New York Times Hit Piece on Jorie Graham = Lame Snark

Perhaps the most widely agreed upon sentiment among the M.F.A. grunts of today's poetry world is that Jorie Graham sucks. Indeed, saying snarky things about Jorie Graham has become a kind of cottage industry in today's poetry world. We here at Poetry Snark have no desire to defend Ms. Graham (we don't do that sort of thing), but we do have a desire to promote the standards of quality snark, and the endlessly repetitive, humorless grousing about Graham and her obscure poems and contest cronyism strikes us as the lamest, safest, most boring and conformist snark around. I mean, you know an opinion about poetry has reached a new height in unthinking dogma when the opinion itself becomes a news item in the New York Times. The New York Times, which recently stopped reviewing poetry altogether, apparently only finds poetry valuable enough to comment upon when it realizes there's a market for its story among disgruntled M.F.A. students and losers of first book contests. So David Orr took it upon himself to summarize the findings of the M.F.A. echo chamber in a story that comes to the shocking conclusion that Jorie Graham's poems are "poetic," "thinky," and "fuzzy." Holy shit, now I get it David! What insight you have! But Orr is too much of a coward to even really lay into Graham--instead he hedges, informing us also that "the point isn't that Graham's a bad poet--she's not…" This isn't snark; it's pandering to the masses of unpublished first book poets who have become convinced that the reason they lost the Podunk Review Poetry Prize has nothing to do with the quality of their work. No, it's Jorie Graham's fault … that's why. Somewhere in the dark, inner sanctum of the Iowa or Harvard poetry death-star war room--where the secret cabal of Jorie Graham's storm troopers plot their evil machinations--a deal is being cut to personally cheat you out of that $20 submission fee.