Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

A personal disposition or two
Ms Stafford’s review begins in a mode of reasonableness and with a proper
pedagogical concern for students of literature who are having to learn to engage
with unfamiliar texts. It reads like the kind of introduction that might prepare
one for the reviewer’s own engagement with the work of the authors under
discussion. Alas, it does not. What it leads to, almost inexplicably (‘almost’ as,
one tends to expect this sort of response by now), is this: "Which is why I feel
angry…". Anger? Why? What business has a professional academic to be
‘angry’ about texts to be discussed? Are they advocating the pleasures of child
abuse? Are they suggesting people would feel better if they beat the hell out of
someone rather than having all that pent up feeling floating around? Do they
propose ethnic cleansing in their suburb? Wherefore anger? Ms Stafford
establishes credentials, I would have thought, for being able to discuss these
works. What she actually says is: "I’m trying to make a connection with it. I
can’t." So. The reviewer’s credentials, i.e. her education, her qualifications, her
personal predilections, her teachers, her colleagues, her peers, and her reading,
have not at all prepared her for the works under review. One could very well be
angry about that. Instead of acknowledging her situation however she has
chosen to pour scorn on the poets, as if somehow they are to blame for it.
To take this point a bit further, there are other, telling, phrases that support my
concern. Ms Stafford sees "a more sinister possibility"; "no discernible thought
here"; "so old- fashioned"; "smart-arse elitism"; "got a nasty feeling"; "I’m
damned if I’m going to"; "I have this nasty feeling"; "I find these two
collections depressing" and so on. Why, exactly, is all this nastiness and bad
feeling supposed to function as a proper basis for, or condition of, the
elucidation of contemporary poetry for what Ms Stafford deigns to call "the
less enlightened reader"? We are not told. It is assumed that the reviewer has
these bad feelings in good faith. Ms Stafford has given no one any reason to
buy such a proposition.
The ventriloquist’s dummy
Does this sub-title merely trade one harshness for another? Perhaps. But it
points to a view of things, an agenda, a false and unquestioning ideology. This
ideology asserts itself by using a body of clichés, shibboleths even, in order to
obscure the meanings of others, and to deny their actual differences. … It is,
additionally, usual for assistance from others – "A kind and more literate
friend" – to be identified in academic writings. And rather than ask how much