A deeper look at negative criticism and bad poetry

We've just caught on: in Bookforum's new issue, a compelling article: "Why Critics Praise Bad Poetry." Adam Plunkett looks sincerely at some "false advertising," as he calls it, the sense that, in the poetry world, "most of published criticism is positive even though so much of published poetry is bad." Plunkett focuses his study primarily on Michael Dickman's Flies and Katherine Larson's Radial Symmetry, which earned Larson the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Considering the problem in the context of Dickman's work, he writes:

One reason for the dearth of critical comeuppances is that even bad poems are often hard to understand and harder to understand conclusively, so negative critics risk missing something and looking like fools. They misinterpret what they malign, they butcher what they slander. A way to acknowledge the problem without giving in to it is to qualify criticisms with an implicit “unless I’m missing something.” As in, unless I’m missing something, the line “At the end of one of the billion light-years of loneliness” sounds like a parody of a pop song. It describes an emotion without conveying it, exaggerates images without making them interesting. “His super-outfit is made from handfuls of oil and garbage blood and pinned together by stars.” Unless I’m missing something, that’s vaguely whimsical but impossible to visualize at all. Blood, toil, sweat, and tears are also ethereal, I get it, but the words are tossed together like a collage I can’t actually imagine—is there oil and bloody garbage floating near the Milky Way, in which case how can the poet see it? How does it look to him like a superhero’s outfit? How is the line not sappy, trite, and nonsensical?

A call for dialogue! Plunkett continues to look at Dickman's poems in detail. As for his other subject: "A welcome contrast is Katherine Larson’s lucid incoherence, which invites reflection as it escapes paraphrase." Plunkett invokes Robert Hass, Louise Glück, and Jorie Graham in discussing this work. Regarding the latter:

Larson has Jorie Graham’s mastery of rhythm and pacing, her looping, involuted meters:

Here are the goblets filled with wine.
The smell of sunlight
fading from the stones.

“The smell of sunlight fading from the stones” is antiquated, Wordsworthian—in imperfect iambic pentameter—but the “sunlight” / “fading” line-break gives a pause just long enough to save the familiar rhythm and to make it feel strange. Graham is known for grand abstract proclamations (“But there are, there really are, things in the world, you must believe me”), proclamations Larson makes and then turns into questions she explores further: “Either everything’s sublime,” she writes, “or nothing is” (meaning that there aren’t sublime things or that the absence of things is sublime?). “Science,” Larson writes,

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,
every time I make love for love’s sake alone,
I betray you.
“Betray” as in “break faith”? As in “reveal”?

Larson gives a clear image of her poems’ mystery, of how she explores like a sailor and builds like a craftsman and analyzes like a scientist, and of how she, as an artist, renders and deepens the problems that caused her to wonder.

The piece ends almost abruptly shortly thereafter, but do read it in full here. Questions about negative criticism and "bad" poetry still abound, we'd surmise!