May 2, 2004

Subject: Is TDR helping to make the Canadian poetry community appear "small, bitter, and useless"?

Dear editors of Danforth Review:

I don’t know Adam Getty or Tom Henihan, who reviewed the Adam Getty book Reconciliation, for TDR. So in reading the review, I wouldn’t have been biased either way. But I couldn’t read one sentence of this review without alarm bells going off to tell me something unjust was happening here.

In the first sentence, the reader is asked to swallow the idea that Henihan knows a poem of divine inspiration from another one. And whatever, precisely, he means by that, he leaves us to fill in. Presumably he means that the poems come across forced, to a greater or lesser degree. But rather than say it in a straightforward, diplomatic way, he’s gone for the language that puts him, as the reviewer, on a tremendous platform. And it’s from here that he proceeds to try and disembowel a new poet who apparently doesn’t deserve the chance to improve. What follows are four more statements ("brutally earnest," "working class grit," "trying to endear himself to the reader," "tipping his hard-hat to political correctness") that go unsupported by anything as concrete as examples from the text.

More accusations are fired off, one volley after another: "sentimentality," "ridiculous," "patronising," "maudlin." But the fragments Henihan shows us here simply don’t support such arguments well enough. The opening lines of "Torn," which Henihan calls "self-endearing" could just as easily be called humble, and to be humble is the key to empathy, which is where a lot of great poetry can come from. But no, we’re to believe that Getty is "shameless," (wait a second, who’s got a 140 word bio at the end, when most reviews have a sentence or two?). Besides, I prefer moderate self-endearing to blatant self-aggrandizing any day. By the time Henihan is quoting fragments of the book and following it up with nothing more than "C’mon… really!" the review is clearly so appallingly written that nothing more need be said.

I suppose diplomacy is a frill that only some people want to see. But if you’re going to be a sniper, at least take the time to prove what you’re trying to say. On a related note, I see that Michael Holmes has, in his interview, had the generosity to call Carmine Starnino an "assclown" for his criticism (seems to me that Starnino is making arguments and creating dialogue, not hurling insults). 

Could we be working any harder to make the poetry world and community appear to be small, bitter, and useless? Should TDR be printing this stuff?

Alex Boyd