No Impressionable Youth
A Lover’s Quarrel:
Essays and Reviews
by Carmine Starnino
The Porcupine’s Quill, 2004
Reviewed by Zach Wells
Reviewer’s caveat
 A Lover’s Quarrel is not
only a good book—thoughtful, stylish and consistently engaging— it
is also an important book because it begins to correct a reductive and
largely unexamined consensus about what constitutes "Canadian
Poetry" that has resulted from the well-intended but misguided
literary nation-building carried out by such critics as Margaret Atwood,
Dennis Lee and George Woodcock. Readers who pretend to love and believe
in Canadian poetry and who ignore or dismiss this book will be
impoverished as a result. As Starnino says, "dissent is essential for
its own sake" (italics in original).
A Lover’s Quarrel
is valuable not just because of the judgments Starnino metes out, but
because of the questions and challenges that he raises. This is most
obvious in the sixty-page title essay, but the previously published
selected reviews that follow make clear that quarrelling as a sort of
critical correction (in the sense of adjusting a steering wheel to keep
the car on the road) has always been a major motivating force behind
Starnino’s reviews. Starnino’s quarrel is not so much with
individual poets as with the critical apparatus that has elevated
certain poets to iconic status while ignoring others who are arguably
more skilled but harder to slot into preconceived categories. This
critical apparatus has been reinforced by a sort of critical quietude (1),
abetted by the increasingly bureaucratic and supposedly self-policing
literary institutions (the Canada Council for the Arts being pre-eminent
among them) that govern and arbitrate in matters cultural. Fear of
offending—or more properly speaking, fear of the consequences of
offending—their peers tends to make writers who review err on the side
of caution rather than controversy. The most common rebuttal to
reviewers like Starnino is that they are "self-serving" in
slapping down other poets. This line of argument is difficult to sustain—"Give
me a break," says Starnino— given that self-interest in our
cultural climate is far better served by celebration or silence than by
blunt criticism, as Starnino is well aware:
Moreover, and especially in this
country, negative reviews, given the reprisals they invite,
invariably bite the reviewer back, specifically in terms of whatever
grants, prizes and publications the outraged poet (or sympathetic
associates) will one day be in a position to dispense. These days,
in other words, poets who write reviews are looking for trouble.
It’s also my feeling that this book
has been the victim of some pretty gross critical mishandling to-date,
from reviewers who have oversimplified Starnino’s tastes and
intentions, and I hope that this review will act in some way as a
corrective to the misrepresentations of others.
 Starnino is transparent about the
"partisan" nature of his tastes and makes his points with
vigour. This has led some reviewers to respond to the tenor and tone of
his book more than to the substance of his often subtly nuanced
arguments. Harry Vandervlist, writing in Quill & Quire, said
that "Starnino overplay[s] contrasts and tr[ies] to spook readers
into choosing between false dichotomies." He goes on to call
Starnino an "upholder of a narrow range of poetic values"—which
statement prompted a terse retort from Starnino in Q&Q’s letters
page. In The Globe and Mail, Fraser Sutherland opined that "Starnino
resembles nothing so much as an impressionable youth bedazzled by
formalist filigree and Parnassian self-importance." These readings
seem to confirm Starnino’s complaint that Canadian critics are often
guilty of reading "crudely." While some of the reviews
Starnino included in his book are overwhelmingly negative in their
appraisals and a few unreservedly celebratory, more often they represent
a fraught engagement with a given poet’s oeuvre. Sutherland tells us
that Starnino praises A.M. Klein and that he "treasures the
philosophically rich Tim Lilburn." This is not altogether
inaccurate, but betrays a rather cursory reading of the essays on these
two poets. In the Klein piece, though Starnino finds much to admire, he
also makes the rather disillusioned statement that, with only two
significant exceptions, "there seems to be no signature note, no
inimitable inner speech that surfaces in Klein’s accomplished
utterances." And the crux of the review of Lilburn’s GG-winning Kill-site
is how the gifts of the poet, after his first three books, seem to
decline steadily and that his "voice stops being a voice and
becomes the recurring sum of its previous effects." In a review of
David McGimpsey’s Lard Cake—a book that stereotyped notions
of "formalist filigree and Parnassian self-importance" would
insist he despise—Starnino finds much to praise. Likewise, in his
now-infamous review of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, he gives Bök
more than his due, saying that his lipograms possess "immense
diversionary charm, and only a tin-eared fool would deny them
that." And he puts the lie to Sutherland’s completely
unfounded assumption that "he treasures … virtually the entire
backlist of Signal Editions, the poetry imprint he edits," with a
highly skeptical review of John Reibetanz’s Morning Watch,
which Starnino says is characterized by "a self-conscious lyricism
that, although sophisticated in its effects, strikes me as being
mechanical and lifeless." Impressionable youth, indeed… That
the supposedly "narrow range" of Starnino’s taste
encompasses such diverse voices as Irving Layton and Charles Bruce,
Richard Outram and Ricardo Sternberg, E.J. Pratt and A.M. Klein speaks
to me of broadly catholic curiosity, not reactionary trench-digging. The
"false dichotomies" we’ve become enamoured with in this
country are those of "formal poetry vs. free verse" and
"experimental vs. traditional." Far from encouraging this kind
of simple bipartisan approach, Starnino seeks to explode such
meaningless Manichean thinking to take a closer look at the particular
flaws and virtues of our poets.
That being said, Starnino’s rhetoric,
while it enlivens his prose, is often at odds with the sophistication of
his knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities. To carp on this is to get
caught up in quibbles—as Emerson said, "consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds"—; however, I’d be remiss in not
pointing out what I feel to be a couple of significant chinks in
Starnino’s armour. One of these is a predilection for dropping names,
often in lists; on the penultimate page of the title essay, for
instance, no fewer than twenty-three contemporary Canadian poets are
named in an impressive act of cataloguing. Most of the names receive
little or no substantial treatment—sometimes not even a second mention—elsewhere
in the book. The catalogue thus becomes a sort of critical shortcut,
effectively excluding the reader unfamiliar with the work of these poets
and giving the impression of precisely the sort of garrison that
Starnino deplores, adding fuel to the fire of critics like Sutherland
and Vandervlist who see him as enamoured with a certain type of poetry,
published by certain presses. (By my rough estimate, of the twenty-three
named in the above-mentioned list, fourteen have published books with
Signal Editions, seven with the Porcupine’s Quill and four with
McGill-Queen’s, all presses with which Starnino is affiliated.) I must
make it clear that I don’t think these poets are all of a type (I
haven’t even read all of them), but in the absence of substantial
analysis of their work by Starnino, it’s very hard for the uninitiated
reader to tell otherwise.
Another big problem with A Lover’s
Quarrel is Starnino’s failure to quarrel with certain poets, most
notably Michael Harris, Eric Ormsby and David
Solway, all three of whom
are friends and mentors of Starnino. Starnino does his most painstaking
close reading on poems by each of these three, and his admiration for
their work is plainly sincere. But—and here I’m finally coming back
to my below-stated reservations—I can’t help wondering if his
friendship with these writers precludes the kind of sensible balance to
be found in his evaluations of Outram, Bök, Lilburn, Layton, Dudek,
Klein, McGimpsey and Reibetanz. In a review of Solway’s Chess
Pieces, he excuses some weak writing in one poem as a clever setup
for a later change of tone; he makes a convincing argument, but I wonder
if such strategies might exhaust his patience in other writers,
especially given that he’s "a huge fan of the maxim that a poet’s
identifying presence should be awake in the smallest sample pruned from
their oeuvre." Of the line "lithe scintillas of
exuberance" in Ormsby’s poem "Garter Snake," Starnino
says that it’s a "ravishing" phrase "pieced together by
an ear that refuses to dim language to its lowest common
denominator." It’s true that this is no dollar-store description,
but it strikes me as rather more overwritten than ravishing and vaguely
imprecise in its evocation. I have a hard time picturing a scintilla of
an abstract noun like exuberance, particularly a lithe one; this is
little better than empty verbosity. And in Harris’s poem "The
Dolphin," Starnino makes much of the fact that the poet’s use of
a simile in the final stanza "creates enough of an opening to allow
the ending’s sprezzatura to whistle out." The ending is very
strong in my opinion, but the actual simile ("the flat
tail-flukes/like the wings of a solitary angel") drifts dangerously
close to spiritual kitsch, especially with the use of the very romantic
adjective "solitary."
Although Starnino comes down squarely
against the glorification of ancestors and colonial special pleading
that has led to the preservation of mediocre works by the Confederation
Poets, it seems to me that in calling Pratt the "dominant Canadian
poet of the twentieth century" he is indulging in his own strained
quest for significant antecedents. I’ve never been a fan of Pratt, but
for the sake of this review I revisited two long poems, "The
Witches’ Brew" and "The Cachalot," that Starnino
singles out for praise. These are fun verse thumpers alright, with some
unquestionably virtuoso technique at play, but I can’t help thinking
that they feel, as Starnino says of Klein’s verse,
"uninhabited." I tend to agree with Al Purdy’s assessment
that "the lack of a single personal human face behind E.J. Pratt’s
epics … leaves me indifferent to him and them." Starnino would
probably dismiss this view as the thought of "a poet who’d rather
adjourn to the ease of his persona than launch into the vexations of
style."
This is another sticking point for me.
Purdy’s name crops up in A Lover’s Quarrel from time to time
(five times by my count, three of which occur on a single page), but never for
anything more than a brusque dismissal. Starnino maintains that "a
poet should be judged by his best poems (not convicted by his
worst)" and he extends the benefit of the doubt to the abundantly
gifted but grossly overproductive Irving Layton as well as to poets like
Milton Acorn and Alden
Nowlan, who could also be wildly uneven and
undiscriminating in their output. But he seems all too ready to accept
the stereotype of Purdy (purveyed by both his fans and his foes) as the
aw-shucks all-Canuck avatar of slack craft, rather than engage
authentically with his oeuvre, which, though uneven and at times
perfectly compatible with his critics’ worst opinions, is far more
subtle and various than writers like Starnino and Solway care to admit.
Like him or not, Purdy’s a figure that any serious critic of Canadian
poetry—as Starnino unquestionably is—needs to deal with. His failure
to do this properly is one of the biggest holes in this book.
I’ve expended quite a few words
quarrelling with Carmine Starnino’s book. This might give the
impression that I don’t think much of it and that I’m not much of a
friend. But really, by taking issue with some primary elements, I hope
that I’m honouring the book’s spirit of lively debate. As Starnino
says at one point, his goal is "never to prevail, but to
participate." I happen to agree with more here than I disagree
with, but saying "yes, yes, that’s wonderful, how true"
makes for pretty dull conversation. A Lover’s Quarrel is a book that
should be read. It is both good and good for Canadian literature,
which suffers from a surfeit of love and a shortage of quarrel. It will
be interesting to see what kind of direction Starnino takes now that he’s
passed this stage in his "discipleship in the discipline of
prose." Here’s what I’m looking forward to: more essays on
significant non-Canadian poets to complement his yeoman’s work on
verse within our borders. It would be a shame for a critic with Starnino’s
skill and insight to become too much of a specialist.
Zach
Wells is the Halifax-based author of Unsettled (Insomniac
Press). He is presently jobless and will do almost anything for a quick
buck.
*
Reviewer’s caveat
Alright, alright, I can hear the knives
being sharpened. So I offer the following caveats and confessions.
First off, my caveats:
- I have been a big fan of Carmine
Starnino’s prose since the fall of 2000 when I encountered his
eloquently feisty reviews in the Montreal Gazette. What I
liked and admired in his writing then, and now, is what I like and
admire in all good critical prose: he didn’t soft-peddle anything
and was refreshingly shameless about airing his opinions.
- In 2003, the informal opinionating I
was semi-pseudonymously serving up on the Bookninja.com discussion
boards caught Carmine’s eye and he contacted me, through Bookninja
editor George Murray, to see if I was interested in writing reviews
for Books in Canada, where Carmine is an associate editor. I
accepted and have published several reviews and essays there since.
Also since 2003, I have corresponded regularly with Carmine over the
last year and a half and we’ve had a couple of meals together when
I’ve been in Montreal for work.
My confession:
- As a reviewer of this book I’m in
a position of triple jeopardy: fan, flunky and friend. I probably
shouldn’t have written this review.
In my defense, this review essay is not
an assignment I sought. When TDR editor Michael Bryson asked me if I’d
do it, I balked at first, giving him all the reasons I’ve listed
above, but Michael said he was cool with all that, so I finally agreed,
telling him I’d be making my biases clear from the get-go. If the
assignment had been to review Carmine’s recent book of poems, With
English Subtitles, I’d have demurred.
Why is this different from reviewing a
collection of essays? For one thing, critical prose is less personal a
medium than poetry, at least for those of us who practice both. I take a
certain amount of pride as a reviewer in approaching a book with a more
or less cool hand. Anything resembling perfect objectivity is of course
impossible in such a subjective field. Nor is it even desirable; as
Carmine puts it in his introduction, "corsucatory suspicion can
hatch more satisfying insights than unfelt disinterest."
Nevertheless, too much personal
knowledge of the poet can cloud the clarity with which one views the
poems; at least, I know that I myself, however unintentionally, tend to
be more forgiving of poetry when the poet is someone I know—unless it’s
someone I dislike, in which case I suspect I tend to be more harshly
skeptical than I might otherwise.
But a book of critical essays, while
hopefully still displaying a goodly measure of style and craft, is more
about ideas than art, and I find it less problematic to engage in a
discussion or quarrel (and I do have my fair share of problems with what
Carmine has written) with a friend and colleague’s ideas.
At any rate, I trust that if the
prevaricating disclaimers above don’t convince you, that the review
itself will exonerate me in this instance from any suspicions of
shilling for a buddy.
*
(1) I realize that this
sounds like paranoid conspiracy-mongering, but it’s hard to deny when
you read essays like Jan Zwicky’s "The Ethics of a Negative
Review," an article that Starnino objects to which posits
what I have argued is an irresponsible objection to the negative
review per se. I have also had the personal experience in my very short
career as a book reviewer of having two different solicited reviews
rejected by two different editors, both of whom assured me that the
assignment was well-executed, but they couldn’t run the reviews
because they came down too hard on a first-time author on the one hand
and a mid-career selected poems on the other. (back to
top)
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