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Critical Reviews |
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Donatello’s
Version
For other
reviews, including Scully's Line Break, consult
BookReviews.
Unoriginally, the superlative blurbs padding this book of poetry abound: “fiercely demystifying intelligence,” “brave, bold talent,” “courageous and undaunted,” “work of exceptional power,” “a rising dragon,” etc. One must, of course, ask why Scully should be considered courageous at all. What precisely did he, as a retired lifer university professor, risk in writing the poems in this collection, a number of which deal with Iraq? Did he risk his life as a reporter or soldier or poet or even professor while in Iraq? Is it courageous and original to be critical of the war in Iraq?
Poets need to be held accountable for the showers of congratulatory hyperbole they choose to bathe in. After all, they can say no, but instead seem to prefer to glow and bask in praise.
Scully is billed as a kind of dissident, “one of the most important figures in poetry that engages the reader in social and political issues,” whose poetry is grounded in “dissident engagement” and, according to friend Richard Wilbur, “arises not from opinionation and facile protest.” Yet, if Scully the poet is sitting comfortably writing, rather than actively contesting and fighting, isn’t his precisely what Wilbur declares it is not?
In “Arc,” Scully asks what we can do, if anything, “to bend/ the arc of justice/ back down to earth?” He notes that it “won’t be with speeches,” but fails to note that neither will it be with poems like the ones he writes—poems that fail to risk anything on the part of the poet, poems that were not written from purposeful conflict with power, poems that were not brandished in the face of power to embarrass power. Scully’s critique of the Republican regime is facile and hackneyed, to say the least. What Scully needs to do is ask himself precisely what he knows should not be openly criticized (e.g., his blurbing friends and literary corruption, in general, arm of the political corruption he rightfully condemns) and write about it. He needs to listen to his superego, when it tells him not to, and disobey it from time to time.
“You reach for poetry, but it comes out verse—/ you’re a versifier caught in a roadblock,” he notes in “Snowblind.” And indeed is that not precisely what and who he’s become? Yet he could be something else with a little courageous, “rising dragon” effort, if he dared heed the career-threatening advice of Nobel Prize Wole Soyinka: “Criticism, like charity, starts at home” (not in DC, not in Iraq, but at the University of Connecticut, for example).
Unfortunately, when reading these poems one does not sense a poet of courage standing behind them at all, but rather a poet safely opining from an armchair watching CNN on the tube. “The situation so far/ is not nearly gruesome enough”, writes Scully in “Neo Manifesto,” as in neo-con, the cheap epithet used by liberals to label anybody daring to criticize liberals, including liberals. But if Scully could contemplate open-mindedly, he’d realize how easily his manifesto could be applied not simply to the Bush regime, but to his own regime, the Academy.
Finally, reading these poems, it is not possible to perceive Scully as anything but a poet commenting from the outside looking in, a poet of politically-correct leftist orthodoxy, who can easily denounce the treatment of Al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo (e.g., “Codex Gitmo”), while turning a blind eye, for example, at the censorship of an American poet critical of the Academy. The nation and democracy need poets living and acting on the inside, commenting on the inside. It is far more interesting and enlightening to read about the experiences of such poets, than the second-hand perceptions of poets like Scully. I’d much rather read a poem about cab driving written by a cab driver, than a poem by a university poet written about Guantanamo, wouldn’t you? This book is not recommended. —The Editor ALL MATERIAL ON THIS SITE IS COPYRIGHT ©G. Tod Slone, 2008, The American Dissident www.theamericandissident.org. |
