Against Assessment; Please Bring Snacks // Aaron Boothby
Aaron Boothby ponders assessment, value, membership, evaluation, judgment, and more as part of our guest edited month looking at “Roles and Functions of Criticism: Comments on our Review Culture.”
I find review to be a strange word in relation to literature, especially poetry. It feels caught up in categorization and analysis, activities I’d rather not participate in. Yet wanting to write with, about, and around what’s called literature, I find myself participatory, or at least accessory. Words are activated and activating things, even when familiarly in place, as descriptors of a sanctioned role or activity. To review: an immigration officer with someone’s life reduced to documents, a government minister at a mining operation on unceded lands who finds all is in order, a grading rubric where an assessor is reminded they are scoring too generously. I’d like to think about why our mode of engaging with literature tends towards assessments of value, what kind of value is being assessed, and why such moves are accepted as how things are done. I think part of why is that it is how many things are done; reducing the particular to the documented, placing what’s alive under consideration.
What I say about my engagements with literature is often similar to what Foucault said when asked about his sexuality: I identify as a reader first. I haven’t read much Foucault, but I find that people think I have. I don’t feel that I’ve ever reviewed literature, but find people think I’ve done so, because what I wrote falls into a category of activity called reviewing. Perhaps I fail in escaping the form, even if some of those people said, “but really it’s more poetry.” To myself I say I want to record how words are vibratory in nerves as they are read, how this texture shifts whether those words are read silently or aloud, how other shifts occur as one moves through lines of a poem, sequences of verses, sentences of prose, and how each poetic voice does this differently. When I have found a way into this encounter and am touched by what I read it may be possible to write about it, and to be led to unexpected places by the text in question. I’ve read much more Antonin Artaud than Foucault: I appreciate his rigorous uncertainty and clarity that does not demand coherence.
WhenI think of reviewing cultureI think of management culture ,in the sense that both set me ill at ease. The assessment of value isa managerial process. As it has been conceived in what’s called Canadian Literature (which I do not entirely accept the existence of), reviewing seems to have begun as a sort of dues to membership in a social club named Canadian Literature. As literature dispersed beyond the rooms of this club into literary magazines and government funding programs, this did not vanish. To review: how does this work fit into what the club has established are the purposes of literature, how does it not, should it be taken seriously or not, does it share our concerns or not. That this kind of critical infrastructure cannot be said to exist at this point does not mean its practices do not linger. I note them every time the demand is made for something “more analytical.” The university metrics of writing programs and funding agencies maintain what the clubs have not, even while within them disruptions take place. It’s not necessarily avoidable, since literature—like everything—runs on capital, and capital demands demonstrable value. Poetry is not valuable to capital, hence, the Literary Review of Canada rarely bothers to assess it, preferring “ideas,” which they do not review either, but simply provide a venue for.
I remember an overview of novels by BIPOC writers claimed under Canadian Literature which argued these writers were going about their literary political engagements the wrong way. If they were to do it the right way, the way the white university English program alumni critic suggested, their work would be more effective. Effectiveness is the measure which comes after categorization and membership. “What does it do” is another way to say “who would read this,” which is another way to say “if the kind of people with power in this society find your work unpleasant, how will you influence them,” which is a way of both claiming and deploying power. This kind of thinking remains endemic to many of those who have positioned themselves as authorities on literature, who frequently aren’t imaginative enough for the task they have nominated themselves to do. Who has decided poetry does not have value, anyway? Those who bring it up only to play accessory to their ideas?
These are ungenerous readings of an environment that is not without many generous acts. When I think of other engagements with poetry, it’s towards generous entrances into relations I do not yet know or understand. I think of commitments to time spent, touched by, and thinking with what words a writer has offered. I look for people responding to literature in this way, curious about how they themselves respond. When I write about another’s work, I ask if I am capable of hearing what it has to say.This does not mean the attempt succeeds: only that it is, to me, an acceptable state in which to begin. Can I hear the relations woven through the lines someone has arranged together, touch the longer line that traces through them on a path that is leading me into some kind of understanding, and how can I speak to that from my own specificity, relations and limitations? How is one able to meet a work? To meet the occasion of a work? To want to work outside of assessment is not to be less rigorous or demanding; if anything, it is to be more so, especially if one presumes critical work.
How can I learn to read a poet’s language which is unfamiliar? I never know how to read it. To be a reader is to be continually engaged in how each voice is marvellously itself, conversant with others. The analytic mode engages this by attempting to examine, categorize, resolve. I think of butterflies pinned to a board, specimens. What’s most offensive to me is any claim to objectivity, which can only objectify, or neutrality, which does not exist. Metrics: again, the managerial attempts to measure, which extend even into positive attempts to resolve identified structural deficiencies such as gender disparity or a lack of marginalized voices, and that end in the logics of diversity quotas or the special issue. Always, in any case, there is something going unmeasured—with literature, what’s least measurable may be what matters most. As Keguro Macharia, writing about the situation of African poetry, notes in a recent issue of Brick, “Metrics do not capture the half-half-remembered lines that make impossible days feel less so.” I think of how much I’ve learned from Macharia’s writing, of how to read with attention towards those things that go unmeasured and which there is no training for how to encounter. I think, too, of how one must read into breadth and breath, not constrained to the local or national.
A few years ago, the poet Klara du Plessis and I started a project called Debutantes (since shortened to Debbie), an online space for writing about first collections by poets, mostly from North America. We asked for essays outside of what would typically be considered reviewing, whether less formal, more conversational, more questioning, or less suitable for more traditional venues. We looked around and saw what appeared to be missing, which was in part attention for early books not constrained by print magazine timelines (in an issue of CV2 I have at hand—Winter 2019—each book reviewed was published in 2016), and that which is easily shared on social media and freely available. This isn’t to say good critical writing is not being published (it is!) or that there has not been a shift to more innovative writing—mostly from other online publications edited by younger writers—because that has been happening, too. Significant gaps remain, in both accessibility and inclusivity. Assessing the wider scope of critical literary culture in what’s called Canada is another task, and I’ll limit my thoughts to saying it has many structural insufficiencies, barriers, and archaic formalities that still tend to grant authority to those most capable of appealing to what authority already exists. There are, as always, exceptions, and those cases are where I look for guidance: waaseyaa’sin christine sy writing on Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent in CV2, and two engagements with Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, one by Eli Tareq Lynch in carte blanche , the other a collaborative review by Klara du Plessis, Linzey Corridon, and Alexei Perry Cox in The Puritan, stand out among other examples.
At Debbie, Claire Caldwell's writing about Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End, began in the midst of two hurricanes and lived life to ask “How am I supposed to write about poetry?” This is a sensibility I share, every time I've attempted to write it, and I've found others do it as well: putting aside presumption or authority. Geoffrey Morrison, writing on Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis, wonders in the act of rereading: “I always learned something new by returning to the poems again, a feeling bolstered by the way they sometimes end on hyphens or commas or other non-period marks—infinitude rather than finality.” This move to refuse the encompassing moves me: to remain curious rather than certain, not be finished with a book, to instead attend to how it is a shifting, unstable thing. Not only different, but composed of differences which do not remain the same on each meeting and need not be claimed as such. Perhaps what I’d most like to see is a shift from review to converse, to be in conversation with, rather than assess. When I imagine my ideal poetic occasion, it is poets in someone’s kitchen, with wine or without wine, definitely with snacks, speaking about poetry. This is in no way a lesser activity than writing an essay for publication in a journal, print or otherwise. Absent the conversational in contemporary reviewing culture, and what’s left are disparate statements or assessments. We are not, it seems, talking to each other through our publications, and the connections atrophy.
When such conversations do take place in print, whether as interview or collaborative review, what results often opens possibilities in how to otherwise direct critical concerns. The collection What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation, edited by Rob Taylor, has a breadth and kind of delight in openness and a willingness to range beyond textual concerns which is immensely welcome. Conversations such as that between Dionne Brand and Souvankham Thammavongsa (who talk about the experience of silence in the desert, and whether to liken it to minimalism or maximalism) and Phoebe Wang and Russell Thornton (who pull apart what distancing is at work between language and nature, how to traverse that and reveal what’s at work in “ways of imagining place”) offer something conversationally engaged and searching, not so much an effort to critique or situate but to think with in greater fullness.
To be more free, more imaginative in what can happen in writing about our encounters with literature, is more a possible sensibility than away forward. I read and notice openings, thresholds, doorways. To not be owed anything, to not demand someone’s words be for me or for us, to meet those words as themselves, on their own terms not even if they disrupt whatever our I finds sensible, nor because of, but refusing the authority of this assessment in favour of entering into a continual conversation. Having listened for long enough to have something insightful to add, one asks to be heard, then takes the occasion to hear what is said in response, porous, unsure.
Aaron Boothby is a poet from California now living in Montréal. His work has appeared most recently in carte blanche, PRISM,and The Puritan, as well as two chapbooks: Reperspirations, Exhalations, Wrapt Inflections (2016, Anstruther Press) and Wave Fields (2020, Skyebound Press). He is also the editor of Debbie, an online space for conversations about first and second books of poetry.