The Philosophy of Poetry Snark, Part I: First Book Poets

The standard operational procedure with reviews is to leave bad first books alone. The bad stuff will be forgotten on its own, the argument goes, and it’s not particularly helpful to be discouraging to young poets. As you might have guessed, we here at Poetry Snark disagree. Some young poets could use a little more discouragement. Many are doomed to a dismal life of failed expectations—the decades-long wait to climb out of the obscurity of a benefitless, low-paying adjuncting gig; the discovery that second books, because not as broadly funded by contests, are often more difficult to publish; and the sheer anonymity of being one of the great mass of contest-sponsored first book poets to be shored against the ruins of academia—these things must be hard for a young person to endure. Poetry Snark would spare them the agony by letting some particularly odious first book poets know that they really ought to pack it in.

But it is more than just charity to these young versifiers that motivates us to thrash their fledgling collections. The other reason why we will be instituting a series of first book snarkings and roastings relates to our philanthropic desire to heal the tepid atmosphere of contemporary critical reception. If we don’t tell the truth when poets lay a rotten egg of a first book, how will readers know when a real golden hen has arrived? How, in short, can we trust discourse that holds “niceness” as its highest value? If everything is good, nothing is truly good.

What few bad reviews are actually written these days are done so out of mere partisanship. An “experimental” poet aligned with this or that herd of avant-gardists may, on occasion, lay into their ideological opposite. Likewise, Adam Kirsch or one of the white guys at Poetry may occasionally lay the strap to someone they deem too obscure or post-modern. This is nothing but another form of the mindless trench warfare that I described in a previous post—the lame resurrection of poetry wars of the 50’s and 60’s. As always, we here at the Snark are a strictly non-partisan operation. If a “new formalist” drops a stink bomb, we will snark it; if a denizen of cave LangPo crawls out to plop a turd, we will snark. Agent Trochee has a particular aversion to new confessionalism and multy-culty charity cases, so we’ll probably sick him on those toadies. We promise to move continually between approaches and schools, and if we seem to be showing one particular bias, we are counting on you to keep us in line in the comments section. Use this thread to suggest first books that you’d like to see us put to rest.