On reviewing

Sina Queryas has a great interview with Jennifer Scappettone on the nature of reviewing. I’m just off the heels of reviewing some things for Broken Pencil, which always leaves me contemplative of my role as a reviewer, particularly if I’ve just written reviews that aren’t positive.

Some acquaintances I was out with today were talking about a play that had been fairly universally panned in the local newspapers. One of my coffee-mates was saying that a review – even a negative review – should be ‘balanced’ by positive comments. I can see the point as a teacher, but is a reviewer’s role different? Do we always need to quilt criticism in compliments, even if those compliments may be inauthentic? It’s this role of a review as an act of building community that i feel on shaky ground about.

I think i initially took on this whole reviewing business as a means to build a vocabulary for myself to talk about writing, so I appreciate Scappettone’s addressing writing reviews as a means to “force [herself] to explore what enthralls or disgusts [her] for reasons [she] cannot immediately name or identify”. It’s easy / socially normative to say that something is ‘good’ and when asked to quantify why, for your ‘just because’ or ‘because it made me happy/sad/angry’. I feel like the absence of debate or deeper discourse about art, and particularly poetry, is really common. It’s easy to get intimidated and unplug, or be concerned about your interpretations not being correct. It’s easier to move around in silence, taking in art, but not verbalizing anything about it.

For awhile, when in my late teens, i had this affected way of describing things with sounds – a theatrical gesture or noise that pointed at what was so appealing to me about the work. I remember a teacher in a writing workshop telling me to stop noise-making and just NAME what I liked, and i felt silenced. I realized I didn’t feel equipped or qualified to talk. Writing reviews for print has allowed me to work out quantifying what I feel is working or not working in art, rather than letting me off with saying something is good or bad, shrugging and walking away.

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and an aside: Jason Dewinetz on writing

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