TDR Letter
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
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