade publisher, was a New York Times Fellow in NYU’s MFA program. With the exception of Poetry and Threepenny Review, tho, Donovan’s list of School of Quietude publications isn’t as glossy as Bellows.

The more interesting ringer here is Troy Jollimore, the one poet reviewed with a book from a small press, but having won the National Book Critics Circle award. Jollimore has been pretty straightforward in interviews in characterizing Tom Thompson in Purgatory as imitation John Berryman, so the real question isn’t why a young poet might take on such a project, but rather what might possess Mr. Waters’ organization to give their annual prize to something that is so obviously “smart student work” when dozens of major books were published last year. The very best I can come up with is that the form is recognizable, at least to a body whose typical member appears to be 50 years out of date on contemporary poetry. Or seventy.

Josephson’s book, which is a compilation of two of her British volumes, seems to me a reasonable project for a publisher like Houghton Mifflin. But Bellows & Donovan demonstrate very clearly that trade presses do not represent a higher quality of writing, but rather are just another small press scene, one with better distribution and advertising budgets. Does it make any sense that their books should get more attention, say, than a Troy Jollimore? No, but if the NBCC hadn’t awarded him its prize that is exactly what would be happening. And there were hundreds of better books published by small presses last year, by Quietists & post-avants alike.

It’s in this sense that the New York Times is hardly better than the independent bookstore whose poetry section, all two shelves of it, stretches all the way from Yeats to Rilke, maybe with a little Rumi & Billy Collins tossed in. And the Times is almost certainly the best daily in America when it comes to book reviews. But if the Times is willing to review very minor books from trade publishers while ignoring major collections – think of the Kyger collected or the new John Wiener’s volume – from outside of that circle, and if it fails to acknowledge its connection to some of the poets whom it does choose to cover, would the loss of the NYTBR actually be a real loss to poetry? Might it not in fact be just the opposite? The Times Book Review is a major source of legitimation for a lot of bad writing. The baldness of some of the annual prizes that similarly go to nondescript Quietist poets year after year might be even more glaring if it occurred without this fig leaf of critical sanction.

Andrew Keen is getting a lot of play these days for his book, The Cult of the Amateur, which argues that the web has opened the floodgates to “non-professional” critics who will run their various fields of inquiry into the ground because they lack the “standards” & discipline of, say, NYTBR or The New Criterion. My own sense is that Keen is 100 percent wrong. Critical sites have grown on the web precisely because the institutional critical apparatus in this country is so sclerotic & inept. This is true of not just of newspapers, but of many academic journals as well. Nothing breeds mediocrity faster than the “consensus building” process of any refereed journal. I may not agree with the likes and dislikes of SoQ bloggers like C. Dale Young or Joseph Duemer, but there is no question that their blogs have far more integrity as critical sites than, say, The New York Times or the NBCC in general. And I trust readers to be able to discern the difference. Which I think is just what Mr. Keen fears most.

When I was 16 years old and mowing lawns after school around Berkeley to make a little money, there were two publications that I always saw to it that I read regularly. One was The Nation, which I’ve been reading almost uninterrupted ever since. The other was the short-lived West Coast daily edition of The New York Times. Even the day after John Kennedy was assassinated, that paper found room on page one to note the deaths of Aldous Huxley & Edith Piaf.

I stopped reading the Times on a regular basis when they canned that particular edition, tho occasionally I would buy the Sunday Times &, when I taught at UC San Diego for a term in 1982, I picked up the habit again pretty much on a daily basis, since San Diego’s local choices for a paper came to Dreadful and Worse. For awhile, The Washington Post had a weekly edition that recapped its more significant stories with a fairly deep dive into its Sunday books section and I read that, balanced by a steady stream of progressive weeklies or monthlies: In These Times, Mother Jones, the Progressive, The Texas Observer, The American Prospect. I still read the last of these – it was, I found, the most reliable publication in America after 9/11 and the regular presence of Hal Meyerson, the best political columnist in America, doesn’t hurt. He’s worth reading the Washington Post for as well.

All of this is a preface to a response to the few readers who have steadily complained when I’ve placed links to The New York Times in particular amidst the various items of news and notes that I sometimes run here. When The New York Times came online on a regular basis, I resumed my daily perusal of its articles, and for all of the paper’s many faults – which could warrant a lengthy blognote all its own – it continues to be the best English-language newspaper in the world. When The Times went to a subscription basis online, I had no hesitation about signing up. It’s one of two papers to which I pay subscriptions for online access, the other being The Wall Street Journal, a paper I will stop reading the minute I retire from the day job. But The Times is for life, even if I should forever make fun of the fact that it doesn’t need to have comics because it already has its startlingly dreadful Sunday Book Review section, craven little toy of advertisers that that supplement happens to be. It really doesn’t matter that Thomas Friedman only thinks he’s an expert on foreign affairs or that David Brooks is mostly a buffoon – even tho he’s officially declared my little niche of Chester County (from whence Brooks came) to be “Paradise” – if you missed Ayub Nuri’s op-ed piece Friday before last on internalizing the Iraq war you missed a wonderful, if terribly sad, piece of writing. And an important one. It really is the paper of record, for all of its sins.

An annual subscription to the New York Times online runs me $49.95 per year and gives me significant access to the Times archives as well. If I want to read any one of the 80 articles that mentioned Ezra Pound prior to 1930, I can do so. My subscription comes with the right to download 100 such articles each month. Thus I can come across an unsigned piece from July 2, 1911, entitled Literary Notes from England, that begins

You may care to know that a young American poet, Mr. Ezra Pound, is in this coronation London season in pleasant favor with the “intellectuals” of Mayfair and Belgravia.

$49.95 per year compares with the $273 I pay annually for the Philadelphia Inquirer to be delivered to my door, the $514.80 that New Yorkers pay for daily delivery of the paper hardcopy (which does, by the way, include online access) or the $644.80 it would cost me to have the Times delivered to this Chester County, Pennsylvania address. Most newspapers today still come for free online, something I do expect to change over the next five years. Would I pay for the Inky, as we locals call our rag, online? Maybe not, or if I did it would be because I was dropping the hard copy. Of the other papers I read online more or less on a daily basis – the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Guardian of London (formerly Manchester) – only the Post has a shot of getting my money if it starts to charge for online access.

This is not because I really need to know that an anonymous Times writer once thought, in a somewhat condescending fashion, that Ezra Pound had not written any suitable “coronation verse” to mark the ascension of George V, but rather because I choose – as I have always chosen – to engage with the world at large, a process for which the Times is one – among many – useful tool.

I have concluded that any reasonable person who can afford internet access plus maybe 3 CDs (or two nights out at the movies with a friend or partner) per year can afford the Times online. So I am not going to note when I link to a piece in the Times with a little “subscription required” addendum or whatever. If you link to a site you cannot access, you ought to register that irritation internally at least. It’s not a distinction I would make with the Wall Street Journal – I don’t run links to its articles¹ – and I admit that I too find myself irked by those moments of access when I find myself cut off from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist or the counter-intuitively named Project Muse. I subscribed to the Chronicle when I was a college administrator, and would do so again if I worked in a school. And I find the idea of keeping intellectual discussion of contemporary (or other) literature behind lock & key at Project Muse all too clear a reason why debunking the idea that refereed journals and academic protocol have anything to do with poetry or poetics is a valid, even important project.

Would it be ideal if all content on the web were free? Yes, but it would be ideal too if all bookstores carried every book of poetry that is in print (maybe 40,000 titles in all), and if all poets had equal access to book publication. When that day comes, I’ll be the first in line singing The Internationale. But until then, it’s the real world I’m going to engage with, and I suggest you do too.

 

¹ There were articles in the WSJ over the past two weeks about the debate within Fisk University over whether to sell two paintings by Georgia O’Keefe & Marsden Hartley, a profile of the scholar who stands "at the summit of Auden scholarship" and a fun piece by Sharon Begley on baseball sabremetrics and received “wisdom.”