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| Michael Schmidt |
Today's blog post is courtesy of 'Michael's Bookshelf', on which we share with you the archive of Michael Schmidt's writings, lectures and talks.
Here, we have taken an excerpt from Michael's keynote lecture on Friday 17 March at the 2006 StAnza Poetry Festival. The full lecture is entitled 'What, How Well, Why?: A leading poetry publisher wonders why criticism has got a bad name.'
Criticism sets out to clear a space for what is new and unexpected, what may be difficult, or [...] deceptively simple. Marianne Moore continued to admire in Elizabeth Bishop, even after things cooled between them, the originality she had admired and encouraged critically from the outset:
Some authors do not muse within themselves; they 'think' - like the vegetable-shredder which cuts into the life of a thing. Miss Bishop is not one of these frettingly intensive machines. Yet the rational considering quality in her work is its strength assisted by unwordiness, uncontorted intentionalness, the flicker of impudence, the natural unforced ending. Hers is an art which [she quotes a poem of Bishop's] cuts its facets from within.
Often criticism has to praise what is not: all those uns have a Hardyesque, or a Housmanesque feel.
In all these instances, there was a culture of reception in which original achievement and change could be registered. There was a complex and diverse review culture, something which is only just being redeveloped now thanks to the web and to excellent online journals such as Jacket, coming to supplement the old stalwarts and replace the journals that have folded. A culture of reception, it seems to me, is public, not contained within the academy, though academics and theorists are welcome to contribute to it.
Terry Eagleton in Stand was one of the best, most consistent, severe and generous, of the critics of new poetry I encountered when I first came to Britain. Another was the Guardian’s Martin Dodsworth. It is through the culture of reception that interested general readers find out about new books or rediscover old, writers see themselves reflected, recognisably, unrecognisably... We are talking 'reader development' in an early sense, appraisal and judgement intended not to sell the idea of reading, and therefore always recommending, but to make sure that new works and editions are valued, that the factitious, meretricious and merely conventional are identified as such.
That culture has value only if it is informed and sets out to inform; if it takes positive and negative risks, and if it is willing to risk giving offence in the interests of truth, for example, to insist on the quality of, say, Geoffrey Hill’s sometimes resistant work, in the face of three decades’ neglect and misevaluation. Poetry’s mere cheerleaders do the art more harm than good. They are in a way the real censors because they discourage engagement, shrouding the poem in good will.
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| Exchanging Hats by Elizabeth Bishop |
Elizabeth Bishop's Exchanging Hats is published this month by Carcanet. Although Bishop was a painter throughout her life, it was not until 1993 that her forty surviving paintings were tracked down, identified and exhibited by the poet and art critic William Benton, in a process whose frustrations and serendipities he describes in his introduction. Reproduced for the first time in the original, hardback edition of Exchanging Hats in 1997, Bishop's subtle, confident artworks illuminate the 'painterly' qualities of her poetry.
This revised, paperback edition of Exchanging Hats contains an updated introduction, revised and corrected details for the provenance of each painting, and a new afterword locating Bishop's paintings within the wider context of contemporary art.