Dramatis Personae:
Snark, a thin, brittle, elegant demon, the shade of an autumn leaf, with dry, cicada-like wings, and a long sharp nose. Eyebrows perpetually arched in an expression of mock-surprise. His sneer shows off double rows of pin-like black teeth.
Blurb, a plump goblin covered in iridescent scales, with a wide, trout-like mouth and a show of feathery crimson gills. She has large, purple soulful eyes perched frog-like at the top of her head, and leaves a trail of silvery slime like a snail wherever she goes.
Snark: Nowhere, I tell you! That’s where they would be. You think a young critic makes his name by close reading and cautious praise? It is the clever putdown, the brilliant and memorable metaphor, reducing a poet’s lifework to a punch-line. (I have a special notebook of these, which I save for the occasion.)
Blurb: Who cares about criticism? Poets write their names in the stars by working the argent reticulations of the moon on water…
Snark: Are you trying to say “poets make their careers by networking”? You realize, I hope, that readers actually turn to the reviews first out of the whole magazine, all giddy with schadenfreude, ready to gloat over other people’s punctured pieties. A nasty review even sells books. You think that puffery on the back cover sells copies? Has anyone ever purchased a volume based on the absurdities perpetrated there?
Blurb: But I'm sincere! Poets have become so chary with image and metaphor, so parsimonious with the sublime in their work that it all has to come out somewhere—why not in praise of a friend?
Snark(aside): ...or crony...
Blurb: Such luscious, juicy words of praise: luminous, brilliant, urgent, liminal, radical, necessary, radiant, lucid….
Snark: “Necessary” particularly irks me. When was another book of poems ever necessary? Plumbers are necessary.
Blurb: I’m up front about what I do. I’m there to, to praise, to celebrate, to. . . cheerlead!—and yes, sometimes I’m over the top. So what? Poets need encouragement…
Snark: I’m with Auden on this. What young poets need is more discouragement. It’s the readers who need encouragement, or courage, anyway, wading through all this effluvia. Have you ever had to read a dozen books for an omnibus review? I don’t think you even read the books you gush over…
Blurb: I read the best bits. Anyway, the urgency comes through the cover. The splendor! The sidereal glory! And spangled with prizes!
Snark: Prizes that are worth a dime a dozen—no, wait, $25 dollars an entry fee. You’d blurb anybody, wouldn’t you? Do you ever say no?
Blurb: I’ve tried. Once. It wasn’t pretty. And I do so like things to be pretty!
Snark: How can you stand it? The books keep coming and coming! An MFA used to be enough to get a job in this racket, now it takes a book—or two. The only good thing I can think of coming from the pullulation of these MFA programs is there have to be thousands of poet manqués out there who actually realize halfway through their degree that they are in the wrong line of work, and maybe they go on to do something useful, something necessary, like, say, garbage collecting.
Blurb: Isn’t that what poets do, gather up the discarded ephemera of the quotidian, the cast-off chrysoprase carapace of the world, which in their eyes alone glitters with the doomed beauty of longing? Anyway, an MFA is a marvelous thing! It gives a budding young poet time to work on her vision, to explore her unique voice, meet peers, blossom under the gaze of wise mentors…
Snark: Future blurbers, you mean…
Blurb: Mentors, and to have a sense of belonging to a community of artists.
Snark: There you go again. Writing isn’t about community. It is about isolation. It is about being alone with the page, or the screen…
Blurb: Or the glass of whisky, in your case…
Snark: Very uncharacteristic of you! I approve. I should have expected some pun on “intoxicating”! But now that you mention it, a drink is in order.
Blurb (giggling): Oooo! Let’s celebrate! Champagne, champagne! Oooo! What are we celebrating?
Snark: Well, do we not between us have all po-biz in our clutches?
Blurb (with deep sigh): Po-biz, yes. But there are still the poems.
Snark (darkly): Yes, the poems. We’ll have to do something about that…
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied...
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