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Aspects of the Poetry Review (On Criticism #1)


written by the Judge


Attempts at describing any mode of criticism must account for the fact that said criticism will always be shaped by the object which it describes. Thus the critical industries behind film, music, literature and gaming are shaped in a way that reflects the industries of those same media and art-forms. It is exceptionally hard to speak of such a thing as ‘general criticism’; the review of a concert will of course differ from the review of an art exhibition in a way which reflects the (potentially incompatible) differences between the two arts.

Accounting for poetry criticism must therefore take into account the particular aspects that distinguish poetry from other arts – and there is probably no better point to start from than the fact that, as we all know (and at times lament), there is no money in poetry. There are what one may call superstars in the subculture, but their status is more likely to be measured by the number of times their names are mentioned in articles rather than by the number of cars in their garage.

The fact that there is no money in poetry comes with several important consequences; for one thing, it has an enormous effect on the form of poetry criticism. Lacking the sponsorship to make a living out of reviews and articles, critics can only operate out of passion and personal interest, balancing these activities with their everyday needs. This poses a number of challenges for any would-be editor: it becomes exceptionally hard to assemble a group of reviewers working together for the same platform – their specific interests and desires being driven by personal curiosity, they are less willing to conform to editorial rules and standards than someone who is paid to do so. Even harder than setting up such a hypothetical platform is the task of sustaining it for an extended period of time; any event in the personal and professional life of a critic could potentially draw him / her away from this type of voluntary work. Many would-be critics in fact start out writing enthusiastically, only to find after two or three of these unrewarded reviews that they do not have as much time as they expected to keep doing this on the long run. Even assuming a stable critical platform can be set up, it is hard to endow it with a stable critical voice – too often its members will simply come and go, meaning that the opinions and ideas held therein will change very quickly. Needless to say, the inherent instability of any critical platform means that communication between different platforms will be even more volatile.

In brief, the primary challenge posed to those who would approach poetry criticism, either as writers or as simple readers, is the lack of a cohesive, unitary critical voice or referent. Instead, the newcomer is faced with a variety of sources, each operating according to its own terms and by its own standards (and often unstable enough that even its own internal standards will demonstrate inconsistencies and variations).

This is a direct reflection of the status of poetry itself, at least as opposed to other arts. There are no stable critical platforms because the artistic platforms themselves are considerably weaker and disjointed. There is no such thing as an MTV, in poetry – a centralised space that distributes poetry according to a democratic sweep of the consumer base. Instead, there is a kaleidoscope of small and smaller independent presses, almost unfailingly run by poets, working in a very intimate relationship with their main artists. The world of poetry is fragmented into small social circles interacting with each other in a way that is unique to the art – and criticism is correspondingly fragmented into even smaller social circles, corollary to the ones above.

It is true that there are some presses which are larger and more powerful than the others (Faber and Picador stand out in the UK), and whose publications tend to make waves. But they too depend for their criteria on selected (if relatively wider and more prestigious) social circles, as opposed to consumer response in terms of what’s selling. It is very rare for a new collection published by Faber and Picador to earn a critical reception that is, on the whole, negative, and this for the simple reason that the press and the critical platforms are very closely interwoven (not, mind you, in the sense that the critics are ‘corrupted’, ‘bribed’ or dishonest in any way – only that they belong to the same social group as the editor and poet, and are thus more likely to share in the aesthetic taste). In addition, there is no such thing in poetry as that phenomenon we sometimes see in other arts, when a product sells enormously but gets bashed by the critics (or vice versa). The consumers and critics are pretty much the same, in poetry, so good sales (in relative terms) will correspond to good reviews.

One important piece of evidence demonstrating the lack of unity and agreement in the voice(s) of poetry criticism is the absence of such a thing as a ‘scoring system’. Though the notion of grading a poetry collection with numbers from one to ten or with percentile scores may appear ridiculous, there is a reason we don’t have it – and this is not that the critics have all looked at each other, shook their heads and said, ‘No, what a silly notion’. Bad ideas, however bad, tend to have at least one or two practitioners, especially in the universally democratic field that is represented by the internet. (That said, I would not be surprised were I now to receive an e-mail linking me to some fellow who reviews poems and gives them numerical scores; the internet is indeed a cavern measureless to man and I can only apologise for not having explored all of it).


No, the reason there is no such thing as a scoring system is simply that poetry criticism is unable to support it. The idea of quantifying merit is just as good or bad for any other art as it is for poetry; if you cannot do it for a pamphlet of verse, then you cannot do it for a movie either. But scoring systems abound in the world of film, even in some intellectual sites, simply because there is such a thing as a common language for criticism. This doesn’t mean that everyone speaks from the same voice; but it does mean that (almost) everyone understands where others are coming from. It is quite clear whether a site (or a writer) is dedicated to an intellectual analysis, a consumer guide, a casual blog or even that peculiar but surprisingly established genre of comedy criticism. These modes of criticism are all consolidated because the film industry is equally well-ordered, as movies are accurately divided by genre, target audience and production value. Imagine doing the same thing with poetry. Think of the last five poetry books you have read or purchased, and try placing them in a genre. Or, try defining the mainstream modes of criticism behind poetry. (The challenge is rhetorical, but if you can indeed do that – then we want to hear from you!)

A scoring system would in fact be practical in many ways – its purpose, after all, is never to evaluate a work of art, but simply to provide common terms of discussion across critical platforms. But if the whole thing is to have any meaning at all, you need to get your critics to all agree on the criteria for the scoring rates, and give them the time to refine their judgment according to those same criteria. As we mentioned above, gathering such a durable assembly necessitates criticism to be a paid profession, and not a (very noble) hobby. A scoring system could only be practiced with consistency by someone writing alone, but (again) if that person is not paid, s/he is unlikely to be able to review more than one book every three weeks (which is not very much). And even then, how long can that person go before life gets in the way and the output is cut short?

The subculture of poetry compensates for the lack of a compass point in its criticism thanks to an exceptionally high level of preparation in its readers. The ratio of reader per critic (or artist) is probably lower in poetry than in any other art. In fact, almost anyone who reads contemporary poetry habitually is qualified, at least potentially, to be a poetry critic. This means that the reader of a poetry review will in principle be equipped to understand and contextualise the review with no need for an established source. It also means, however, that the critic must have some special standards in terms of how to write the article. The readership is different than what it is for a film or a game, and the review must account for this difference, respond accordingly and then take responsibility for the way said readership may respond.

What are these ‘special standards’? Having established some of the ways in which the form of the poetry subculture influences the form of its criticism, I now find that space is coming short. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to cut the argument short, only that I’ll have to continue it next week. In the upcoming month Drfulminare.com is going to publish a few more articles dealing with poetry reviews themselves, with what makes them unique as items of criticism, and with the special responsibilities of the critic in this particular context. See you next Wednesday.

Part Two is out! Read it here!

Sunday Review: Penned in the Margins round-up


A special Winter round-up this week – with yours truly back in the critic’s seat! I know! It’s been forever! Anyway, it’s time to look over at fellow London published Penned in the Margins and assess the good work they’ve been doing in bringing bright, young poets into print. Click here to read on.

Birdbook Launch, 17 December!


It’s on! Birdbook II: Freshwater Habitats will officially take flight at 7.30pm on Monday 17 December at Paper Dress Boutique and Bar, Shoreditch!

We’ll be having short readings from a flock of the poets involved in the project, along with projections of the beautiful artwork representing each of these incredible freshwater birds. We’re looking forward to meeting the talented writers and artists who have made this book such a treat to produce.

Nearest tubes are Shoreditch High St (Overground), Liverpool Street and Old Street, and stacks of buses go to the area.

Ah yes, and the Facebook event is here!

We’d love to say hello, so if you’re in London at that time, come on down and have a flutter!

Approaching International Poetry in 21st Century England; Part Two

written by the Judge


The second part of our article wishes to discuss the practical aspects of engaging with international poetry. It is dedicated to those who entertain an aspiration to do so. Readers uninterested in putting in the (considerable) work required to branch out of their own poetic culture are welcome to discard it, and should be aware that this article does not wish to pressure anyone into such a study. There is no moral or cultural obligation to read poetry from other countries, any more than there is to read poetry itself. It is not mandatory towards becoming a good poet or a good critic, even though it is indispensable if one wishes to take part in the European discourse that is coming to permeate the rest of the continent (and which is leaving England behind). For the rest, the benefits of approaching international poetry are your own to discover as well as to dismiss, and they can only be termed benefits as long as they are understood as a choice, and not a requirement.

We mentioned the ‘considerable work’ that is necessary to approach international poetry. This is almost entirely related to the process of learning the foreign language of your choice. The challenge involved in finding and researching the poetry is negligible; when approaching a new poetic culture, you will invariably find that selections of local verse have already been made for you, and good material is never too hard to put your hands on, provided that you can access the foreign country you are studying (yes, you do have to go there in person – most of the contemporary material has yet to be translated, and much of it never will be).

Learning the foreign language, however, is the sine qua non of all international poetry. Bilingualism is required even when reading translations into your mother tongue – you must have an understanding of how another language allows for forms of expression that are not possible in English. Lacking this fundamental prerequisite, even finding books in translation does not help, and will never take you past a certain superficial stage.

Thus, engaging with ‘international poetry’ should really be understood as engaging with only one foreign culture. You may expand that number to two or three, but in prospect, as you can only really learn one language at a time. Any use of the expression ‘international poetry’ that is not grounded in this dualistic exchange, and that wishes instead to discuss a global (or otherwise polycultural) scene as a whole, is a fiction by default. Distant poetic cultures do not interact with each other except after centuries, and sometimes not even then (the most potent proof being that literary titans such as Camoens, Mickiewicz or Tasso may remain not only unread but frequently even unknown – not by the common folk, but by the poetry pundits themselves!). And there is no such thing as a global poetry expert – to gain a working knowledge of what is going on even in one continent is a colossal task, one made all the more endless by the fact that smaller countries do not necessarily have correspondingly modest poetic outputs at all (Nicaragua, for example, has a tremendously vital scene which rivals that of other, larger Hispanic countries).

The only reasonable way to approach international poetry, then, is to choose one foreign culture (and language) of special interest and stick with it. This does not mean that you will forever be limited to your initial choice, but it is the only way to start.

Since you can only begin with one language / culture, your choice has to be carefully meditated. Countries very far away will be very difficult but also exotic and fresh, and to people around you, you will become an authority almost by default. Closer cultures and languages will be easier, and you will have many peers: this means greater competition if you wish to use your multilingual skills in criticism or publication, but also greater opportunities for sharing and communicating. Some of them open up new doors. Fluency in Spanish gives access to the entire South American continent bar Brazil, Russian is a popular second language in many Eastern European nations, and French is spoken in Canada, Africa and parts of South East Asia.

Learning a foreign language is a strange prospect. When polyglots are faced with the need of learning a new tongue, they generally approach it with excitement, and their initial progress can be very fast. People who only speak one language, by contrast, often find the whole idea dispiriting, and are slow to get into it. In reality, it is just as hard (or as easy) for both groups. People who already speak multiple languages are only more familiar with the process of learning, and they know that obstacles which initially appear insurmountable (and illusions about one’s own inability or lack of talent) require no more than a little time to be dealt with.

Learning a foreign language does not require exceptional intelligence, and it should be an option available to anyone smart enough to read this article. It does, however, demand strong commitment and patience. Like learning to play a musical instrument, it is a task that takes several years, and in which perfection can never be attained. It is almost impossible to learn only with books, so be prepared to take periodical trips to your country of choice. This is where the European Union becomes helpful. A return flight to a European capital will cost you less than one hundred pounds, with no need for visas; such a trip can be taken several times a year, over weekends if necessary. Flying to Asian, African or American countries will be priced from five-hundred to more than a thousand pounds, and the bureaucracy can be demanding and limiting. Along with the difficulties inherent in exotic languages, one understands why there are so few people who can speak Lingala or Bali.

Tackling foreign poetry means tackling the entire culture that produces it. You are unlikely to understand a poem that references a Bollicao if you don’t know what that is. This is why personal trips to the chosen country are so important, and this is also where learning a foreign language will truly reward you. Of course being able to read Dante and Baudelaire in the original is very nice, but the most surprising material is normally that which does not get translated. Finding out that a country has an entire comics culture that you knew nothing about, or a colourful underground rap scene, or a completely different approach to sports journalism – that’s when the language discloses itself to you, and really shows its benefits. Hopefully, poetry will help you on this path. You may learn a language in order to read poetry, but past a certain level the relation becomes reciprocal, and poetry in turn starts teaching you the language, adding new words to your vocabulary, new turns of phrase to your repertoire, and a new musicality to your cultural ear.

Engagement with international poetry, like engagement with poetry itself, is necessarily proactive. You must go to it, it won’t come to you. This is one of the reasons why lamenting the absence of more translations into English misses the point – no matter how many translations there are, you won’t really get much out of foreign poetry if your viewpoint remains anglocentric; if it remains rooted in the idea that things must go towards English, and not you past that bridge. Changing this perspective may be one of the most difficult things to do, especially for poets born in a culture that neither demands nor encourages learning a foreign language. But it can reward you by opening many doors you did not even know were there, and by giving access – better, perhaps, than anything else – to the particular and fascinating European multi-cultural discourse that defines this continent’s historical moment. Make your own decision as to whether that’s worth the price of admission.

Approaching International Poetry in 21st Century England; Part One.

written by the Judge


International poetry is a difficult topic. It is the specialised branch of a specialised branch: since there are few people reading poetry, it follows logically that only a very select few will read poetry from multiple countries as well. Linguistic barriers are among the most challenging to surmount, and the fact that England has one of the least polyglot cultures in Europe does not exactly help. The first part of this article wishes to discuss some of the characteristics of the current international (and especially European) poetry scene when seen from the English perspective. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or final article on the topic, only an introduction to some of the issues and problems that surround it. The second part will discuss the question of how to approach international poetry in practice.

The political reality of our continent, to the extent that both alliances and rivalries are now mediated by a common regulating body, has in the last half-century increasingly come to be defined by the European Union. Linguistically, we have therefore seen the rise of English as the union’s official language – and this is a matter of great consequence for scholars of poetry. Previous centuries saw intellectuals learning a foreign tongue primarily (though of course not exclusively) for two reasons: so as to be educated in the language of the dominant power, or else for an historical purpose. The former case is well exemplified by the French language, which was learnt and employed between the 18th and 19th Centuries by the English Romantics, by the great Russian novelists and by an assortment of literary figures (Giacomo Casanova, for example) on account of the political and cultural influence held by France. As for the second purpose that we mentioned, it refers to the popularity held by Latin and Greek in the continent’s educational curricula (at certain points, Italian joined that group as well, as the language that gave access to the great medieval authors).

Both these registers have fallen away. The language of the dominant power is now American English, and the popularity of dead languages – even among the educated – has been largely replaced by an unprecedented interest in the living languages of our neighbours. Our relationship with international poetry is now defined – even if unwittingly, unwillingly or indirectly – by our engagement with and our understanding of a collective European culture (the political expression of which is the European Union). Reading Dutch poetry, for example, is the process of interpreting how its points of convergence and divergence with your own country’s poetry reflect the way your two cultures communicate in the context of the larger political union. This is not a conscious decision, any more than reading French poetry was once necessarily intended to be a response to France’s political power. It is simply the international scenario that one is most likely to be confronted with when reaching outside of one’s own country, regardless of whether one subsequently chooses to embrace or resist it.

The European cultural register also defines our relationship with poetry from outside the continent. We understand a Korean poet or poem’s foreignness not so much to our specific country, but to European culture as a whole – even if it makes no sense to speak of this ‘culture’ as something unified. This is not as paradoxical as it may sound, because European culture in the sense that we are talking about it here is not unified, but unifying. If you are indeed able to read Dutch poetry, this will almost certainly be related to how this cultural union has connected you. (Our argument admits to several exceptions, especially when it comes to ex-colonies. The relationship of English readers to Indian literature, or that of French readers to Algerian literature, has its own special status).

In the current geopolitical context, one of the great victims has been English culture – and, by extension, English poetry. The rise of English as the ‘common tongue’ of the continent has excluded the British population from the surge of enthusiasm for multilingual studies which has filled the rest of the European soil with polyglots. The stupidity of English officials – who have seen this process happening for decades and have done nothing about it, even welcoming it as a blessing or a privilege – is mirrored by the stupidity of foreign European officials. A common continental lament may take a similar form: if the English tongue becomes dominant, then in a thousand years nobody will be able to read the books or listen to the songs that we are writing now, much like nobody can read some of the Gaelic or Celtic or ancient Hispanic inscriptions in caves dating from before the Roman (and Latin) invasion.

The oversight here is that languages do not have a half-life of a thousand years – they change spontaneously and ineluctably and become new systems of their own, in a process that is only bound to accelerate in the coming age. Since this mutability is the very source of beauty in language, there is no reason to lament it. And if you really are worried about how your poetry will be understood in 3012 (good luck to you, by the way), then rest assured – it will become illegible well before then, regardless of what language you are writing it in.

As for the present situation, almost every young educated person in non-anglophone Europe is at least bilingual, and sometimes much more than that. This means that Europeans born outside of England have more job opportunities and more academic outlets; they can travel to more countries, with all the openings for new learning and experience that that entails; they have access to more literature, music, art, journalism, criticism, ideas, as well as an instant advantage in anything related to politics, diplomacy, trade or tourism. The irony in all of this is that the ones who should be promoting anglocentrism are all non-English speaking countries, while the only ones fighting against it should be the countries in the UK. Instead it is the other way round!

British poets are but one of the categories damaged by this development. Their burden is not only that a much greater workload is required to gain access to foreign poetry – for learning a foreign language becomes an enterprise, rather than a given – but the fact that they mature and develop into a culture unaware of its own anglocentrism. Scholars and poets desiring to branch outside the confines of their own country usually find themselves funnelled towards American poetry, and this inevitably leads to a sort of provincialism. As importantly, it blinds one to the realities of the European discourse as we have sketched it in this article. The common thread that runs across the various European nations, and which defines this moment of our cultural history, is distinctly weaker and harder to perceive here in England. And if this does not seem like a big deal, remember that missing out on a cultural shift is always your own loss. The Renaissance did not stop by for Russia. Classical music did not wait for the Americans. The mutual cultural integration of the European Union is not going to wait for English literature, unless English poets themselves go out and engage with it.

And this, of course, leads us to the next part of the argument: how do we approach international poetry? The second part of our article will be dedicated to the practicalities around this question. To be published as next week’s feature, still here on Drfulminare.com.

Sunday Review: Rachael Boast’s Sidereal

posted by the Judge



Man, I’ve been looking forward to this Sunday. Some weeks of work can take it out of you.

Finally, though, the time has come to lay back and relax with a cup of coffee and a poetry review. This week Judi Sutherland takes on no less than the winner of the 2011 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, that being Rachael Boast for her work in Sidereal. Find the review here and see what Judi thought about it.

Enjoy your Sunday – I know I will!

Birdbook 2: Freshwater Habitats


It’s here, and it’s packed. Featuring the work of:

Derek Adams, Anthony Adler, Rachael Allen, Carmen Ashworth, Andrew Bailey, Jo Bell, Emily Berry, Zoë Brigley, Sue Brown, Sam Buchan-Watts, Erika Bülow-Osborne, Mark Burnhope, Gerry Cambridge, Phil Cooper, Lois Cordelia, Sarah Coulston, Lorna Crabbe, M. P. Dean, Chris Emslie, Charlotte Geater, James Goodman, Luke Heeley, W. N. Herbert, Alexander Hutchison, Kirsten Irving, Andrew Buchanan Jackson, Valerie Josephs, Gregory Leadbetter, Alice Lee, Ann Leighton, Anna Le Moine Gray, Laurens Leysen, Ira Lightman, Rachel Lovatt, Sophie Mayer, John McCullough, Ian McLachlan, James Midgley, Harriet Moore, Siân Moore, Sarah Morrish, Sarah Ogilvie, Richard Osmond, Kate Parkinson, Abigail Parry, PopiRouge, Samuel Prince, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Erica Read, Julia Colquitt Roach, Christos Sakellaridis, Bethany Settle, Jon Stone, Katy-Rose Thorogood, Claire Trévien, Jen Wainwright, Alexis West, Chrissy Williams.

Magma 54



A good showing for us again in issue 54 of Magma, available from here. It features poems by Ian McLachlan (co-author of our team-up pamphlet Confronting the Danger of Art), Mark Waldron (who launched the opening salvo in our micro-anthology Pocket Spellbook) and Ben Stainton (who will be appearing in the forthcoming Coin Opera 2).

It also includes a poem by me, alongside the other winners of this year’s Eric Gregory Awards, who are a fine bunch that we’re keeping our eyes on.

Finally, it includes a wonderful review of School of Forgery by David Morley. Morley, one of the editors of Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry (the book that convinced me to start reading poetry seriously), is usually very generous when describing the work of others but also crafts his reviews meticulously, avoiding cliches and trite praise and instead trying to articulate what is unique about a particular poet’s output. Well, I would say that. But I’m serious! Here are some choice extracts:

“So intense is the attention to things and forms that every poem in School of Forgery could be described as high definition performance.

Jon Stone understands that a poetry collection is a poetic form in itself … The whole composition matters. So does every weld. The structure of School of Forgery is ingenious and impressively intricate. Its slotting architectures are slit, mortised and battened.

Ultimately, it’s not its complexity or élan that resonate with me but genuine tristesse. Like Mandelstam studying the science of saying goodbye, it understands the heartbroken space between possibility and requital.”

I am slightly jealous that, as it turns out, my book got to see more of this year’s swifts than I did, however. Maybe next year I’ll try to spend more of the summer outside of London.