Louis Esterhuizen. Enkele gedagtes oor die kwessie van resensies en literêre kritiek

 

Via ‘n skakel op die Poetry Foundation se webblad beland ek op ‘n blog genaamd Lemon Hound waar daar ‘n besonder interessante projek oor die kwessie van resensies en literêre kritiek aan die gang is. Die webmeester, ene Sina Queyras, het naamlik meer as 30 bekende kritici genader met ‘n standaardstel vrae. In dié geledere het ek drie bekende name raakgesien en hul kommentare nogals insiggewend gevind. Hulle is David Orr, resensent en rubriekskrywer van die New York Times Book Review, Michael Robbins, resensent van Poetry Magazine en die London Review of Books, en Stephen Burt, professor in Engels by Harvard en skrywer van die boek Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009).

Vir jou leesgerief plaas ek enkele vraag-en-antwoord aanhalings hieronder, maar gaan snuffel gerus rond by Lemon Hound; daar word inderdaad belangrike goed kwytgeraak oor ‘n uiters belangrike onderwerp.

LH: Is there a quality you are looking for in a review that you haven’t found?

DO: I’d like to see more actual thinking going on. One of the sad facts about poetry reviewing right now is that many poets pay more attention to their own team uniforms than they do to reviewers’ reasoning. They want to hear what they want to hear, and they can be excessively charitable to bad arguments that happen to suit them, and obnoxious toward interesting arguments that don’t fit their world view. As a result, many reviewers – and I include myself in this criticism – can find themselves becoming concerned with framing and positioning at the expense of making sense.

LH: What do you hope to achieve by writing about writing? Do you believe that reviews can actually bring new readers to texts?

DO: Let me answer the second question first: Yes, I believe reviews bring new readers to authors. I know they do, actually. As for what I hope to achieve, well, I’ve always thought that criticism is its own art form. It’s true that only by reading poetry can we have the experience “reading poetry,” but it isn’t clear to me that that experience is richer or better than the experience of reading criticism, if the criticism is good enough. So I guess by “writing about writing” I hope to achieve something at least as interesting to the reader as a decent poem or pop song.

LH: If you write reviews, how would you describe your approach, or method? Do you offer or engage in exegesis, theoretical, academic, reader response, close, contextual or evaluative readings? If you don’t write but read reviews, what aspects of reviewing do you notice?

MR: I don’t think the approaches you mention are mutually exclusive. I’m interested when a reviewer sees  something about a poem or a poet that no one else has seen that strikes me as incontestably right. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, but ideally it will combine stylistic brio with analytical insight into the work’s cognitive dimensions. Christopher Ricks is the most consistently astonishing reviewer in this respect.

LH: If you also write non-critical work, how different is the way you approach reviewing or critical writing to the way you approach your own “creative” writing?

MR: Well, I get assigned books to review. If someone hired me to write a poem on a deadline with a certain number of words, they would receive something like a beat-up stuffed bunny wearing an Iron Maiden jersey with a duckbill stapled on it.

LH: What do you think the purpose of a review is? If you also write about books on a blog, why? What does blogging let you do differently?

SB: Reviewers should describe the book accurately in a way that makes clear which (if any) readers will likely enjoy it; reviewers should say what’s interesting, what’s well done, what stands out (for good or ill) in a book. If the book, or its author, or books much like it, have already attracted attention, reviewers might also say why; if the book (e.g. almost all first books of poetry) hasn’t attracted much notice as yet, reviewers should explain why it deserves notice, why it’s worth our time (if indeed it is).

LH: If you write reviews, how would you describe your approach, or method? Do you offer or engage in exegesis, theoretical, academic, reader response, close, contextual or evaluative readings? If you don’t write but read reviews, what aspects of reviewing do you notice?

SB: I read through the book a few times, make plenty of notes, then arrange them into what I hope makes a vivid and well-argued essay at the appropriate length. Depending on the length, the venue, and the sort of poetry (or other writing) under review, all the modes of reading you name above might play a role (except possibly “reader-response,” which names a limited and perhaps obsolescent mode of academic meta-analysis, explaining what other readers have seen in a book). Exegesis, theory, “close reading,” impressionism, context, and flat-out evaluation each have their place, though simple ratings (letter grades, stars as for movie reviews, adjectives such as “great” or “superb” or “remarkable”) rarely convince skeptics; reviewers should say not that books are good or bad, but how and why.

LH: Have you been in a position where you have had to write about a book that you don’t care for, or a book that is coming out of a tradition that you are perhaps opposed to, or resistant to on some level? How do you handle such events? Or how have you noticed others handle these events?

SB: Yes, I have. I’ve rejected assignments when I’ve felt unable to do a book justice; I’ve also accepted requests that I review writers whose work has left me ambivalent or dissatisfied. In each of these cases I try to do the book justice, to explain what it seems to be trying to do, why that goal seems worthwhile (if it seems worth while), and what other goals it occludes or prevents. I don’t seek out those sorts of requests, but I do accept them: I would hate to live in a world where all poets, or all kinds and schools of poetry, get examined only by the subset of critics who already think they’re great.

Amen.

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