Constructive Negativity: Prize
Culture, Evaluation, and Dis/ability in Canadian Poetry, Shane Neilson
Palimpsest
Press, 2019
Hello Shane. It’s Geoffrey Nilson, your
(almost) surname twin from the opposite left coast of the nation. Long-time reader
(since 2001, your review in Event Magazine),
first-time letter-er. I write poetry reviews too! What a small world, two guys
in one country with (almost) the same last name both really in to poems? What even are the odds?
There are two reasons I believe your
book Constructive Negativity to be
required reading for anyone interested in poetry in this place called Canada.
The first is that you have, as you write in the introduction, “landed on sure
footing by writing the first book of Canadian literary criticism that covers
dis/ability in a substantial way” (13). You address significant problems that
plague our literary culture in spite of the exposure to yourself or your
reputation, whether ableism at the heart of diversity, the proliferation of weaponized
pain metaphors, or the ubiquity of alcohol in our industry. I love, too, that
you have written about your poetics
in spite of a reticence to do so. It has inspired me to write about my own and
my family’s experiences with dis/ability (as well to engage my poetry reviews with
dis/ability), which I think was probably one of your main goals of putting the
collection together. I wish I could speak now to the immense importance of the
materials on your own dis/ability and about poets who identify as dis/abled
(particularly Roxanna Bennett,
Alden Nowlan, and Marc Di Saverio), but that is another letter.
Which brings me to the second reason
why Constructive Negativity is
required reading. Overwhelmingly, the book leans toward an overall critique of
what you call “prize culture,” composed mostly of previously published essays
and poetry reviews in your unique and often satirical “negative register” (15).
Why I think reading this material is so very important is not exactly why you
might think. Poetry needs literary criticism like yours so we can know what
antiquated forms to move away from. “You
must change your genre,” (15) applies to you as well.
I admit I have a soft spot for the dis/ability
section, given my own history of mental illness and drug addiction (a sector of
dis/ability you seem to have left mostly out of your profile). As well, it hits
home because both of my maternal grandparents were dis/abled: my grandfather a
WW2 amputee, my grandmother chronically-ill from multiple sclerosis. Grandma
lived in a long-term care home and Grandpa was like my official babysitter, the
one who introduced me to poetry. He liked to read aloud from Dickens,
Shakespeare, and one of his favourites, Robert Service. Back then I had no idea
“The Cremation of Sam McGee” was supposed to be “bad” poetry. I didn’t know to
scoff at the ballad form or the obvious rhymes. I just loved the sound of the
words.
Sure, reading the poem now, it has not
aged well, and Service’s casual racism in other places is inexcusable. These
flaws however have not stopped “Sam McGee” from being added to the Canadian
canon, given its continued editions, notoriety, and anthology inclusions.
Beyond the aesthetics of opinion, the poem has this whole time been important.
From the first stanza after the refrain the reader understands Sam McGee “was
always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell” (In Fine Form), captured, incapacitated, willing to die from icy hubris
for the capitalist wet dream come to life that was the Gold Rush Yukon. Even a
die-hard CCF socialist like Grandpa could be seduced by myths.
Like writers with the myth of prize-winning
poetry. What does prize-winning mean? Can you fill me in, Shane? I don’t
believe you have given a strict break down in your book. I can’t tell you the
five top qualities of a prize-winning poem, even though I’ve written a few.
Here’s what I do know: it has nothing to do with if a poem is “good.”
The first time I won a writing contest
I was twenty years old. It was also my first publication. Well there was that
creative writing award at eighteen, but this seemed more important because it
didn’t come from my high school. Appearing in subTerrain in the summer of 2001, “jack-knifed” was winner of the 10th
Annual Last Poems Poetry Contest (now the Lush Triumphant Prize). I’m still shocked my fever-dream of a depression poem was
chosen, cringe-worthy teenage violence and Lord
of the Flies reference et al.
No, what I remember most is not that I
wrote a “good” poem that was objectively better than the others that were
entered, but that my specific poem made a connection with the right audience.
When Maritime poet and fiction writer Tammy Armstrong, then living in Vancouver
and editor at subTerrain, revealed she had championed my poem during the
editorial process, it taught me an important lesson. Prize-winning doesn’t mean
the “best” or what everyone likes. Prize-winning means the particular choice on
the particular day the particular decision is made.
I’ve had a few almost-wins, too, in the
spirit of full disclosure. Honourable mention for the Alfred G. Bailey Poetry
Prize in 2015 stands out. Funny thing is, you won that year, Shane, for your
then unpublished New Brunswick. I remember reading your familiar name on the announcement.
I wasn’t disappointed to lose to you. I’m a fan! Most of all, I was pleased
with any recognition for my strange, anti-capitalist ekphrasis, coming at a
time when I really needed some positive reinforcement to bolster belief in my
practice. Even if I had been upset, when I got around to reading some of the
poems, how could I be disappointed with lines like: “Your bosom of earth is strewn
with heavier shadows, New Brunswick” (CV2)? Please.
Maybe I’ve seen you as a sort of
literary older brother, someone to follow out in the world, if not an influence
per se, at least a guide for how to be as poet and critic. But I think
following your lead might be over, now. Not knowing at all of this pseudo-brotherly
arrangement we had, I do not blame you. Our poetics diverged; our critical
practices are no longer alike; the only thing similar between us is that last
name differentiated by a single vowel.
And that’s ok. The only constant in
poetry is change. Or did I mess that up? No matter. I want to place a flower in
the barrel of your gun. Prize or no prize, you will find your reader. You’ve
got use your power for good. Shane, you are at your best as a critic, then;
it’s right there in the words of Constructive
Negativity. Not stifling your rage, but directing it at the power and
structures which would keep your people (the dis/abled) subjugated,
second-class product of the brand that is CanLit.
Pushing an exclusive view of what
poetry is, by deeming some poetry “good” and some “bad,” is nothing more than
cultural poetic colonialism of the type perpetrated by settler-state syllabi
for centuries. Furthermore, I believe this “evaluation” only matters to the
market. And the market doesn’t care about us. The market cares about upholding
the status quo only insofar as it continues to be profitable, and when
something outside the status quo becomes profitable, the market quickly moves
to adjust and capitalize. Negative aesthetics as the righteous voice against
“bad” poetry has certainly been profitable. You have published hundreds of
reviews (and many books) over twenty-plus years. Whether the capital accrued is
monetary, is not the question. You have power in Canadian literature.
You would love a negative review of Constructive Negativity, even calling
for one in the text (73), but I don’t roll that way Shane. That approach would
simply confirm the value you place on negativity as a critical tool. Instead I
lean toward Robert Bringhurst who writes in the forward for Dennis Lee’s Heart Residence: Collected
Poems 1967-2017: “Politics,
when humanely conceived and practiced, is not a mode of social combat; it is
friendship on a systematic scale.” Ditto for poetry reviewing.
Let’s halt the pretense of aesthetic
evaluation and call negative reviewing what it is: promotional opinion writing,
the stuff of business. Negative reviews sell. They get clicks and engagement.
They promote the writer of the review and the publication in which it appears
as much or more than the art they engage with. The most egregious hit pieces
disguised as critical engagement (ex: the Roy Miki review in Constructive Negativity) speak in the
same register as a Pitchfork music review. You use The
Fiddlehead as a benchmark in your justification
of the negative review, it being a journal that because of its practice of
negative reviewing “quickly became a coveted place to publish poetry in Canada
and remains so today,” (163) seventy-five years on.
It was the same with Pitchfork; from tiny music blog into
multi-million dollar culture giant (now Condé Nast property) on the simple
stock of one thing: the negative review. Their hyperbolic negativity,
inclination to rip major artists, and obvious shifting preference for certain
genres/styles are all legendary in the music business (taste a few here). Sure, I love a good skewering as much as the next reader.
The whole point is that they’re extreme: no one believes them to be honest
appraisals. They’re entertainment. Take the review for the sophomore album by Australian band Jet, whose
biggest crime seems to be sounding like an AC/DC cover band trying to play The
Beatles. Giving a 0.0 rating and making the review just a video of a chimpanzee
peeing into its own mouth is crude, juvenile, and, yes, I have to admit, funny,
but it isn’t healthy. I consume this kind of stuff and I want more in a toxic
loop, like cultural junk food I regret the moment it hits my stomach.
Shane, your critical tone may be shaped
by Orwell, Eliot, and Swift, but your negativity, I believe, has more in common
with Pitchfork, Robert Christgau, and
Lester Bangs, that kind of critic unafraid to sacrifice an art form they
profess to love on the altar of taste. Your fervour to separate “good” from
“bad” poetry does not acknowledge that aesthetic appraisal itself serves
capital, the position that only if something is “good” is it “worth” our
attention (and our money).
You understand the risks of “the dark
side of evaluative criticism” that “sometimes masquerades as a pure aesthetics”
(164), but it seems to me that you don’t care unless it hurts you or one of
your own. You ridicule “post-modern questions like who is doing the judging?
and who am I to speak? that are literary identity politics updates on John 8:7”
(166), yet at the base level of humility, “let he who is without sin cast the
first stone” is a pretty decent way to be in the world and, in contrast to some
shit the Bible has on offer, sage advice.
Since I know you appreciate a little
bit of critical inflammation, I counter with my own scriptural reference from
Mathew 7:5: “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see
clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s.”
“Prize culture” is not for poetry; it
is for marketing books, for fundraising, for tax credits, for building
subscription numbers. Prize culture is a manifestation of the capitalist
realism Mark Fisher describes “as a belief—that there’s no alternative to
capitalism,” that “all we can do is accommodate ourselves to the dominance of
capitalism, and limit our hopes to contain its worst excesses…Capitalist
realism is about a corrosion of social imagination and, in some ways, that
remains the problem…we are only just beginning to be able to imagine
alternatives” (k-punk).
To imagine an alternative reality free
from neoliberal ideologies and dominance inherent to the market—of dis/ability,
of diversity, of book publishing, of poetry and reviewing, of reading and of
thought—to imagine that future possibility, is a radical, transgressive act.
Let us be radical, then. Let us have our poetry culture shed its compulsion to
dominate. Let us sing our poems to each other. To sing each other’s praises.
Praise is not a shallow thing in a world without capital. I can feel that truth
in my fucking skin.
For me, a new poetry is created with
the publication of each new poem. I approach my critical assessments always
with this fact in mind. I remind myself to come to a poem on its own terms, to
let the poem be just what it is rather than what I prefer or believe to be
“good.” I must find what it offers to teach and listen to how it expresses that
knowledge. I must refrain from speaking at all until the poetry and I
communicate. The critic has nothing without this.
Unless you and a poem are in
communication, you can know nothing about it except what you put upon it.
Unless you and a poem are in communication, you have no authority to pass
judgement on its literary merit. When you and a poem are in communication, you
will have no desire to judge at all. You will be in love.
“Leave us alone or be kind to us”
(266), you write. Your fellow poets ask the same.
Shane, the exclusion practiced by
Canadian literature and its prize culture toward the poets and poetry of
dis/ability is the same exclusion you practice with your aesthetic battle
against “bad” poetry. The battle itself is a manifestation of capitalist
realism, where it is more conceivable to attack those with which we share
fraternity than to challenge the system that pushes us to each other’s throats.
It is a failure of imagination.
Thankfully, poets do imagination quite
well.
ur pal in pomes,
geoffrey
A small note on form and citation: Much of the discussion around reviews and literary prizes takes place online, this essay included. Following Robert Creely’s dictum that “form is never more than an extension of content,” I leverage search marketing methodologies and Google PageRank to transfer “link juice” or “link equity” to the quote references. When my article links to a small press or literary journal the links pass PageRank. The more quality incoming links to those sites, the better they perform in the “eyes” of the Google search ranking algorithm; the link becomes more than logistic or navigational, it becomes an act of generosity (cultural and monetary) and the review an act of community that circulates the capital it accrues in publication and readership.
Geoffrey Nilson is a writer, editor, and the founder of poetry micro-press
pagefiftyone. The author of four chapbooks, his writing has appeared recently
in Coast Mountain Culture, Hamilton Review of Books, filling
Station, and as part of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin
Press, 2020). Nilson is the BC-Yukon Regional Representative for the League of
Canadian Poets and lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded
territory of the Qayqayt nation.