the ego and the negative review

The discipline of the appreciative review is, I believe, among the great unsung arts of our culture. I suspect it remains unsung because, appearances to the contrary, it is not actually a species of speaking, but a species of listening; and our culture tends to regard listening as a passive activity. But listening — real listening — requires that we give over our attention fully to the other, that we stop worrying about who’s noticing us, that we let the ego go. As such, it is an activity requiring much more effort than the activity of proclaiming our selves through speaking our views. For we are a culture, perhaps a species, drunk on a narrow notion of assertiveness and virility. We are also a culture, perhaps a species, many of whose individuals are obsessed with rank — to the extent that knowing one is on the bottom rung is felt to be preferable to there being no rungs at all. These twin addictions, as visible in the contemporary university as in the military, lead us to suspect those with a gift for listening as ‘soft,’ and to celebrate those with a taste for volubly dispensing judgement as ‘tough.’ My suggestion is that it is those who insist on listening nonetheless who are really tough: they have the courage to continue to serve art when everything around them is making it easy not to.

- Jan Zwicky, from her 2003 essay "The Ethics of the Negative Review", originally published in The Malahat Review, and republished at the new Canadian Women in the Literary Arts website. You can read the whole thing here.

Zwicky says that the harshest judgment a critic can pass on a work is silence, and that we should “keep our mouths shut” about books we don’t like. Very true. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” But if you regard this vow of silence within the framework of Zwicky’s argument, you start to realize—or at least I do—that it rubs against the grain of earlier statements she has made. Think back on her admonition that we make sure what we say stands the test of time. If we ignore certain books altogether, how can we possibly know if our opinions, or the works to which they pertain, have lasting merit? Is it not the height of egotism to not review a book because one doesn’t like it, and let it slip into obscurity without comment? Does one not owe it to one’s art to give everything that aspires towards it a fair shake?

- Zach Wells, in his 2004 response to Zwicky's article, "Strawman Dialectics", originally published in Books in Canada. You can read his whole rebuttal here.

it's all politics, that talk

Jay Ruzesky: So poetry opens possibility as opposed to the way language, in a "scientific" or objective way, does not?

Jan Zwicky: Could we make a distinction here? Science itself, and the way many scientists think, is not always that different from lyric thought. So we really do need to use the word "scientific" in scare quotes, as you do, when we're setting up this contrast. When we use it in this way, we're referring to a picture of science - one common in the media and in academic humanities departments. That picture sees science as a kind of thinking bound by rigid and simplistic canons of logic, aimed at exploiting and controlling the world. This is really, still, Francis Bacon's mid-seventeenth-century conception of science.

What is the relation between lyric thought and this Baconian picture of science? I don't think lyric poetry is "subjective" in a sense that contrasts with Baconian "objectivity;" it's not (principally) aimed at voicing an unchallengeable, irreducibly personal point of view. But I do think that if you read a good lyric poem, you have to give yourself to ways of thinking that aren't conditioned by the Baconian ideal. And that allows you to acknowledge that you do know things in a way that Baconian science doesn't. Culturally, we try to control such knowing by marginalizing things like lyric poetry and saying, "Oh, the arts are about imagination, and the imagination is for making things up. What they say isn't 'true;' they're not 'objective'." It's all politics, that talk. It's a way to control ways of knowing that are inimical to a cultural alliance between capitalism and technology, which is part of the West's inheritance from the Enlightenment. The imagination can but doesn't always "make things up;" in fact, imagination, which allows us to perceive likenesses and similarities, is fundamental to knowing the way things are.


- from The Malahat Review #165, Winter 2008.

the imprint of the unsayable

For some poets, I think, the poem starts with an image; but I usually don't feel I've got the image until I hear the music. Anyway, I'm a music junky - and sometimes what I find most musically satisfying turns out to be in emotional bad taste: "dim lands of peace," etc. I'm instinctively drawn to the idea that poetry is memorable speech. But in - rightly, I think - depriving ourselves of certain rhetorical stances, what we are able to make is more like memorable image or memorable though. (That last not in some abstract sense, buit in a sense fully compatible with William Carlos Williams's dictum). So, the upshot is that I'm much less confident I could actually say what poetry is. But also, partly as a result of a lot of experience editing other people's work, I find I don't really care anymore. What's important, and moving, is the imprint of the unsayable on what is said - and there's enormous range in the ways the unsayable manifests itself.

- Jan Zwicky, from Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, Ed. Tim Bowling, 2002.