DO POETS WHO write well and publish widely on the topic of poetry ever worry that their criticism will overshadow their poetry? Arguably, this happened to Randall Jarrell, one of the best American poetry reviewers of the 1950s but also a poet--but, as it happens, one now remembered for only one poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," even though he wrote quite a few other good ones (e.g., "90 North").
Ange Mlinko, say. At this point, do more people read her reviews than read her poems? Is that unfortunate?
Stephanie Burt is perhaps an even more striking example, as she is not only a widely-published reviewer of poetry but also the author of several books of criticism (including one on Randall Jarrell). Given that she publishes in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books, are her poems ever going to have as large a readership as her reviews?
Probably neither Mlinko nor Burt worries much about this discrepancy. Still, I wonder, if they could magically flip the size of their audiences so that their poems were more widely read than their reviews, would they hesitate to do so?
Graywolf Press is doing their part, having given the cover of We Are Mermaids an eye-catching trio of comic-book-style mermaids, so that the bookstore browser might think the book a short graphic novel and give it a quick perusal.
The thing is...I don't think a quick perusal would do the volume justice. Burt is a subtle, understated kind of poet, her syntax sophisticated, her forms ingenious, her best trick a reverse-angle perspective, as when she lets punctuation marks speak for themselves, or the poem titled "Whale Watch" that turns out to be from the point of view of the whales.
Well, maybe I'm being pessimistic. I hope the folks who pick up the book will sit with it a while. It has some fine poems about being trans--and for that matter, some fine poems about comics, so that cover is accurate as well as enticing.
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