‘Generosity as a Social Justice Reading Practice’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Recently, a particularly ungenerous, cruel, and (to use a more technical term) shitty poetry review was published that brought poets out in droves to the defense of the author. The review was cynical, written in bad faith, and included at least one breathtakingly heartless quip on alcoholism and recovery.
But this post isn’t about that review or its writer—neither deserve your time or attention. What I’m interested in today is the conversation over poetry reviews themselves, and what, if any, responsibilities reviewers have. There’s been an on-again, off-again discussion on what purpose poetry reviews serve, and if there’s room for real-and-actual negative reviews of poetry.
There is room for such writing, but I want to back up for a moment. You don’t need me to tell you there is no money in poetry for 99% of its creators. Unlike fiction, which has many potential paths to some sort of financial future, poets are sustained more by the ethereal currencies of community and affirmation than they are by agents and book contracts.
And those currencies are precious, important things. Even more so today. Trump didn’t create the current climate of nihilistic cynicism that pervades every corner of our lives, but his arrival certainly has amplified it to an enormous degree. Poetry needn’t be hidden from that, but, again and the again, the word I return to is generosity. I believe we need and deserve generosity.
Emilia Phillips wrote the following back in September, and it’s an important distillation of this value:
Generosity is the word I use for this reading practice, as it suggests that I give something—my attention, my curiosity, my ear—to (almost) all poems. This is not to say that I like every poem that I encounter, only that I do not attempt to pass judgment on it because of its style, author, or tradition alone. At its core, this reading practice demands that the reader seek out work by writers who were doing something entirely different than the writers one holds most dear, and work by writers with different backgrounds and experiences than one’s own. With racism, misogyny, and xenophobia at a visible boiling point in the United States, and literature’s resilience as an art form that allows one unique access into the lives and challenges of others, reading generously seems more important than ever.
Back to “negative” reviews. It’s not that poets are too soft for criticism—it’s that the act of tearing something down is far easier than building something up, it’s that we have a responsibility to each other to sustain something resembling a healthy community of poetry. There is no rubric for this, nothing’s set in stone, but let’s start with generosity—not spite, not anger, but generosity.