Yet we must try to see our own blind spots; we have an ethical obligation to be clear about "where we are coming from" when we evaluate literature. And the literary world will become larger and more interesting when we open ourselves to as many ways and kinds of reading as possible, when we realize that evaluation is contingent on our values, and when we make an effort to question those values

The average print run of Pote and Poets Press, for instance, which publishes poets like Rachel Blau du Plessis, is less than one thousand copies; the average print run of a university press poetry series is two thousand; Louise Glück's books sell more than 50,000 copies; a book by Billy Collins might sell 100,000 copies. Compare this to the million copies sold of every novel featured on Oprah's book club. Historically, of course, poetry has always had a smaller audience than fiction because reading poetry--even that of Billy Collins--takes more effort than reading prose. Poetry offers, in Emily Dickinson's words, "more windows and doors" than prose. In other words, to various degrees, poetry challenges the dominant ideology because it emphasizes convention and form--the white space that makes us read differently and changes the rhythms of our breath and speech. Readers of poetry can change themselves--and subsequently their worlds--because they breathe "outside the box" of convention.

As a Poet in the Schools, I found that students like art until that liking is regimented, restricted, and judged; in other words, until they are expected to evaluate the products they are being taught to produce.

Shortly after Billy Collins was named Poet Laureate, my conversation with several other women poets turned to his poems

Herrnstein Smith posits that the academy has remained "beguiled by the humanist's fantasy of transcendence, endurance, and universality," and thus is unable to acknowledge the mutability and diversity of literary values. All value is radically contingent because it is produced within a particular economy.

Interestingly, those of us with graduate degrees in literature had more in common with each other than with anyone else, despite our racial or ethnic differences, because we had been trained to look at literature as formalists, and were eager, above all, to evaluate it. Everyone else in the group discussed the content of Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, but the four academics focused on form--and on how it wasn't a very good book because the message was too simple and the characters' dilemmas were not complex enough. The four academics would have preferred a book, in Joan Houlihan's words, that we couldn't understand because it would have given us more to do.

The notion of a pure aesthetic (the objective theory of art) is rooted in a chosen distance from the necessities of the natural and social world. In other words, a pure aesthetic is founded on a belief that artists, writers, and their products can be separated from issues of class, race, gender, etc. Therefore poets who make an issue of their race, class, and gender, etc. offer challenges to American poetry that strike at the very heart of "objective" assumptions.

vant-garde and postmodern art is always bourgeois, Bourdieu points out, bourgeois meaning middle class and college-educated; the working class prefers mimetic art and insists that every image must perform a function.

universities educate students in taste

ndeed, some New Critics separated themselves from politics in an effort to make the practice of objective art the highest value.

In the case of the New Critics, the practice of distinguishing between good and bad poems became a way to create an elite, academic literature composed mostly of the works of college-educated white, male writers.

Creative writing students focus on form rather than content

Creative writers, even those in PhD programs, tend to take only a few theory classes, and because their dissertations are collections of poems or stories or a novel, they don't practice contextual criticism

Only recently has the literature textbook gone beyond formalism and been re-imagined in light of other theories of art

A New Critical "scholar" did not need to research the context of the work, era, or author, but could merely apply formalist tools to produce pages of close reading. Robert Scholes points out that literature is still taught this way in high schools, naming Web bulletin boards where students desperately ask for advice on finding the symbols or irony in poems or stories assigned to them by their teachers.1

As an example of a "bad" poem, one that "will not stand up under serious contemplation," the editors use Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Bugle Song," a poem that reads like a song lyric and in fact was later set to music.

hus, the source of poetry is the poet himself and that source erupts spontaneously

The objective theory of art is still dominant today.

Such a focus on evaluation rests on the idea that "good" art not only rises to the top, but also that its quality is eternally lasting and easily discernable to connoisse

Abrams acknowledges that "the deviation of art from reality has always been a cardinal problem for aesthetic philosophy," solved by "claiming that art imitates not the actual, but selected matters, qualities, tendencies, or forms,"3 This is restated more elegantly in Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as "an imaginary garden with real toads."

Without ancillary attention to formal excellence, the pragmatic theory of art can lead to a misguided sense of social justice, for instance when committees choose work only because of its social content or the writer's minority status.

Thus, many writers, editors, and readers evaluate without being able to name their underlying values. Yet evaluators of literature have an ethical obligation to be clear about their own points of view, and must attempt to articulate their positions, however mutable.

literary evaluation

Wild lands are practically worthless.

“Writing Matters: Deborah M. Gordon”

“Each of these pieces is completely unique, completely unlike any other.” As soon as I said that, it felt right. Difference—uniqueness—as a basis of commonality, I like that. At least enough to make it this moment’s platform.

put out the news myself

Words arranged in a way that declares: here is a living mind; here is a spirit. A good sentence describing piece of gummy candy can telegraph this as certainly as any high-flown rhetoric on the soul or the fate of nations. Reading literature attends as much to the saying as to the said.

What I am trying to say is that I am, at root, moved and heartened when I find what strike me as the best words in the best order, never mind the ostensible subject.

I have preferences I feel are worth fighting for, worth promoting

I have no jihad to prosecute

I certainly could not, for love or money, set out anything like a firm prescriptive aesthetic: this is what the best writing ought to be; this is what AGNI will promote.

editing is, before readying manuscripts for publication, very much a business of cutting away the less essential in order to expose the more essential. I mean this both in practical and philosophical terms. Editing, I have found, is the search for signal in a sea of noise.

Transfer the brats to another large disposable aluminum pan.

Because of their small size and gentle nature, sheep are especially suitable for women, children, and people with certain disabilities.

Franklin Gothic font

But no matter how much you might personally dislike Comic Sans, don’t dismiss a powerful, heartfelt message just because you don’t like its typeface, especially when it’s being used well (as it is here). That’s not a matter of taste. It’s classism, and classism is just a shade removed from the racism that cost Garner his life. Which, ultimately, is what we’re trying to rise above.

But I think the criticism of the use of “Comic Sans” in the “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to be wildly off-the-mark. Not only does Comic Sans work to great effect here; there isn’t a better font that could have been used for the message Rose was trying to put across.