Dwight Garner and Chelsey Minnis

Both Garner and Minnis surround themselves with the buffered walls of elitists.  Their email addresses are not available to the common public, so I could not send the following to them.  And one day, perhaps sooner than later, the following will not be available on the Internet.  And the great cleavage between the elite and the plebes will be complete.  

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Gibberish on a Silver Platter—

Clarity, the Great Taboo in Poetry

(My Wake-up Gift to National Poetry Month)

If a Pulitzer Prize* for gibberish were to be awarded, it ought to go to Dwight Garner of the New York Times for his gibberish encomium of gibberish poetry.  “In ‘Baby I Don’t Care,’ Drole and Fierce Poems Influenced by Film Noir,” Garner praises ad nauseam poet Chelsey Minnis.  One ought to wonder what provokes those like Garner to select the books/authors they select.  What are their biases?  One might suspect high-brow inanity to constitute one of Garner’s.  (BTW, in 2015, I wrote "Review of an Unusually Lame Review," unpublishable of course, regarding a different laudatory review written by Garner on establishment poet Charles Simic.)  

Fluff flurry of words to the point of gibberish characterizes Garner’s style, which certainly must be well appreciated by readers of the New York Times, as well as publishers, of course.  An interesting caveat, though not mentioned as a caveat, appears after the title of the review:  “Buy Book.  When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.”  “Independently reviewed”?  Well, one would have to follow the money to make that determination!  Indeed, how much is the Times paying Garner for his review and how much “affiliate commission” is it getting?  How can that possibly be deemed “independent”?  And how can a review be negative?  Wouldn’t such a review inevitably lower the Times’ “affiliate commission”?  Why don’t/can’t other poets and readers question and challenge, as I do here?  Why have such citizens become a mass of open-wide-and-swallow robotons of thought, or rather non-thought?  That is the question.  Well, I digress… or sort of.

As a caveat, I did not read Chelsey Minnis’ book of so-called poetry and thanks to Garner’s so-called review, I will NOT be reading that book.  So, this is not a review of that book, but rather a review of Garner’s review of that book.  Are reviews of reviews even permitted in establishment poetry and writing circles?  Likely not!  After all, I have yet to see any such reviews published or mentioned in establishment literary journals and the media.  In any case, Garner begins his “review” with—surprise!—gibberish:  

Some poets are cutters, others are curers, showing up to every occasion like a condolence-wisher with a casserole.  Chelsey Minnis is firmly in the first category.  Her verse arrives well chilled. It is served with misanthropic aplomb.  

So, what does that even mean?  Minnis is a “cutter” of “well-chilled” verse.  Hmm.  Brilliant use of vocabulary?  But shouldn’t a “cutter” instead be a poet who cuts those like Garner and other such hacks of the poetry establishment?  If not, then what is being cut?  After all, to cut nonsense with nonsense is not really cutting at all!  Or is it?  And so, Garner quotes Minnis’ cutting verse, praising that  “Minnis is endlessly quotable, so one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly.”

I love to go to bed sober, 

which means I have to start drinking early.

I like it when two men take off their dinner jackets and fight

Next time you see me, I’ll be crashing Rolls-Royces.

Who, in reality, except the well-paid Garners, would ever quote such a verse?  And one must ask why poets like Minnis spend so much time writing meaningless crap.  Why don’t they instead, at least now and then, risk something by writing a poem or two highly critical of the academic/poetry establishment, Garner included?  Well, the reason is that Minnis was hatched from the establishment itself (University of Colorado in Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop).  And so, Garner lauds (and more readers “Buy Book”):  “one of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time […]” and “she’s a provocative thinker about gender and poetry and the erotics of dislike.”  

Yes, the “erotics of dislike,” unless of course dislike of the poetry establishment, Garner included.   To support his statement, Garner quotes the poet:  “Sometimes I try to please someone that I hate … / So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions.”  Provocative?  How is any of that even remotely “provocative”?  “Her poems marinate in the sort of feelings you don’t like to admit you have,” states Garner.  But how does elite reviewer Garner know what kind of “feelings” we don’t like to admit we have?  Mind-numbing!  Does he really think everyone thinks like he does?    

And Garner eulogizes ad vacuitas, of course:  “In much of her early work, the poems comprise clusters of words that float in fields of ellipses, to intense if slippery effect. These ellipses function like cosmic versions of Emily Dickinson’s dashes.  At times, in ways both comic and deadly earnest, Minnis can seem like Dickinson broadcasting from hell.”  Hell in the fields of ellipses!  Oh, my!  I’m shaking in my boots!   Then somehow Minnis, hatched from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a dissident!  Garner supports this odd thought by quoting from “Bad Bad,” which “reads like a dissident manifesto”:  

People say “nothing new” or “the death of the author” but, I am new and I am not dead.

If anyone thinks they need to write reviews, teach classes, edit magazines, or translate books in order to write good poetry … then maybe they should just take a rest from it.

Poetry is for crap since there’s no money or fast cars in it … 

But, in the thighs … I feel it.

You should not fall in love with your mentor, but you should try to punish him with your poems.

I fell in love with my mentor like a novice … 

I was a nude girl on a fire truck ringing a bell.

I cannot write poems to honor other poets … 

I do not think of them at all.

I am only sentimental about my drinks …

I will tell you what is poetry … 

It is a remote electronic claw picking up a stuffed bunny rabbit …

It is like bleeding from your anus in the snow.

Some dissident, eh?!  Solzhenitsyn ought to be rolling in his grave!  “Even better, Minnis may not be glad of this review,” argues Garner, as if Minnis didn’t want to sell any books at all.  To support his affirmation, he cites Minnis.  

I want to write a poem because I don’t feel very boring!

But I will feel like a stuffed leopard because of the praise.

Let me give you my feedback.

My feedback is arf arf arf.

Well, at least, that’s better feedback than the general silence of the lambs, or rather poet academics, that I usually receive.  Garner concludes his so-called review with a final desperate publisher pitch:  “Let’s say you haven’t bought a book of poetry in some time. ‘Baby, I Don’t Care’ and the reissues from Fence Books could make you come back. You could start here.”  Yes, “Buy Book,”  “Buy Book”!!!  

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*It is truly amazing how the elite intellectual-establishment ream-fillers never—never, never, never!—wonder what the biases of the judge anointer-selectors might be.  Indeed, just state “Pulitzer” and the indoctrinated intellectuals open wide and swallow.  BTW, I’d send this to Garner, but he surrounds himself with a well-buffered wall like all elites.  Email address not available… 

Dwight Garner

Question:  Now, what poetry magazine out there would ever publish a review like the following? 

Answer:  The American Dissident.  Period.

Review of an Unusually Lame Review 

Ever read the poetry reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times?  If not, take a gander.  You might be surprised by the level of innocuousness… or perhaps not, that is, if you’re familiar with the poetry establishment.  “‘When our souls are happy,’ Charles Simic has written, ‘they talk about food.’  When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic,” states Dwight Garner in his latest New York Times review on several new Simic books. 

My review here is not about Simic, but rather about one of his blind fawners.  In fact, one must wonder if Garner is a paladin for publishers:  his review is scarcely longer than a lengthy back-cover blurb.  I’d copied it several weeks ago with the thought of sketching a cartoon on Simic, but I’d already done several, so that thought quickly evaporated.  Finally, I got down to looking at it.  Garner notes Simic’s stuff is “comic and elegiac” with a dash of “old world sensibility.”  Now, wouldn’t it be nice for once to read about a poet who’s stuff was hard-core truth telling and quite upsetting to the literary established order?  Sure, tell me about it.  The beginning sentence of Garner’s review should have been a line from Simic’s most potent verse.  Well, perhaps it was.   

The next indication of Simic’s potency, or rather impotency, as admired by Garner, is the following:  “In his very good new book of poems, ‘The Lunatic,’ for example, a spring day makes him so happy that, even if he had to face a firing squad, he’d ‘Smile like a hairdresser/Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.’  Oh, yeah, now I really want to read that book!  I’ll have to run down to the local library to see if it has a copy.  But am I dreaming?  For such verse, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a MacArthur fellowship!  Ah, but Garner informs that earlier Simic had written a “nearly perfect collection” in 2007 in celebration of his having been anointed Poet Laureataster of the US Congress.  Talk about a dysfunctional Congress!  In fact, the latest GAO report on the Library of Congress seems to have indicated precisely that!   Too bad, Garner does not provide a “nearly perfect” line of verse from that collection to entice us to read it.

Finally, the other book reviewed is a prose collection, The Life of Images.  “Yet what’s really special about this book is that it demonstrates what a melancholy baby this poet is, in all the best ways,” notes Garner who is perhaps so blinded by his love of Simic that he doesn’t even realize the inanity pouring out of his own pen.  Perhaps he too is a “melancholy baby”?  How not to LOL.  Perhaps a cartoon of both of them in diapers singing Van Morrison’s “Melancholia” might be a good idea.  Hmm.  So, Simic was “an early foodie.”  Whoopee!  One really has to wonder how someone like Garner manages to get his hagiographies published.  Oh, yeah, I forgot, the high standards of the New York Times… and paladin of publishers.