three pages energetically asserting exactly what his poems do and how they do it. It is, well, insulting.
And baffling to a reader who appreciates reaching his or her own conclusions. To paraphrase Andre the Giant in the movie "The Princess Bride," I don't think it all means what he thinks it means.
from B.T. Shaw: The Oregonian: Toppled by too much
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4 comments :
B. T. Shaw's comments about ars poetica seem to me ridiculous. I wrote an explanation of what I am doing because I got tired of people misunderstanding my poems and how they work. Rather than being insulted by by my taking my poems seriously, Shaw should use this as an opportunity to expand and deepen her apparently narrow and shallow expectations for poetry and poets. hwr
Numerous errors, some of them libelous, occur in B. T. Shaw's review of THE BRICOLAGE OF KOTEGAESHI. Below is a list of them. I have supplied the true information after each quoted error.
"New Geneva (Pennsylvania, I assume)" – New Geneva is a fictional town in Oregon's Willamette Valley. This is obvious from the poems in the book Shaw was reviewing, The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi, and was explicitly stated in my first book, to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon. To guess that the New Geneva of these poems is in Pennsylvania is absurd and completely incorrect.
"A line by a 17th-century Quebecer" – The Baron de Lahontan was born in France near the Pyrenees and became an officer in the French military. He was sent to New France and commanded Fort St. Joseph in what became Michigan. He explored widely in what became Wisconsin and Minnesota. He lived in Holland during his later years. His book about his explorations in La nouvelle France was very influential in Europe. To characterize him as a Quebecer is inaccurate and must be corrected.
"Pleistocene-era critters" – The Pleistocene is an epoch, not an era. It is part of the Cenozoic era. Shaw makes it look like the mistake is mine, but it is entirely the product of her own ignorance of Earth's history.
"tours through one man's brainpan" – The whole point of my book, The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi, is to show life lived from the center or hara in the lower abdomen in connection with the entire universe all the time. The brainpan is not the point at all. The very title should have told Shaw that. If she had bothered to Google for kotegaeshi, she would have seen that it is a spiraling throw done from the center in the lower abdomen and not from the head. To characterize my book as focussed on "the brainpan" is incorrect and completely misleading.
"if the speaker is not, as Robertson insists, Robertson" – The narrator is named Lee Douglas, as is stated explicitly in my first book of poems, to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon. Shaw here insinuates that I am lying in The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi when I tell the reader that the narrator is fictional. She has no basis whatsoever for making this false and libelous statement. She is just flat wrong.
"Robertson is a retired research librarian" – "I resigned from my position as a research librarian early in 1992. I did not retire. I was a long-haul truck driver for a while during the 1990's, and my second book of poems was based on that experience, Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems. A look at The Oregonian's own review of my book from 2004 would have told Shaw that, as would a quick trip to the Clear Cut Press website. I was also a public librarian, a bus driver, and an investor during the past fifteen years. Her characterization of my work history is incorrect and damaging to my career as a poet.
"Robertson's strung-out sentence form" – To use "strung-out" is to insinuate that my poetry is connected to drug use. This libelous statement is entirely false. I do not use drugs or alcohol at all. This must be retracted with an apology!
"desperate for a change of scenery" – Shaw has spent the first half of her review complaining about the constant change of scenery. She cannot at the conclusion represent the scenery as monotonous and unchanging. This is incorrect a priori by the very logic of her own presentation. It is also wildly inaccurate and misleading.
"An ars poetica is already, therefore, a failure of character" – This astonishingly ignorant statement would make Horace, Boileau, MacLeish, and me all men of failed character. This libelous characterization of me and my statement of aesthetics is false and must be retracted with an apology.
"unable to unscramble, for example, a line purportedly by Tolstoy" – This is yet another libelous insinuation about me. I began reading Tolstoy in Russian at twelve years of age. I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Slavic Languages and Literatures. I was the Director of the Russian and East European Studies Center at the University of Oregon. I do know Russian. There is nothing scrambled about the Tolstoy quote, and it is not "purportedly by Tolstoy." The quote means simply, "Our ship stood at anchor off the coast of Africa." It is from a late story by Tolstoy titled "The Shark." It is a clear, easy, straightforward sentence. The European languages of Pacific Northwest history, besides English, are Russian, French, Spanish, and German, with Latin lurking in the background. It should not astound Shaw to find them in the work of a poet from this region. She should instead be asking why there are not more poets from this region making reference to the full multi-lingual history of this place. But I digress: the point is that this statement insinuates that my Russian quote is scrambled and maybe not by Tolstoy. This is false and needs correcting. An apology would be good, too.
"a collection of poems peppered with references to the cosmos" – Again, it is as if Shaw did not read my book carefully. How could she read my poems and not see that the main point of them all is that we are each a center of the universe and that the cosmos is here with us constantly. Anyway, her statement is false and misleading. My poems are not "peppered with references to the cosmos;" they are about nothing else but the cosmos all the time.
"a difference, however, between gathering stardust and building a coherent cosmology" – This statement is so false that it is hard to comprehend how Shaw could have intended it to apply to my poems. One of the principal ideas in this book of poems, The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi, is that we cannot build a nice, tidy, little structure of words to explain away the tremendous mystery we are living in during every moment of every day. The Earth and all of us are literally made of stardust (see The Life of the Cosmos by physicist Lee Smolin). It is not something different from us that we go out and gather. Shaw’s statement is incorrect. The book she reviewed was in fact preoccupied both with the ardent desire for a spiritually honest cosmology and with the existential impossibility of ever finally having one.
"more bent on gathering from the great big world than pausing to figure out what's plumb" – Again, she is so wrong in so many ways. My book takes from the great big and the little tiny and everything in between, and it does not take at all but just accepts whatever comes along from without or within. The whole book is about the Quixotic quest for "what's plumb." She is absolutely incorrect to say otherwise.
"losing sight of the fine line that separates bricolage from bric-a-brac" – "Bric-a-brac" means small, ornamental articles; "bricolage" means something made from what is ready-to-hand. Shaw has spent the first half of her article giving examples of things in the poems that are not small, ornamental articles. It is shockingly incorrect to portray "the Willamette Valley's eight Kalapuyan tribes, devastated by smallpox," for example, as bric-a-brac.
--hwr
Hi Howard,
Thanks for adding to the thread, and bringing your side of the matter to the fore.
It is obvious that BT Shaw did not like your book. And as an onlooker to this situation, I have to wonder about publishing a review of a book that one doesn't like. If a reviewer's tastes lie somewhere else, then doesn't the readership get served by saying hey, here's a book to get excited about.
A problem with doing the supportive critiques only, is that you get accused of being part of some incestuous circle either trying to sell each others books, or being too afraid of ostracism from the circle, to do a down, dirty and honest criticism.
I wonder now, if I will ever submit a review of a book that I find myself being too critical of. Maybe this stuff is more essay material, where the panning can take place in citations of a work, without the focus of the piece being the work being panned.
Yours,
Rus
De gustibus non disputandum, of course. I was incensed by B. T. Shaw's review of THE BRICOLAGE OF KOTEGAESHI, not because she disliked the book (how could anyone not like this book?), but because she so willfully misunderstood and misrepresented it. She peremptorily dismissed the statement of poetics at the end of the book and consequently failed to understand the poems on their own terms. This was a failure as a critic on her part, not just a difference in taste, and the fatuous maleficence of it appalled and dismayed me. hwr
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