From the Vaults: PUPPY FIGHT!

Puppies fighting: it seems like something bad is going to happen, but then nothing happens.This article was originally published in the bad-old days of the original Town Crier, in the heat of the PUPPY FIGHT.CORRECTION: This article has been modified as of January 4th, 2013. The penultimate paragraph originally stated, as if it were a fact, that Michael Lista "mostly reviews men." That line was written back in the summer of 2012, and the assertion to which it referred, made by Natalie Zina Walschots, has since been challenged. See here for Lista's  reviews in the time since. We apologize for the misrepresentation.  Ah, poetry. So much passion, so little at stake. Not to belittle poetry—I would like to spend my life in its service—but it can become silly, can’t it? See the formalists and free versers pissing on the same basil plant they’ll later mix into a pesto served to both at the university seminar? See the LANGUAGE folks playing at the dismantlement of power? See the hippies who don’t even seem to write pouring wine on the marble floor of the corporate-poet-alliance (duck for cover, the boring lines will crush the young and elderly)? For what? For poems? Really?The latest drama concerns negative reviewing. Jan Zwicky thinks it’s pointless and that energy is better spent on useful praise, while Michael Lista thinks it ain’t that big a deal and that poets should toughen up. Initially, Zwicky and her backers came off pretty well, with Lista coming off as somewhat disrespectful.Then Zwicky came back with a pretty-damn-negative review of Lista’s essay (it is also impressively mean for a poet whose Griffin reading sounded as if read from inside the smell of lavender). So now both sides have gotten down and dirty. This would be a shame if it weren’t also pretty funny. Remember, this is about poetry—that sometimes difficult but ultimately delightful thing—not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s funny that poetry got the very dignified-seeming (from my limited experience at least) Zwicky to publish the phrases “shitkicking” and “kick in the nuts” in regard to Lista’s critical attitude, while doing the equivalent to Lista himself. Zwicky must have been watching the Euro Cup last week!Now, by finding humour in this exchange, I do not mean to in any way disrespect either poet/critic. They both make valid points, whatever the ultimate dignity of the exchange. I’ll list some responses to various aspects below. But for now I’d like to argue that to get angry at a poem, at a poet, or at poetry, is like getting angry at a puppy. They can’t really do anything, in the end, so why not just get together and talk about how delightful they are, and how they remind us of the world’s potential for tenderness and promise? Then again, a puppy can piss you off too, and a puppy needs to be disciplined. Even so, such discipline should be handed out evenly and calmly, keeping in mind that until it grows up a puppy remains blameless for its actions. In this analogy, poetry never grows up.Perhaps the same attitude should apply to the sparing between Lista and Zwicky. In this case, then, the puppies are fighting each other, and it got a little testy there for a second. All good, though, nothing to get worked up over. I, for one, have a hard time getting angry about poetry. The negative reviews I’ve written stem more from confusion concerning why people hold certain opinions about certain poems, not anger. I might be agitated by a poem, collection, review, etc.—but not angry.What does deserve anger? Government Bureaucracy. Psychopaths. Bigotry (and to be fair, much of Zwicky and her supporters’ anger comes from a perception that Lista—who [was at one time accused of] mostly reviewing male writers – is to some degree guilty of this).But Negative reviews? Bad poetry? Please. That's just some puppies roughhousing. Nothing to get undignified about.