Rattle:  Poetry for the 21^st Century                                                                            For other reviews, consult BookReviews.

Winter 2006.  Alan Fox, Editor-in-Chief.  Timothy Green, Editor.  Megan O’Reilly, Assistant Editor, Stellasue Lee, Editor Emeritus. Studio City, CA.

 

N.B.:  Editor Timothy Green (see his comments below after the review) brought to my attention several minor errors in this particular review, which I have since rectified. Clearly, however, those errors did not effect the fundamental premise underscored in the review that the poetry published in Rattle was essentially no different from that published in most other literary journals and, in that sense, was quite establishment-friendly.  Of course, Green refuses to acknowledge that point. Also, he noted it took several attempts to get me to rectify those errors and inferred that, because of them and the unfounded hearsay accusations of John Amen, editor of Pedestal, my writing could simply not be trusted. 

In your long preamble (where you expect us to trust the authenticity of your recreated dialogue with editors), John Amen accuses you of slander, along with the nihilism addressed below.  It’s the slander that matters to me – slander is why I’ll never be able to publish any of your essays or reviews, at least until we grow so large as to afford a team of fact-checkers.  I don’t trust you. 

Green's is a disturbing statement, especially if one considers that it was based on the hearsay accusation of one person, who, by the way, refused to back his claim of slander with even one example.  Whether or not Green or others trust the "authenticity" of my dialogue is immaterial because it can be proven with documentation that the dialogue is in fact authentic. But Green is not interested in documentation at all. What interests him is hearsay, innuendo, and gossip.  The dialogue inserted in my essays is done so because it serves as damning evidence, not because I don't like someone or have hatred in my heart.  In fact, it appears the evidence is so damning that Green refuses to believe it, preferring instead the fairytale-land of innuendo. See the long email below that I wrote addressing each of Green's comments.  As for the entire dialogue de sourds, consult it if you like.  A "team of fact-checkers" will hardly be necessary at all. 

Evidently, Green and so many others like him prefer engaging in ad hominem rhetoric because it serves to divert attention away from the issues at hand, including the rejection of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, not only by the literary established-order, but also by the sheeplike multitudes of litterateurs content with propagating its icons and hovering around its feed trough of prizes, anthologies, grants, invitations, recognition, and accolades.  
 

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“Rattle is the ultimate in contemporary literature,” blurbs Denise Duhamel.  “Consistently exciting, surprising and provocative, Rattle is the poetry journal that the 21^st Century has been impatiently awaiting,” blurbs David St. John.  

 

Criticism ought to open the doors to dialogue and improvement, as opposed to the ostracizing, silencing, and ridiculing of the rare critic who dares actually criticize.  Clearly, as an ardent poet-critic, I am an oddball of sorts in the poetry milieu because, for one thing, I do not believe in publishing self-serving statements of praise regarding literary journals or books.  But more importantly, I am an oddball because I sincerely believe that above all else, including being a faithful literary-society member or collegial-faculty member, a poet should be an individual of courage who dares speak rude truth. 

 

Of the eight reviews published in Rattle, each was positive, leading me to believe only positive reviews were accepted for the print journal. However, the editor explained that for some reason reviews would no longer be appearing in the print journal.  Rattle is to be praised for at least leaving the door ajar for negative commentary on its website and despite several literary battles I've engaged in vis-à-vis the editor, it has not removed my review of Best American Poetry 2006 (www.rattle.com/ereviews/bap2006.htm).  In any case, the editor kindly sent me a copy of the print journal as “payment” for the online publication of that review.  Because I’ve written this critique, one could easily conclude that besides being an oddball, I must also be impolite?  My bent is certainly in that direction, but only when being polite necessitates the suppression of critical thought and ideas. Sadly, most critics tend to be polite and suppress the latter. 

 

In any case, America is run by large corporations.  Lobbyists and huge corporate donations have assured that politicians of both political parties, for the most part, serve as their puppets.  With the exception of Hillary and Bush fanatics, few citizens would probably disagree with that assertion.  Corporations and their “cultural foundations” seem to be behind just about everything today, including poetry.  How, for example, can a thinking individual deny the influence of corporate money on Poetry magazine, which received a $175,000,000 gift from Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals?  The huge amounts of money being funneled into poetry by corporations will, in the long run, probably succeed, just as it has in politics, to castrate the genre. 

 

Entertainment serves to deflect attention away from what the corporations really do and are seeking to do.  It is thus logical that the entertainment industry would seek to co-opt (and castrate) literature.  Evidently, corporate money wants poetry to serve as diversionary entertainment.  An assessment of Rattle, at least the current issue, would lead a thinking poet to classify it as a diversionary-entertainment (or corporate-friendly) literary journal. 

 

Most of the poems in this issue of Rattle appear to be well written by intelligent wordsmiths, but most of them are also highly lacking in purpose… with the exception of writing for the sake of writing, which is really a non-purpose.  “I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing,” wrote George Orwell (“Prevention of Literature”).  Most, if not all, of the poets in this issue do not write for the reasons Orwell wrote… and their poems, certainly for the most part and probably for that very reason, do not burn with the intense passion of vivid personal experience and/or conflict.  One exception, however, is Ed Galing, who does write poetry highly critical of the way how some senior citizens in America are treated.  Indeed, he writes to expose that lie.

 

None of the poets in this issue really RISKED anything in the particular poems published, certainly not the ire of the academic/literary established-order.  Sadly, most poets tend to write cutesy, witty poems like the one Heather Abner wrote on her dog Diesel, the poem that appears first in this issue of Rattle.

 

After his bath and haircut

at the groomer each month,

Deez sports a kerchief

that would look good

at MOMA […] 

 

Of course, this would be a valid criticism of MOMA, but upon reading the rest of the poem, it becomes evident it was not meant to be.  If it were, the poem probably would have been rejected.   

 

Most of the poet biography statements in this issue are troubling because of their essential vacuity.  How to be vacuous while simultaneously cliché-extolling poetry?  Peggy Alsworth’s statement provides a good response:  “Poetry is my Pequod.  It carries me into the wildest of seas where I wrestle in the deep, hoping others will find the journey contagious.” 

 

In fact, the bio statements constitute the most interesting writing in Rattle because they mirror perhaps the state of the poet mind in America today.  Compare the following examples with Orwell’s statement above.  “I think I write poems to try and discover what I feel,” writes Sally Bliumis-Dunn.  “I am an alien who was abducted by humans,” writes Linda Bosson.  “On my home planet, the poems are alive and we herd them like sheep” (perhaps she meant “poets,” not “poems”).  “I write because it feeds me, and it is in my vein,” writes Patrick Carrington.  (Perhaps Carrington is one of those lucky Guggenheim or MacArthur Foundation fellows, chomping away on Gug and Big Mac checks.)  “I write to please and amuse my lover,” writes James Doyle.  “I play with words the way my son plays with Legos,” writes Terry Godbey. 

 

Such entries are the rule, not the exception.  Not one poet, out of the roughly 80 poets published, notes as a reason for writing the improvement of society and democracy via the Emersonian “rude-truth” exercise of free speech.

 

Jack Conway writes:  “I teach my students at both Bristol Community College and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth that the genre of poetry is a ‘big tent’ with room beneath it for many different forms and styles.  I also teach them that there are many people with measuring tapes out there in the world of poetry today trying to measure American Poetry for a coffin and to beware of them.” 

 

Perhaps Conway also needs to inform his students that poetry is, or at least should be, much more than “form and style.”  It is, or at least should be, also substance.  He needs to inform them which “substances” constitute taboos; for example, criticism of the University of Massachusetts and its creative writing professors.  Conway needs to challenge his students to break those taboos.  Moreover, he might inform them that that coffin is being measured perhaps because of the nation’s poetry professors, including Conway himself. 

 

Alas for literature and democracy, it is the seeming total absence of RISK that has come to characterize American poets today.  Rattle’s $5,000 poetry prize-winner, Sophia Rivkin, in her poem “Conspiracy” rightly criticizes the way how many react in the face of someone else’s impending death:  “[…] while everyone stands white-faced/ among the white-faced crowd,/ blending in, blending in.”  But couldn’t that very critique of “blending in, blending in” be applied to Rivkin herself, as well as most other established-order poets, with regards to not standing apart and risking (e.g., salary, benefits, poesy prizes, invitations, and career) for the sake of truth and democracy? 

 

The kind of phenomenon found in Gary Lehmann’s hagiographic essay on socialite poet Dorothy Parker, appearing in this issue, was critiqued in my review of the Best American Poetry.  “If her meal ticket was paid for by her popular essays, now mostly unread, her lasting fame is based on her poetry,” writes Lehmann.  “Here we see her at her best.” 

 

Two Volume Novel
The sun’s gone dim, and

The moon’s turned black;

For I loved him, and

He didn’t love back.

 

If the poem above cited by Lehmann is indeed Parker’s best, why not keep the lid on her coffin and stop writing about her altogether?  As for Tom Brokaw’s Greatest-Generation hoopla, this issue of Rattle devotes an entire section to Greatest-Generation poets.  Reading the poems, one can quickly note that GG poets are certainly no better than any other generation of poets.  By the way, what the Greatest Generation seemed not to do, perhaps more than any other generation, was question and challenge society’s institutions and celebrities.  Because the poetry milieu tends to suffocate in hagiography, back slapping and self-congratulations, criticism of it is absolutely necessary for without it that milieu simply continues on its merry way down the road of faux grandeur… as the democracy becomes increasingly unrecognizable as a democracy.  Like politicians and pedagogues, poets should not be praised ad nauseum. 

 

Finally, what is perhaps disturbing is that indeed the poetry published in Rattle might very well represent, as the magazine’s subtitle notes, “Poetry for the 21^st Century,” which is why it is difficult to believe that, in the words of editor Timothy Green, “We’re continuing to do everything we can to spread great poetry.”  
                                                                                                                                                                                —The Editor

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