The Editor Strikes Back!

As I've said, August Kleinzahler's kneecapping of The Poem of a Life in the London Review of Books some weeks back has become little more than an ugly memory (as one friend puts it, "who cares what a grumpy old poet thinks about a cranky old poet?"). Still, it's nice to see Charles Bernstein weighing in in the letters column of the latest LRB:

Is the ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’ to which August Kleinzahler refers in his piece on Louis Zukofsky (LRB, 22 May) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine Bruce Andrews and I edited from 1978 to 1981? Probably not, since his description of our work and relation to Zukofsky does not fit. And is it ‘A’, Zukofsky’s best-known work, that Kleinzahler has in mind when he refers to A? Probably not, since his review misses the delight it provides to ear, eye and intellect. In the 165 small-format pages allotted for the Library of America edition of Zukofsky’s Selected Poems, I endeavoured to present all aspects of the poet’s work. I wonder why Kleinzahler feels Zukofsky’s work would be better served by someone who, like himself, appreciates only a small part of it? Isn’t that the kind of appropriation for which he scolds me?

You go, Charles! 

I guess it only makes sense: if you assign a biography to a reviewer who just plain doesn't like the work of the poet under discussion (and, I'd guess, the poet himself), & who's got a whole buttload of grudges against his contemporaries who value said biographical subject, then that reviewer's unlikely to produce a very well-balanced assessment of the book in front of him.

(Thanks to Vance for drawing my attention to this, away from the endless annotated promotion tables & charts...)

"No such thing as bad publicity,"

I keep telling myself, stiff-upper-lippishly. But that doesn't mean receiving a 3500-word panning – nay, spanking – nay, drubbing – from August Kleinzahler (now known as "stinky-feet Augie" to two small girls in my household) in the 22 May London Review of Books doesn't hurt. Man, it does.

(And no, I'm not giving you the link. Look it up your own bad self.)

Casting my mind back to the Kübler-Ross "5 Stages of Grief at a Bad Review," I suspect I'm somewhere on the "depression" side of the passage from "depression" to "acceptance," having passed thru the stages of "denial" (surely they sent him the wrong book?), "anger" (cf. Franz Wright, passim), & "bargaining" (but even a bad review in the LRB will surely sell some books to masochistic types?). But the sting is still too real & immediate for me to say much coherent about what's wrong with Kleinzahler's take on the book, and what might be right about it.

Suffice it to say, for those of you who might be taking up pens & cudgels on my behalf, that Kleinzahler's version of Language Poetry makes Tom Clark's (remember "Stalin as Linguist"?) look sophisticated, & that while he spends the better part of a paragraph excoriating my final appendix, he seems to have entirely misread it. Man, I have so many other nasty things I want to say that I've just gotta close now.

Expressions of sympathy – flowers, bonbons, bottles of booze – entirely welcome.