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Editor's Manifesto
As editor of Parnassus for nearly thirty years, I have stubbornly maintained that poetry criticism is an art, one requiring airtight argument, a passion for style, and even an entertainer’s wit and timing. A reviewer should, needless to say, be erudite and intellectually nimble, but also unintimidated by reputation and quick to point out such flaws as boring syntax and arbitrary line-breaks. Skepticism is all the more crucial nowadays, when books of poetry enter the world wrapped in a caul of blurbs.
Over the last fifteen years or so, as the prestige of high culture has steadily declined, the audience for belletristic criticism—as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety—has dwindled. Yet what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers. Some poets, doves by temperament, are not suited to criticism. But many are simply too fearful. Looking warily over their shoulders, they mutter, “If I write a negative review of poet B’s book, he or a former student of his will pillory my own book when it’s published.”
This widespread timidity, this failure of nerve, quashes the frank exchange of ideas; it closes the valves of everyone’s attention like stone, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. What should be a bracing intramural conversation turns bland, parochial, prevaricating. If reviewers, like a chorus of Pollyannas, hail nearly every poet as being worthy of a laurel wreath, why should we believe them?
Another aspect of this lamentable decline has to do with international poetry. Since the Fifties and Sixties, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of American poets who, falling under the spell of, say, Neruda, Celan, or Akhmatova, embark on a study of Spanish, German, or Russian so that they can read these poets’ work in the original, and perhaps even translate it. (There are, of course, some notable exceptions.) I’m not sure to what this should be attributed. Laziness? Lack of curiosity? I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty of mastering Czech or Chinese. Still, an intimate relationship with another language, particularly its music, can only enrich the poet’s art, as Ezra Pound, the model of a linguistic voyager (and voyeur), demonstrated.
From its first issue, Parnassus has paid close attention to international poetry. The late Donald Sutherland, endowed with an extraordinarily cultivated literary mind, served as our roving ambassador to the courts of St.-John Perse and Valéry, Lorca and Viceinte Alexandre. And we’ve been fortunate, over a quarter-century, to draw on other experts who could interpret, with flair and acute understanding, the poems of Basho, Hölderlin, Tsvetaeva, Cavafy, Apollinaire, and many others.
So when it came time to pick a theme for our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, the choice was easy: We decided on an international number, with a special section devoted to Arab, Hebrew, and Persian poetry—rich, ancient traditions all, and too little known to American readers. We believe readers will marvel, as we do, at the classic verse of the Sephardic poet Shmuel HaNagid, the Persian poet Attar, and the Arab poet Labid. These poems will linger in memory and, I hope, rouse a desire in the reader to investigate such exquisite work more closely.
For me, these years have been like a non-stop, racy, irreverent conversation—and sometimes a quarrel—in the Mermaid Tavern. Friendships have blossomed out of my marginal comments and, on occasion, my hectorings. As a devout letter writer, I’ve delighted in corresponding with writers in Wichita, Strasbourg, Jerusalem, and a thousand places in between. Occasionally the discovery of a good poem in the slush pile has made my day. (We editors all like to believe that had Emily Dickinson submitted her poems to us, rather than to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, we would have spotted and nurtured her genius; such fantasies help divert us from the dirt-in-the-fingernails task of weeding repetitions.) And perhaps most satisfying of all has been watching young writers metamorphose from talented apprentices to brilliant reviewers.
The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex have been perennial bestsellers. A book entitled The Joy of Editing would sell maybe a dozen copies before being rushed to the pulping machine. But I would gladly write it. When I stumbled into the role of editor, I was only vaguely aware that Parnassus is a mountain in Greece sacred to the Nine Muses. I quickly learned that editing was a calling that demanded a steep levy of time, toil, and imagination. Lugging pork up Parnassus has been, at moments, a Sisyphean task, but mostly it’s been an exhilarating challenge, crowned by spectacular vistas. Parnassah, in Hebrew, means prosperity—by editorial prestidigitation, I’ve managed to marry my Hebraism to my Hellenism.
—HERBERT LIEBOWITZ
The Editor Recommends
Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press). Goldbarth’s imagination is nomadic, his curiosity omnivorous, taking him to 17th century Prague and an encounter with a golem, to Rembrandt’s studio where Gypsy Rose Lee happens to drop in, to the Chicago neighborhood he grew up in. Albert could outtalk and outwit Leno and Letterman, Stewart and Colbert; he’s much funnier than all of them.
The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, 1956-1998, translated by Alissa Valles (HarperCollins, to be published in February, 2007). Inexplicably, Zbigniew Herbert never won the Nobel Prize. A master ironist and fabulist, Herbert lived through and observed the horrors of war and totalitarianism. His poetry is a model of how to write political poetry, but his verse is also lyrical, learned but never pedantic.
Paul West, Tea with Osiris (Lumen Press). This beautiful, harrowing sonnet cycle chronicles the author’s extraordinary struggle with aphasia. One of our virtuoso stylists, a novelist of extraordinary range and accomplishment, West writes with verbal flair, wild humor, mordant tenderness, and a kind of heroic defiance--self-pity is conspicuously missing--about his affliction.
Books by Parnassus Authors
Eric Ormsby contributes an essay to The New York Sun's Wednesday Arts and Letters Section. Ormsby is a master of the feuilleton.
Acceptance Speech for the Poetry Foundation's 2007 Randall Jarrell Prize in Criticism
It
is a great honor and a source of deep satisfaction to have my name linked with
Randall Jarrell’s, who has been for me a model of how to write poetry
criticism: incisively, with fierce integrity and an aversion to suffering lazy,
mediocre poetry quietly. His judgments carried so much weight that even his
close friends, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, trembled as they waited for him
to deliver his well-thought out and documented verdict about their new books. His
critical essays and reviews still live on the page, even though some of the
books he wrote about have passed into oblivion. His essays on Whitman, Frost,
William Carlos Williams, Stevens, and Marianne Moore remain peerless. Like
Hazlitt, Jarrell quoted copiously from the works of the poets he elucidated. He
swept away the debris of cant and conventional interpretations, allowing us to
see their poems, as if for the first time. Like a good poem, his essays reward
rereading.
Above
all, Jarrell was a passionate truth teller. “Taking the chance of making a
complete fool of himself and, sometimes, doing so, is the first demand that is
made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does,
if he is to be of any real use to art,” he observed in “The Age of Criticism.”
Jarrell worried that the overproduction of criticism might eclipse the poems
and novels that deserve pride of place. Critics, like parasites, necessarily
had to feed on their artist hosts. Not surprisingly, he flayed the vast
majority of critics for being dull. His list of their vices reads like the
prospectus of a Dunciad
for critics to match Pope’s Dunciad
of eighteenth century Grub Street hacks and poetasters. Here’s Jarrell’s
list: “graceless, joyless,
humorless, long-winded, niggling, blinkered, methodical, self-important, clichè-ridden,
prestige-obsessed.” Jarrell might
have been describing much of the academic criticism of the last thirty years.
The
atmosphere for criticism in 2008 is very different from what it was when
Jarrell wrote. In politics, criticism and dissent, even when done with reasoned
analysis and factual evidence, are equated with treason and naivetè. In the
world of poetry and poetry criticism, theorists have ridiculed objectivity as a
sham, a sly means of advancing a covert agenda. You know the doctrinaire
arguments. I’d like to summon Randall Jarrell to refute this pernicious
relativism. “Real criticism demands of human beings an almost inhuman
disinterestedness, one which they adopt with reluctance and maintain with
difficulty: the real critic must speak ill of friends and well of enemies, ill
of agreeable bad works and well of disagreeable good ones; must admire writers
whom his readers will snicker at him for admiring and dislike writers whom it
will place him among barbarians to dislike.” We have lost the meaning of—and
belief in—disinterestedness (it is often confused with uninterestedness).
I can’t tell you how many times I have invited poets to review another poet’s
work, only to be turned aside with the feeble excuse “ I can only say nice
things about his book.” This
timidity destroys any chance of a stimulating conversation about the merits of
a new book of poems. To speak ill of a friend’s work requires courage and the
suppression of a fear of lethal retaliation.
The
tribe of Ben and Benita has always been fractions and competitive. I have heard
a language poet speak of Howard Nemerov’s poetry with Olympic disdain as not
worth reading. I once asked an experimental
poet to review an A.R. Ammons book.
He replied, haughtily and dismissively, that Ammons had not “advanced
the craft.” If that judgment was
correct, why did he refuse to show us where and why Ammons’ poetry fell short? “Pull
down vanity,” I told the sneering poet.
The
O.E.D. defines criticism as “The act of passing judgment of the qualities or
merits of anything.” A secondary definition, which has often supplanted the
original one, is “fault finding,” which may encompass carping or debased judgments.
The very language of criticism can resemble a land-mined field. Take the word
discriminating. It can be a horrific word that spews out the bigot’s mindless
and ugly discrimination against those he deems inferior or benighted. But the
word also describes what poets, historians, and scientists do in their work:
make discriminations. This process is integral to the pursuit of truth, not
precious connoisseurship or smug elitism.
Parnassus has survived for over thirty years because
like a salon at which guests of diverse opinion talk and argue, it offers
criticism that is erudite and entertaining, raucous at times, and stringently
argued at great length (we don’t tolerate ex cathedra pronouncements): like Jarrell, our
reviewers are not afraid to stick their necks out. Parnassus
is also catholic in its tastes; it patrols poetry’s coasts on different
continents, picking up signals of new voices in Brazil, China, Poland, and
Iran. In any issue of the magazine a reader may encounter an essay on Classic
Arabic poetry, Surrealism, and the ballad, retrospectives on La Fontaine,
Muriel Rukeyser, Zbigniew Herbert, Adrienne Rich, or reviews of First or Second
books—all written in witty, stylish prose.I have edited Parnassus with the strong conviction that poetry criticism and
reviewing can be, or at least should strive to be, an art.
When
the late Stanley Lewis, the founding publisher of Parnassus, asked me what I thought of a magazine
devoted to poetry reviews, I shot back “Who’d read it?” I was right—Parnassus has not exactly been a box office bonanza—but
I was wrong, since the magazine filled a need. It has been a joy to assemble each issue—no zero
population growth at Parnassus—to
become friends with many poets (this tested my disinterestedness at times) and to be
literary paterfamilias to young poets and critics who kept me from turning into
an old fogey.
Parnassus was recently rescued from the hangman’s
noose by a philanthropic stranger, in a series of improbable events that would
make Shakespeare’s Pericles
and Cymbeline seem
plotted by James T. Farrell. Startled and moved by the outpouring of affection,
dismay, respect, and sorrow that our imminent closing aroused, I started a file
of condolence letters...Then I added a file of resurrection letters.
I
would be remiss if I didn’t thank my co-editor, Ben Downing, who is a savvy and
brilliant editor in his own right; my wife Susan, whom I met at a Parnassus party, which proves that sometimes rave
reviews need not be venal, and finally to the Poetry Foundation for bestowing
the Randall Jarrell Prize on my life’s work
—HERBERT
LIEBOWITZ
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