The further adventures of rob mclennan, reviewer // rob mclennan
rob mclennan writes about the road he's traveled as a reviewer as part of our guest edited month “Roles and Functions of Criticism: Comments on our Review Culture.”
I began reviewing back in 1993 by sketching out a short review on Ken Norris’ selected poems, FULL SUN (1993) for The Carleton Arts Review. I recall he’d been frustrated at the book’s lack of attention, and asked if I’d be willing to consider it. By June 1994, I convinced the weekly Ottawa X-Press that books were worth discussing, and began a four-and-a-half-year tenure as their books columnist. I even managed some reviews in the Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail during that period, as well as a monthly chapbook column in Toronto’s Word: The Literary Calendar that was replicated in Vancouver’s VERB. From the beginning, my reasoning was simple: I couldn’t afford to purchase all the books I wanted, and I craved a way to support other writers and their writing. While at the Ottawa X-Press, I wrote three reviews per column, attempting to balance poetry and fiction, local and national, emerging and established, and quickly realized how often I was not only the first review for a particular title, but the only review—a terrifying prospect that has continued to fuel my resolve. How can so many deserving books be ignored so completely?
I originally established my blog a couple of years after I stopped writing for the Ottawa X-Press, realizing I shouldn’t be spending eighty percent of my reviewing energy on attempting to place a review. Now I spend my time on the work, instead of struggling to wait six, eight, or eighteen months for the prospect of fifty dollars, or straight out rejection. It also means I spend an enormous amount of time doing work without any kind of financial compensation. And anyone who knows me knows full well that my current stretch of relative comfort with a spouse who is employed is the exception of my past three decades. I write reviews because I enjoy doing them, and because so many books fall into that chasm of absolute silence.
If we don’t bother to comprehend and absorb what has already been published, what’s the point of producing more? And just as not everyone writes poems or fiction with the same goals or purposes in mind, not everyone composes reviews with the same goals or purposes in mind, either. I’m not attempting to employ career strategies or get in good with a particular camp or publisher or individual through reviewing. I’m not trying to show off how smart I may or may not be. I haven’t an axe to grind, nor an agenda to push. There is work I prefer, obviously, but my range of reading is pretty wide, and isn’t every writer’s range of reading wide than the scope of their writing?
I approach writing as a life-long study, and this process includes just as much reading as writing. I spend as much time creating my own work as attempting to discuss work that has already been produced. Reviewing makes me a better writer, and abetter reader. It makes me a more engaged editor and publisher. I solicit far more than I randomly receive in my in-box, and a great deal of those solicitations are prompted from the packages of review copies of books, chapbooks, and journals that appear daily at our front door. Through reviewing, I am able to see a remarkable range of what is “out there.” Too many new poetry titles are indistinguishable from what I’ve already encountered, but the ones that standout are incredible.
I personally don’t see the point in trashing a book I don’t like. I know there are some that approach the critical review as a kind of necessary “take-down,” articulating why a particular book, according to the reviewer, is “bad” or why an author’s reputation might be overblown. There’s only so much space, only so much time in a day.
It is possible to be critical in a constructive way. Take-downs, more often than not, appear petty, political, and self-aggrandizing, none of which has anything todo with the actual writing being discussed. This isn’t about the reviewer, or what they “like” or “don’t like.” Who cares what you like, reviewer? Who are you, exactly?
I know of an award-winning Canadian poet who said twenty years ago that they had to stop reviewing because they wanted to keep their poet friends. It felt a bit dodgy to me at the time, wondering who was making this poet review books they didn’t like.Now I wonder if they were unable to critique without it turning into complaint.I’ve not liked books by people I am very fond of. I’ve enjoyed books by writersI am unable to interact with. At one point, I pushed myself to see if I could review, without bias, the work of a particular Canadian poet who had previously savaged multiple of my own poetry books in at least three reviews: it took some doing, but I can do it. Now, I’m not trying to pretend I’m an amazing reviewer: I have my good pieces and my mediocre pieces and my very good pieces. It’s a work-in-progress and continues to evolve, as good writing should.
I agree with André Alexis, who, in his lengthy “Water: A Memoir” from his collection of essays, Beauty & Sadness, is frustrated in how those who followed Ottawa writer and critic John Metcalf’s example didn’t quite understand his reviewing style, thus conflating and equating “critique” with “opinion.” They are not the same. While I didn’t need to agree with Metcalf’s conclusions through any particular essay, it did become difficult to argue his points, given he’d spent so much time working his argument, something so few that have followed him have bothered to do. The real questions of a review are: what is the book doing, and how well is it doing it? What is this particular book working from, and working with? I get tired of seeing language-driven poetry trashed because it isn’t embracing the narrative, metaphor-driven lyric (and vice versa). Why bother, if the reviewer has already decided to hate everything about it prior to opening to the first page?
I exist in a position where I’ve reviewed whatever the hell I want for so long that I have the luxury of overlooking books that don’t appeal. I work hard to seek out titles that interest me, and titles that might not have seen much attention, although I know I can’t get to everything. If I don’t think I have anything to add to a conversation about a particular book, whether I think it works or doesn’t, I don’t review it. There are some books I might not be qualified to review. I might not know enough of a particular style or series of influences to feel competent intaking on such a work. Other times, I attempt a review so I can try to understand how and why a particular author makes the choices they do.
The venues, especially the paying ones, fall, and fall away. When John Barton was editor for Arc Poetry Magazine (1990-2003), he made a point to get every poetry title that was produced by an Ottawa-area writer reviewed in the pages of the journal. As the only trade literary journal between Toronto and Montreal, it often meant the only review at all for certain books within those boundaries. Without such a deliberate effort, it might mean not a single review at all.
The Kingston Whig-Standard was infamous for their reviews of literary titles, until the books section was gutted. Prairie Fire used to work enormously hard to get titles reviewed by Winnipeg authors, Manitoba writers, and Prairie writers, which rippled out from their geographic centre. I reviewed for them briefly after they moved their reviews online, but stopped once I realized these reviews weren’t being archived, as though they never existed. I’d rather not get paid at all than have my reviews disappear. Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell says that when his first poetry title appeared in the late 1980s, he had eight or nine reviews, including one in the Ottawa Citizen—written by George Woodcock, no less. Now most poetry titles are lucky to have one or two, if any. I had a literary press out west tell me some five or six years ago that they weren’t sending me their poetry titles for review because they didn’t consider online reviews to be worthwhile. “We send to the newspapers,” they told me. “I hope you understand.” It was hard not to be baffled by their response, and wonder what newspapers they thought were still reviewing small press books of poetry.
Between the deluge of books published now compared to thirty years ago, and the increasing lack of reviewers and reviewing space, the conversations are predominantly online, and predominantly by those who aren’t getting paid for their time as reviewers. Not everyone is as driven, nor in the position, to review as heavily as I do—even if they are getting paid—which means that the impulse for reviewing becomes, increasingly, self-directed by the reviewer as opposed to publication-directed. I might be out of the loop on some of this stuff, but beyond Arc Poetry Magazine, The /tƐmz/ Review, Canthius, Vallum Magazine, and The Puritan, are there even a half dozen venues across Canada able to pay for more than a scattering of poetry reviews?
Writing is study. We engage with writing so that we may better understand its mechanisms. Reviewing provides me further tools and further insight, both for my own personal work and for my critical pieces. I wish to understand poems and books in their context, and the further I engage with them, the further I am able to articulate what just might be happening.
Born and currently living in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey, and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
