MUSEUM POETICA: ANVIL AND ROSE

Some readers believe that Dwight Garner, a book reviewer for The New York Times, has been influenced by Anvil and Rose reviews.  Surely this is utter nonsense.  However, in the spirit of investigative reviewing, here are reviews of five of Mr. Garner’s reviews, all post–Anvil & Rose, in chronological order, with the titles used in the online New York Times.

“A Raging Pandemic Inspires Poetry with Little Bite”
Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, ed. Alice Quinn.

Garner opens with a question that could set up a joke — “What are poets for?” — and then he responds by quoting Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, of all sources, foreshadowing his dark intent to gut this lame anthology.  Here’s Rushdie’s take: “A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”  Accusing most of this batch of “America’s poets” of putting us to sleep, Garner slashes Sarah Arvio, Rick Barot, Elizabeth J. Coleman, Rigoberto González, Nathalie Handal, and Jane Hirshfield, among others.  He states that in this anthology “American poetry seems as if it is dazed and sated, in critical care and intubated.”  Nice use of pandemic metaphors, Mr. Garner.  But the most incisive comment is that most of these poems have “been written as if by comfortable indoor cats.”  Where did these newfound chops come from?  

“Karl Ove Knausgård’s Essays Struggle with Big Ideas”
In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Quoting Randy Newman for the opening (“I have nothing left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway” with the chorus singing “He’s dead.  He’s dead.”) is the equivalent of throwing a pitch high and inside, letting the batter know this is not a pitcher to mess with.  Garner bows to Knausgård’s My Struggle series, but then utilizes the Randy Newman quote to great effect: 

“He also seems, forgive me, a bit posthumous, in the sense that the culture is unlikely ever again to make the place for him that it did.”  But the review then backs off after the lovely bluntness of “These are minor essays, earnest and sawdust-filled.”  The review goes totally askew when Garner starts to quote from the essays, and his quotes show Knausgård is pretty damn sharp: “About Christopher Nolan’s movie ‘Inception,’ he writes: ‘Lovely wrapping paper, no present.’”  No sawdust here. This review suffers from an opening too strong to follow, or a slow realization by Garner that the book isn’t really that bad.

“In The Liar’s Dictionary, People Work on the Definition of Love and Many Other Words”
The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams.

(Warning: More baseball comparisons.)  In this review, Garner is like a pitcher whose elaborate wind-up contortions are more engaging than his actual pitches.  As in his Knausgård review, Garner has a lot of fun with his introduction, opening with Jack Kerouac’s famous “The ones for me are the mad ones . . . ,” but then Garner goofs on Kerouac and hits us with the opposite, celebrating book nerds: “lexicographers, copy editors, fact checkers, librarians, the better sort of Wikipedia updaters: the rank and file of the intellectual proletariat.”  You know, those  “unacknowledged legislators of the world of reading matter, this band of shaggy-sweatered warriors, share expertise and a nomenclature and a tendency to blink in strong sunlight.”  This playfulness goes on for four paragraphs before Garner gets down to business — reviewing The Liar’s Dictionary.  Which he sort of likes, but finds it gets a bit too cute for his tastes.  Once again, the review doesn’t live up to the introductory paragraphs.  But Garner enlightens us with a great term: “mountweazels,” that is, phony words slipped into reference works.  If only Garner slipped some into his review. 

“Summerwater Makes an Intimate Study of Social Class Out of a Long, Rainy Day”
Summerwater by Sarah Moss.

Garner’s weakest review yet, as if the energy displayed in the pandemic poetry review keeps fading away. This is certainly his lamest opening paragraph: “Against the wisdom of the ages, you can tell a book by its cover. You can usually tell one by its title, too.” Um, what happened to the reviewer who quoted Salman Rushdie and Randy Newman? This review revives a bit in the middle section, thanks to some choice quotes from Moss’s novel, such as this one: “Justine chose this remote park in the hope of avoiding the wrong sort of people and finding the right sort, ‘those who don’t need fried food and warm sweet milky drinks always on demand, gift shops and public toilets, people who want to get out of their cars.’” But the review comes apart at the end, with Garner trying to justify novels with weak endings: “Endings don’t matter to me quite as much as they do to many.” Then he tries to justify this surrender: “If I’ve been allowed to ride shotgun on a magnificent cross-country drive and the car breaks down in Reno? Well, sorry to miss you, Los Angeles, but I’ve got my memories. This metaphor, alas, does not work so well with travel by ship or plane.” And making a dumb joke about the failure of his examples doesn’t help.

“The Devilish Art and Life of Lucian Freud, In Full Detail”
The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968–2011 by William Feaver.

A very traditional review, though with some barbed quips, like “[Feaver’s] biography is hairier than a bonobo.”  Garner proceeds to number the ways in which Freud, a grandson of Sigmund, was “devilish”: “The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. He lived like a puddle-stomping toddler.”  And: “Freud needed new lovers the way a diabetic needs insulin.”  Two lovely similes.  But back to the devil: He painted his daughters in the nude.  My favorite comment by Garner on Lucian Freud: “You wish you could cover him, like a parrot, when you want him to be silent.”  Then, in the very last paragraph, this rapturous assessment of the painter: “He made the ordinary gravid, and sublime.”  OK, the the previous twenty paragraphs were all misdirection?  A trick to make the last paragraph spring out and punch us in the head?  Or is this Garner’s way of saying, Ladies and gents, the artist is a genius and a monster?  Whatever it is, “A Raging Pandemic Inspires Poetry with Little Bite” is Garner’s best review.  Or is that just because it could have been written for Anvil & Rose?  Surely we agree, Mr. Garner, a reviewer’s work (as well as the poet’s) is, to borrow from Rushdie, “to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”  

(Let’s ignore “At the Inauguration, Amanda Gorman Wove History and the Future Into a Stirring Melody,” an entire Garner review dedicated to this minor poem.  The overblown praise can be attributed to inaugural giddiness after Captain Chaos’s departure.  It could happen to anyone.)