How does one go about defining bad art? As an instructor of creative writing, in the classroom, in office hours, via email, I diplomatically affirmed one student or another in their appreciation of poets often derided publicly on social media or privately in casual conversation between writers. Instapoets. Stadium poets. Popular poets. Outside of the persona I knew best to adopt for students’ sakes, I found myself participating in, even cruelly, gleefully instigating, such private conversations.
Much earlier, before I had any experience teaching English and creative writing, in a small university classroom in upstate New York the window displayed a scene in which snow masked most identifying markers, a uniformity of gray and white. Up for discussion: W.G. Sebald. One of my peers seemingly took any opportunity to disparage the readings for our literature course; Sebald, our newest victim, was no exception. Why this person chose to enroll in a reading-intensive literature course in the first place, other students wondered during class break. It’s mystifying to me now for a critic of literature to have such confidence in their own taste that they might close themselves off to a novel so acclaimed that it received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Poet-critic Randall Jarrell in Poetry and the Age wrote, “[I]nstead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance whether or not these pay lip-service to its own ‘principles,’ and can then praise or blame them accordingly.” Here, Jarrell was pointing out the arbitrary aversion of readers of poetry to any hint of what might be deemed obscurity. Though to lack the lauded quality “clarity” is to be societally dismissed for Jarrell, what seems most important to me here is that simple phrase: at a glance. To be so readily dismissed without any attentive effort from the reader was at the core of Jarrell’s critical lens in this essay. Who knows what criteria fueled that one undergraduate peer’s railing against the curriculum; it could have been any number of things, obscurity included.
Another classroom: my first semester with the poet-critic James Longenbach, I was, antithetically to the Sebald-rejecting peer, completely paralyzed in workshop. How to begin talking about my contemporaries’ poetry, much less the confounding (to me, then) collections of Louise Glück and Ellen Bryant Voigt? He brought my silence (the decorum of workshop demanded my feedback, my critical thought, to writers who entrusted me with their work, Jim tried to get me to understand) to my attention many times, much to my embarrassment. To silently accept and appreciate a work seemed just as upsetting in those moments, in that environment, as writing-off a piece entirely. I vapidly chimed in useless attempts at critical appraisal, forcing an “I like the sound of this line” or two.
That same workshop, mid-semester, when Longenbach asked for feedback on the course, one student said she’d like to learn what makes a poem a “bad poem,” and the rest of the room enthusiastically agreed. He took a moment to contemplate this, concluding, “I don’t think that would be helpful.” This response made sense, even as I knew the writer then, as someone who urged his students to approach poems descriptively and often shared aphorisms along the lines of If someone tells me not to write something, I try to figure out how to do that thing well. After I took Longenbach’s workshop (more successfully, this time) once more, and began understanding him as a critic, his approach made even more sense. For a poet who unusually entered the field from the starting-point of Modernist scholarship, who focused so much on the dissolution of oppositional accounts of poetry, the question of defining “bad” art wasn’t a new one. Years before I was born, in his book Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, he quotes Kenneth Burke’s Counter Statement: “No categorical distinction can possibly be made between ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’ art.”
Longenbach went on to explain to our class the impossibility of establishing what a poem isn’t doing; to prescriptively decide what a poem should or shouldn’t do amounts to mere dogmatism. The worst, though minutely consequential, act a critic can take toward any work of art is to let it lapse into obscurity, to never write about or focus on it in the first place, an act of which both that undergraduate peer and I were at one point guilty.
Longenbach had a keen sense of time’s perhaps inevitable washing-away of art. In a 2011 panel discussion entitled “Lineage: American Poetry Since 1950” for the National Book Foundation, he spoke among a laughing panel and audience: “Think quickly: How many poets who flourished in the 19th century have you read with any lasting attention?…Will Elizabeth Bishop or George Oppen be read at the end of the 21st century? Will anyone have heard of John Berryman?” Who knows what will happen to “players in the passing history of taste”?
So, how to be a critic? Or, for that matter, a poet? The autodidactic poet-critic R. P. Blackmur in The Double Agent provides some guidance here: “[N]o observation, no collection of observations, ever tells the whole story; there is always room for more, and at the hypothetical limit of attention and interest there will always remain, quite untouched, the thing itself.” We’re left with the poem, the book, the art-object of words crafted into lines on the page; the idea that we might access and comment on only what patterns we see, not those unseeable to us; and the imperative that we must expand those patterns we’re capable of valuing. What in us deludes us into thinking we must be the judge of the National Book Award of the United States of the Self? We’re left with, in other words, as Longenbach said in the panel discussion mentioned above, “the less congratulatory work of learning from inimitable predecessors. Yeats did not become Yeats by hangin’ out in Brooklyn with Lionel Johnson. He became Yeats by spending long, often unrewarding, hours with Shelley and Donne, poets whose achievement he could only dream of approaching.” We can have only the wild uncertainty of admiration, attention to the work itself, and what we might learn from it.
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As a means of implicit advice, I’ve modeled in this piece exactly the way I’d approach writing any piece of criticism, inimitable predecessors guiding me along my necessary path. Here, Longenbach, Jarrell, Blackmur. Elsewhere, I’ve exclusively written on books and writers who have shaped the very way I think about poetry, compelled by each writer-book pair to share what might be learned (the patterns I’ve been made, by these books, capable of valuing), hoping that knowledge could someday, despite history’s inevitable washing-away, produce a body of work that might effect change. Operating in the same way, Longenbach, writing on George Oppen for The Nation, leaves unattributed the words, the dictum even, “[o]ne does what he is most moved to do,” words which Oppen himself wrote in a daybook.
What I’m advocating here is for a critic’s being moved by the pattern-making of their subject—for a literary critic, the words on a page, arranged to produce a certain effect—whatever that may be. What, otherwise, is the point? After I wrote a review for a popular literary magazine, a literary agent emailed me asking me to review their client’s forthcoming book. Reading it, as with any book I’ve reviewed, I was less concerned with my personal taste, my enjoyment, my feelings—less with what constitutes good or bad art (whatever those abstractions might arbitrarily mean to me at any given moment)—than with what the text might be doing with its patterns, and what knowledge I might be able to glean from them. After reading the manuscript multiple times, I wasn’t sure what I could write, so I respectfully declined, hoping another critic, capable of seeing and valuing other patterns I, at that time, could not, would be moved to their own, equally valuable work.
In the world of this essay, taste becomes the death of art. Yet I can’t help but worry that this small, and I hope humble, dogma, too, quickly becomes, thinking this way, subsumed by a tenacious, unavoidable taste.
