“Now I See Something That I Didn’t Before”: A Conversation with Anita Lahey
Anita Lahey is the author of two poetry collections: Out to Dry in Cape Breton, published in 2006 and nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Spinning Side Kick, published in 2011. The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture is her latest publication, released in 2013 with Palimpsest Press. She’s a former editor of Arc Poetry Magazine (2004 to 2011) and is also a journalist who has written for Canadian publications such as Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Cottage Life, Canadian Geographic, and Quill & Quire. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Interviewer’s Note: This interview took place on the afternoon of March 27th at Café Novo, near High Park and Lahey’s home, where she lives with her husband and son. The week previous, Lahey had conducted a mini-tour with poets and critics Jason Guriel and Zachariah Wells called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry” in Toronto, Hamilton, Windsor and Montreal. Presented by Biblioasis, Porcupine’s Quill, and Palimpsest Press, the participants and guest moderators each discussed their most recent nonfiction books and the critical culture of poetry reviewing in Canada.
Lahey and I talked about The Mystery Shopping Cart, reviewing, poetry, and our relationship with certainty. The book includes essays on the legacies of Canadian poets Diana Brebner, Dorothy Roberts, Gwendolyn MacEwan, and P.K. Page, as well as conversations, reviews of varying lengths, and personal reflections on such diverse subjects as Poland, redheads, eulogies, and her father’s cash-register business. Many of the longer reviews include a short “afterword,” in which Lahey revisits her original piece, adding information or reevaluating her position. As I only had an hour with Anita, I decided to cover fewer topics with more depth, and to ask questions that veered toward younger writers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Phoebe Wang: How did Palimpsest approach you about putting this book together? Or was it the other way around? Anita Lahey: It was a little more convoluted than that. I was approached by someone who’d been talking to Palimpsest about the fact that they were looking for these kinds of books, so I was encouraged to put something together, indirectly. PW: Did you have an intended audience? Or a sense of who the readers would be? AL: I wish I could say I was that intentional about it. It’s a mixture of things, as you know. On the one hand, I would hope that people interested in poetry would be interested in reading it, and not just the ‘hardcore’ people in the poetry community. I hope that when I’m writing about poems and writers, I’m not writing in a way that’s part of this little club, so if you are not completely ensconced in it, you wouldn’t be completely baffled by the way the writing is being talked about. There’s also some general personal essays. In theory, it could have a more general audience. PW: When I was reading it, I thought it would be a good fit for a college or university level literature course, because it’s so accessible, but also because you do make mention of your own education as a critic. Were there review or essay collections that you read when you first began editing at Arc Poetry Magazine, or during that tenure? AL: Again, I’m going to say I wish I’d done more of that, because I fell into working on Arc from a much more generalist magazine journalism background. I hadn’t been reading a lot of poetry criticism before I became involved in Arc, and because I was reading poetry and writing poetry and wound up volunteering with them, one of the editors at the time, John Barton, asked me if I’d like to try writing a review. My first reaction was, “No, I’m not qualified to do that,” and he said, “Just give it a try, you’re a reader, and the most important thing is being a thoughtful reader.” So gradually, that grew and grew, and suddenly there I was, editing the magazine, and editing reviews and criticism, and feeling very much like I was learning what it was supposed to be, as I was doing the work. For the first several years it was purely a volunteer position, and then it was very lightly paid part-time—so you’re trying to fit this around finding other ways to make a living. But I will say that I started reading more Canadian criticism and being more aware of it, and also others outside Canada. Someone I really admired, and still admire, is Joan Acocella, who writes for the New Yorker. The pieces she writes—I feel she uses the excuse of talking about a book to also talk about wider issues, to talk about a whole writer’s career, and/or a whole set of cultural topics. So you’re getting an education in the writing, in the subject, in the trajectory of that particular author. That kind of criticism is really hard to do; it takes someone who’s really widely read, who has a lot of life experience behind them. Also I think it’s being financially supported, so it’s hard to make that happen in the environment in which we’re working. I don’t want to make excuses for stuff that falls short, but it always feels like a struggle, that we’re doing our best. PW: I found that a lot of your pieces did tend to look outside to other issues. AL: I learned a lot from the editors I worked with. John Barton was someone I learned a lot from in terms of how to articulate what you’re feeling and thinking in a clear way. Someone else I worked with, my editing his work and him editing mine, is Carmine Starnino, and I’ve learned a lot from him, in terms of the depth of knowledge he has about Canadian poetry and how he tries to closely read.
Phoebe Wang: How did Palimpsest approach you about putting this book together? Or was it the other way around? Anita Lahey: It was a little more convoluted than that. I was approached by someone who’d been talking to Palimpsest about the fact that they were looking for these kinds of books, so I was encouraged to put something together, indirectly. PW: Did you have an intended audience? Or a sense of who the readers would be? AL: I wish I could say I was that intentional about it. It’s a mixture of things, as you know. On the one hand, I would hope that people interested in poetry would be interested in reading it, and not just the ‘hardcore’ people in the poetry community. I hope that when I’m writing about poems and writers, I’m not writing in a way that’s part of this little club, so if you are not completely ensconced in it, you wouldn’t be completely baffled by the way the writing is being talked about. There’s also some general personal essays. In theory, it could have a more general audience. PW: When I was reading it, I thought it would be a good fit for a college or university level literature course, because it’s so accessible, but also because you do make mention of your own education as a critic. Were there review or essay collections that you read when you first began editing at Arc Poetry Magazine, or during that tenure? AL: Again, I’m going to say I wish I’d done more of that, because I fell into working on Arc from a much more generalist magazine journalism background. I hadn’t been reading a lot of poetry criticism before I became involved in Arc, and because I was reading poetry and writing poetry and wound up volunteering with them, one of the editors at the time, John Barton, asked me if I’d like to try writing a review. My first reaction was, “No, I’m not qualified to do that,” and he said, “Just give it a try, you’re a reader, and the most important thing is being a thoughtful reader.” So gradually, that grew and grew, and suddenly there I was, editing the magazine, and editing reviews and criticism, and feeling very much like I was learning what it was supposed to be, as I was doing the work. For the first several years it was purely a volunteer position, and then it was very lightly paid part-time—so you’re trying to fit this around finding other ways to make a living. But I will say that I started reading more Canadian criticism and being more aware of it, and also others outside Canada. Someone I really admired, and still admire, is Joan Acocella, who writes for the New Yorker. The pieces she writes—I feel she uses the excuse of talking about a book to also talk about wider issues, to talk about a whole writer’s career, and/or a whole set of cultural topics. So you’re getting an education in the writing, in the subject, in the trajectory of that particular author. That kind of criticism is really hard to do; it takes someone who’s really widely read, who has a lot of life experience behind them. Also I think it’s being financially supported, so it’s hard to make that happen in the environment in which we’re working. I don’t want to make excuses for stuff that falls short, but it always feels like a struggle, that we’re doing our best. PW: I found that a lot of your pieces did tend to look outside to other issues. AL: I learned a lot from the editors I worked with. John Barton was someone I learned a lot from in terms of how to articulate what you’re feeling and thinking in a clear way. Someone else I worked with, my editing his work and him editing mine, is Carmine Starnino, and I’ve learned a lot from him, in terms of the depth of knowledge he has about Canadian poetry and how he tries to closely read.
“I hope that when I’m writing about poems and writers, I’m not writing in a way that’s part of this little club ... ”Then there are other types of approaches to talking about poetry that have also informed me—it’s people like Don Domanski in Halifax, who did some pieces for Arc, or someone like Al Moritz. Or Jason Guriel (who has a very hard-nosed book of criticism out this year, and it’s really well considered, and I think he doesn’t pull any punches, and he also has a lot of meat behind what he’s saying—it’s not just willy-nilly). And so those guys are looking really closely at a poet’s work and working at the line level, and there’re other ways of looking at poetry in more of a global sense, like “What is poetry trying to do?” or “Why do we write this stuff; what is it all about?” I’m also thinking about that when I’m reading a book. PW: Do think a background in journalism served you in that capacity, in terms of that curiosity? AL: Probably. It definitely helps in the basic sense of trying to write clearly and concisely—and having an interest in being edited in a hardnosed way. In that kind of journalistic setting, the editors aren’t gentle with you, so when I started writing for literary magazines, I was surprised at the gentle back-and-forth. [Laughs] So it helped in that way because I was very well trained to expect that I could be doing better than I was doing. I think the curiosity was there. PW: You mention in the introduction to Mystery Cart that reviewing and writing criticism became a way for you to explore poetics. AL: Some of the pieces in the book, especially the earlier ones, are me learning how to read poems, to be honest. I don’t know how fair that is on the poets I was writing about, but that’s how it happened for me. Partly with the aid and encouragement of smart editors, and a lot of us are doing that—we’re all learning as we go—but I didn’t come to it with an English degree; I didn’t come to it having learned how to read with an academic eye, the way some people do, the way you can really feel it when you read Jason Guriel’s book. But you know, we all have different windows and I think that’s good. PW: Well, an academic education also tends to emphasize an objective, or theoretical, or contextual, or historical look at a writer’s work, and to put forth a really solid thesis—and I wonder if in universities, or even earlier, in high school, students are being told that discussing what they like and how they feel about a book are not as valid as those other kinds of approaches. AL: Right. PW: So when you take them out from the structure of that argument or approach, they’re left feeling like they don’t have an authority. AL: I can’t speak to that. It’s not that I never studied literature—I went through high school and I did take some English classes at university as part of my journalism degree—but I certainly didn’t have to take it to that level where I had to classify everything. PW: I think that might have been a good thing. AL: Maybe. So, when I’m coming to a book, I’m coming first as a reader, and having my own direct reaction to the book and what’s happening in it, and then when I sit down to write about it, I try to place my reaction to the book in a wider context. As opposed to starting with a theory or academic context, I’m starting with my visceral reaction to what I’ve read. I’m trying to be open and frank about what’s happening to me as a reader of that book, with the understanding that the person reading the review would know that—it might be different for them, and likely would be, because they’re a different person. And I think that’s important: I think a lot of the discussion that has been going on about reviewing and the way it’s supposed to work really underestimates readers, their understanding of the relationship between the reviewer and the book, and between them and the reviewer. They’re not blank slates that reviewers are putting their all-powerful assessments onto; they’re close readers in their own right, and will have an understanding that a reviewer is one person with a perspective. PW: Being frank and being honest—I think people see that as a risk, and I wonder when you were an editor why it was difficult to extract a more outspoken review. I wonder if there were any trends you saw, if mostly older writers were doing that, or younger writers. AL: It’s interesting. I think sometimes younger people (maybe younger is not the right word, but people with the least expertise) are sometimes the most confident in their opinion, whereas they should stop and say, “Wait a minute.” There’s that thing where the more you learn, the more you don’t know, and I think that’s part of what happens, that has people hedging, being hesitant about their own right to extend what feels like an authoritative viewpoint about someone else’s work. I don’t know any other areas of culture where the people by and large doing the criticism are also the people who practice that artwork, so I think it’s a difficult position for a lot of reasons, and I think that’s at the root of a lot of the suspicion of certain reviewers who do tend to come down hard on stuff they don’t like. They’re also practitioners of that craft, and I don’t think we can get away from that. I think we have to be aware that it’s also a community where a lot of people know each other; a lot of people have worked together, or might wind up working together. I have a good friend who’s a film critic, and when he sits down to watch a movie and review it, there’s very little chance that he has a relationship with the director. And he’s not someone who’s writing or filming movies himself. So he’s purely looking at the art as someone who’s partaking of that thing that was made. It’s a much more fraught enterprise when you have poets reviewing poets for a lot of obvious reasons, but it’s worth pointing out. I don’t really address that in my introduction. And I think that’s part of why it was hard to extract really honest responses from people, and I don’t know if it’s a conscious thing that’s happening, or if it’s something that sort of instinctively happens.
“I think a lot of the discussion that has been going on about reviewing and the way it’s supposed to work really underestimates readers.”When I sit down with a book, there’s always that question of, “What right do you have to share your opinion of this?” and underneath it, I’m sort of looking at how this person has made his or her poems and what I think of that, and I’m definitely not achieving what I would hope to. PW: Because the reviewer occupies a place in time just as the poet did. Some of these reviews you revisit got me thinking about how reviews or essays are expected to be someone’s final word. Maybe it would be healthier to have reviewers revisit their work, or have more reviewers having a conversation with themselves. And that was a really nice luxury with this book, which we don’t really allow for— AL: —the reviewer to look back— PW: Yes! AL: One of the problems we have, which is a legitimate problem, is that there isn’t a sort of healthy, widespread reviewing culture here, especially of poetry. If someone is sitting down to write a review of a book of poetry, he or she is well aware that the review might be the only one ever written about that book. Especially if it’s a lesser-known poet, or somebody’s first book—and that’s significant, something we all need to keep in mind. I don’t think it justifies not speaking about a book, which I know some people advocate—that we need to use the limited room we have to champion only books we love—because I don’t think that is healthy. It just becomes a sort of promotional gig, and then there’s also all this silence, this self-imposed silence, which to me is kind of distressing. We need to do our best to talk things out. PW: It also promotes a false dichotomy, because I’ve never had the experience where I’ve absolutely loved the book or hated it. There are usually things about the book I liked, and things about the book I just didn’t understand. That’s one thing that frustrates me about this positive/negative reviewing debate. AL: I was talking to my film critic friend about this, and he said, “Well, where would the line be? In other words, how much do you have to like it to be allowed to write about it?” And I think that’s very true, that it’s very rare, that your own response to a book is purely negative or purely positive. And positive and negative aren’t even the right words. PW: No, bafflement, for me, a lot of the times … AL: [Laughs] And that’s worth talking about! One of the things I was doing, was this little touring panel of poetry reviewing last week with Jason Guriel and Zach Wells, who both have books out this year. And one of the things Jason talked about which turned out to be a hot button—at every single panel someone reacted strongly to this—was how he wants, first and foremost, for a poem to entertain him as a reader. A poem’s job is not to nourish you—a poem’s job is to entertain you, and a poem should have a reader in mind. And just what you said about bafflement: a lot of contemporary poetry is baffling to the reader. It doesn’t mean it’s not doing something interesting or worthwhile, or that some people wouldn’t derive something from it, but to a lot of us, it’s so internalized that it’s really hard to understand what it’s all about, or what it might mean to us as readers. And it isn’t trying to draw us in; it’s trying to do something on its own. If you, like Jason, find that frustrating, you should be allowed to talk about it. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with you, but it’s a point worth raising. PW: I wasn’t able to attend the event, but a few Puritan staff members were at the Toronto event as well as the Hamilton one. AL: The Hamilton event was quite interesting. PW: At the Hamilton event, you mentioned you found the reviews for your first book too kind, and the second book wasn’t reviewed at all. When you had your books reviewed or not reviewed, did that affect how you wrote criticism? AL: There’s this widely held idea that if you don’t like something you should be quiet about it. And you can’t even assume that all these people are picking up your book. Because there’s so many books and so many poets that someone might be drawn to. But the question crosses your mind: did some reviewer pick this up and think, I’d better not talk about that?
“One of the problems we have, which is a legitimate problem, is that there isn’t a sort of healthy, widespread reviewing culture here, especially of poetry.” As a writer—and I don’t know if other writers would feel this way—I want to know if my book didn’t work for someone for some reason. That's something I’m really curious about. Because I want to reach a reader in some way. That’s part of the impulse of writing, to share, so I wouldn’t say that my own personal perspective has given me a perspective on the world of criticism—a hard reading is kind of an honour, in a way, because someone cares deeply enough about what you’re doing to give it the attention and time, and to think about it and read it that closely, and that’s a real gift. That sounds a little cheesy, but … PW: Can you talk a bit about mentoring? It came up in Mystery Shopping Cart. AL: Mentorship is important, but I don’t know if it’s important for everyone. I think of poetry as an art, but it’s also a craft, and many different kinds of craft involve lengthy apprenticeships, and usually involve a close relationship with a teacher, or various teachers. I find this has been the case for myself and also for many writers I know. You learn from the people who’ve walked the path before you. And then you gradually find your own way. I remember when I was first studying with the poet Diana Brebner in Ottawa. She decided to try teaching at some point, and she’d published three books by then, and was never a big, widely-known name in the writing community outside Ottawa, but she hadn’t really had that kind of close attention—she made her way largely on her own. And she used to say, “Why shouldn’t I help you get there a bit faster? It took me ten years to figure all this stuff out, and if I can share what I learned, then maybe, for some of you, it won’t take that long.” PW: I was really amused by the interview with M. Travis Lane where she talks about the capital “P” poet [1. In her interview with Lahey, M. Travis Lane defines “Capital P poets” as “Some idea of what a Poet is: a romantic figure, the poet as wise, as sexy, as little Laytons.”], and what you’ve done in this book is present such a wide variety of poets, so you brought that kind of mentoring to the reader. We can read these reviews and learn about so many different ways of looking at poetry from the women you interview and write about. I don’t know if you were conscious of that, or had that as an aim. AL: I wasn’t actually [aware] that I was passing that along, so that’s kind of nice to hear. I mean, a lot of the book is people talking, like Travis Lane, or Stephanie Bolster and John Barton, who have so much to offer from different experiences of writing. One thing—you talk about different kinds of poetry. To me, one of the things I don’t like when talking about poetry is talking about a very narrow idea of what makes a poem. On one hand, what we were talking about earlier about keeping a reader in mind is very important, but I think there are a lot of different kinds of readers and ways those readers might be reached or affected or entertained or whatever, and sometimes I’m baffled by the debates that go on, that tend to have very narrow ideas of what’s okay, what should be allowed, what we should have left behind by now, or all of these things.
“I think we have to be aware that it’s also a community where a lot of people know each other; a lot of people have worked together, or might wind up working together.”They have these discussions in the music world, but we all seem okay with loving and listening to different kinds of music. That doesn’t preclude the fact that there are definitely such things as weak poems and bad poems, but why can’t there be many different kinds of really strong poems, just like there’s lots of different kinds of really strong music? PW: I’m pretty comfortable with feeling baffled and confused, but not everyone is. As long as I have a feeling that the poet has a vision, and they’re trying to communicate this vision as best they can through whatever means they can, and they’ve made these deliberate choices in terms of form to get that vision across. All I can ask is, do I receive that vision and can I pass it on? Part of my idea of reception is very tied to my bafflement and confusion, and I’m trying to analyze that—do I feel emotionally baffled by this poem, or intellectually baffled? AL: And sometimes that bafflement is sort of an— PW: An entrance, it’s a way in— AL: And there’s a difference between something that’s just behind a wall, and something that’s pulling you down this path that you don’t understand at first, but it’s taking you somewhere. PW: There’s a sense of having to return to a poem again and again. I mean, who are some of the poets you return to with a sense of, “There’s something here I don’t get?” AL: I think the best poems all have some of that. It’s that thing about poetry: you can never adequately articulate what makes a good poem because the whole magic of a poem is that it’s holding something you can’t articulate. So the best poems are the ones that, when you read them again, you see something that you didn’t see before. There’s room for you in that, because we’re always different in the sense that we’re amassing experience and things all the time, so when we’re going back to something, we’re going back to it slightly different than when we read it before. And if a poem is a good, strong one, it actually responds to that change somehow, so you get something more, or different, or you see something you didn’t like the last time. All the poets I talk about in the book are like that, like Dorothy Roberts, P.K. Page. There’s actually a poem in the Dorothy Roberts essay that now I read completely differently, and I think, “Oh no, I completely missed this,” or that’s not exactly the right way to put it. It’s like, “Now I see something that I didn’t see before.” So the poem makes a different kind of sense to me than it did before. So that’s partly how a good poem is a thing that can contain that. But it’s partly you changing as a reader, developing as a reader, and as a person. PW: That’s really interesting—particularly the idea that after you’ve read a poem the first time, that poem’s already changed you, or has already altered your idea of reality, and a good poem or good poet realizes that— AL: Or it’s found something; it’s not even necessarily changed you, but it’s found something in you that maybe you weren’t able to articulate before, or … PW: Or it’s brought something to your attention. AL: I was at this symposium in Victoria in February, organized by The Malahat Review, called WordsThaw, and there was this panel with Tim Lilburn I attended, and he said something wonderful about how when you’re reading, what you’re reading finds something within you and makes you bigger inside. And that’s like, the best experience in life, basically. And the funny thing is, when he said that, it was like that moment for me, because it was something I always felt but was never able to put into words, so it “made me bigger inside.” That’s what I want as a reader, and I guess not everyone wants that. Some people actually want complex intellectual stuff going on, and not that I don’t want the intellectual, but if I had the intellectual without the other thing, it loses interest for me fairly quickly. But I understand that’s partly me as a reader. And I think anyone reading my reviews would come to understand that pretty quickly. And if that’s not their bag, then, they can move on to another critic. PW: I wonder how well we know our Canadian critics, if we know them well enough to say that so-and-so is of a certain style. AL: If you read someone over time you get to know their sensibilities, and their interests, and the things that bug them, and gradually, you develop a relationship with reviewers, and you get a sense of, “They’re not going to like this book because of this, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to like it,” because I know that that’s one of their bugaboos, and that really isn’t mine. I don’t mean to keep paralleling this, but I’ve always had those kinds of relationships with movie reviewers. There are some movie reviewers who, if they’re totally crazy for a movie, then I know I’m probably going to find it a little cheesy, because I get a sense of what works for that person. But at the same time, if they’re good writers, I’ll still read the reviews and enjoy them, even if I know it might not be the recommendation that would match. And that’s important, too—that your review or essay is still a piece of writing that’s talking to a reader. And it has to, on its own, try to be a clear and engaging piece of writing. It’s something someone enjoys for its own sake. PW: Was it difficult to match books to reviewers at Arc, according to your knowledge of the reviewer’s style or preferences? AL: Oftentimes, I would let reviewers follow their own noses, and gradually over time, as we were starting to be able to have a little bit of staff, I was able to start thinking about things I wanted to make sure didn’t get missed, things we wanted to try to get someone to review. I wish I could say that we did that comprehensively and more than we did, but we didn’t have the capacity to be going through things to that extent. In general, the reviewing content of Arc was largely led by what the reviewers wanted to talk about. And there’s some validity to that because the people who want to do this kind of writing, to some extent, should be given permission to follow their noses.
“You can never adequately articulate what makes a good poem because the whole magic of a poem is that it’s holding something you can’t articulate.” Where I could, I did try my best to get them to peel away the jargony stuff that didn’t actually open a way into a book. As someone who came to it from outside the poetry community, I think I at least had an advantage that way, in the same way that when I read a piece of journalism, I’m researching something that I know nothing about. In a way I’m acting on behalf of the readers and asking the questions they would ask. PW: Do you mean over-academic jargon? AL: Not necessarily. I shouldn’t say that I peeled it all away—obviously there’s a lot of poetic terminology. Maybe it’s more like a tone than jargon, like a tone of, “We all know what we’re talking about here,” and we just have to be careful about it. And I think I do it, too, and I’m sure we did it on these panels in this past week, because we’re all speaking the same language and involved in the same world. You forget that some of the people listening, or reading, aren’t privy to the shorthand. PW: And that can be a barrier to them, to try to review, and to try to write about literature. AL: And I know that the people reading Arc are also people writing poetry, but not all of them are, and those are the readers that you want—I mean, you need to speak to your readership, but in an ideal world, the audience of poetry would be a lot broader, the way it was a hundred years ago. PW: I didn’t really notice it until I think I was pitching a piece to [an editor] and he pointed out that some of the reviews I’d written were quite esoteric. I replied to him that that was because they were written for particular publications where I could bank on certain kinds of knowledge. AL: Yeah, and if you’re talking about another poet, it’s going to be specialized to an extent, but I tried to temper that as best I could. If I mention Karen Solie, than you know exactly who I’m talking about, but someone’s who’s new to the poetry world wouldn’t, so they wouldn’t get all these automatic associations that go with a name or a certain kind of poetry. PW: A lot of people don’t think of reviewing, even if they’re PhD students in English, and I find that really strange. I do feel there are not enough young women reviewing. So I think it may improve with more books like yours coming out. AL: Well, someone should actually put together a collection of M. Travis Lane’s reviews, because she’s been writing reviews for the The Fiddlehead for about 30 years, and she’s covered a really wide range of books and styles. I’ve appreciated how she illuminates the poetry, how she doesn’t let it off the hook, but she’s not mean—she’s really thoughtful and instructive. PW: Have you read Robyn Sarah’s Little Eurekas? Your tone reminds me a lot of hers. AL: Robyn Sarah—you can climb into her prose and you know what she’s talking about, and you don’t have to be an expert. PW: With this book did you feel you were talking back to yourself as a younger writer? AL: Well, it’s interesting. I felt really ambivalent about it because some of the things in there are more than ten years old, and I was very much in the early stages of learning at that point, so you sort of ask yourself, should I really be putting this out in the world again? What would I think of that book if I read it now? And it’s not as if I had time to reread all those books. Then I said to myself, “Well, you know what, you wrote and published these things, and you should stand by what you said at the time.” It was true at that period, and that’s fair enough. But there are always doubts. So the idea of putting notes at the end helped to make me feel better about it. It sort of felt like cheating, but I’d written all these things already. So adding the notes felt like I was making a book, in a way. It helped me think everything through. PW: I feel both those things about this book, in that the reviews are a kind of a snapshot of a point in time, but that sense of tentativeness or doubt that you have seeps through and that’s the very reason it’s valuable. Because we do have books of criticism that are so definitive (i.e., “this is what the poet is doing, this is their whole career”), and I think that can be very inaccessible. This open-endedness, this kind of winding-around makes for a more readable book. AL: I think too much of it could actually get annoying to the reader, though, so if you’re going to put this stuff to paper, you should sort of stand by it. So I need to be careful about my tentative little inner voice, and sharing it, because that could probably get tiresome. And a little disingenuous? Obviously I have some faith in what I’m saying or I wouldn’t write and publish these things. But, I think most of us can relate to having some germ of doubt. PW: And not all the afterwords are like that. In some of them you’ve added more information. AL: Sometimes I read other people’s reviews and they have a clear sense of what they think is good or what they think is bad, and even an idea of good taste and bad taste, and I don’t approach the world that way—which probably suggests that somebody might think what I say is in bad taste, because I don’t have that kind of radar. And it does make me a little uneasy, because oh, you know, the tone of it is, you’re supposed to feel this way—but it may just be that that person’s quite confident about how they feel, and that’s fine. PW: I think it’s important to have lots of different kinds of books of criticism. If a reviewer does feel doubtful or unconfident about a book, there should be, in our forms of writing, ways to make room for that. Because sometimes I will read a very definitive or very certain and very confident review and wonder if it’s really true. AL: [Laughs] Yeah, how can you be so sure? PW: I feel suspicious of it. I think that’s just me. AL: I think I do also.
