My review of Eliz­a­beth Benedict’s new anthol­ogy Men­tors, Muses & Mon­sters is up at Book­fo­rum’s web­site. Check it out…

The edi­tors gave my reviews in the Sep­tem­ber issue of Poetry mag­a­zine the title “Live All You Can” (which dilutes some­what the irony I was going for by quot­ing that Henry James line in the piece); this reminds me, for obscure asso­ci­a­tional rea­sons, to urge you to read James Wood’s excel­lent take on Terry Eagleton’s smack­down of “undergraduate atheists” (in Mark Johnston’s fine phrase) in last week’s issue of The New Yorker (not avail­able online to non-​subscribers). Anyway, hope you enjoy the reviews, or uh.. l8r/

[Note: This review is the second in a series. For the first, see here. For the third, see here.]

Rae Armantrout, Versed

For decades the con­fes­sional poem has been attacked by crit­ics who find it intol­er­a­bly naïve, suf­fo­cat­ing, and lim­it­ing, the seal stamped by the signet of bour­geois values. John Updike, in a moment of inten­tional self-​parody, cap­tured per­fectly the voice these crit­ics hear: “Of noth­ing but me, me / —all wrong, all wrong— / as I cringe in the face of glory / I sing, lack­ing another song.”

By now, of course, the inter­net has made con­fes­sion­al­ists of us all, and even the most strin­gent crit­ics of the mode have shown reserves of com­pla­cency that could shame whole sub­urbs. But there was a time when crit­i­cism of con­fes­sional poetry had real teeth. When Charles Bern­stein went after it in a 1980 essay, he argued that the moves had become too well known and the forms too much imi­tated, with the result that even the stark­est of per­sonal rev­e­la­tions ended up sound­ing phony:

[Note: I recently com­pleted a passel of reviews for a pub­li­ca­tion that decided not to pub­lish them. Rather than let them die on the vine, I thought I'd throw a few them up here over the next couple of days. The second and third in the series are here and here.]

Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge

Poetry about the extra­or­di­nary suf­fer­ing of its author presents its read­ers with a spe­cial conun­drum. On the one hand we don’t want to pre­tend that the suf­fer­ing is inci­den­tal to the art; one of the more easily dis­pens­able things that T.S. Eliot ever wrote was that “the more per­fect the artist, the more com­pletely sep­a­rate in him will be the man who suf­fers and the mind which cre­ates.” But to err in the other direction—to read the suf­fer­ing instead of the art—well, that’s what Oprah’s for.

A reader comes wary, then, to a book like Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge. It’s not just the title: already on back cover of the book we find no fewer than three Poets Lau­re­ate warn­ing us about the “irre­versible, immense” qual­ity of Guest’s suf­fer­ing, which the jacket flap spec­i­fies: “At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suf­fered a bicy­cle acci­dent that left him par­a­lyzed for life.” Nor is this a publisher’s ploy to secure our pity in advance; the end of the first poem, “A User’s Guide to Phys­i­cal Debil­i­ta­tion,” offers a fair precis of what’s to come: