17 June 2004. Now, for a look at a sample of Dan Schneider's criticism, a discussion "Blood," by Naomi Shihab Nye:

I tend to suspect that Nye is more Arab than Schneider. The latter's main screw-up in the preceding, though, is stylistic: his twice telling us Nye is a leading housefrau poet. He then bops into slams of hers and Forch�'s behavior, and the latter's appearance. After a quick run-down of her biography, he turns to "Blood." He finds it disjointed because, in his view, its first three stanzas fail to relate to its title. But, they clearly do: each has to do with being an Arab, or having "Arab blood." According to Schneider, "NSN hopes that by tossing up those stanzas it will distract the reader from her real intention, which is to whine about the Israeli-Palestinian nonsense." How does he know what her motives were? It seems to me that the stanzas appropriately portray the poet's background as an Arab-American (or whatever the correct term is). From them, she goes to her feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which oppress her father and her because (one assumes) of their blood-ties to people whose lives are being devastated by that conflict.

Schneider "improves" the poem by cutting it to the following:

Of his improved version, Schneider says, "No music, no real imagery of power, & no real �poetry� of any sort. The original lays like a silent fart & the rewrite is more focused, but lacks the earlier possibilities. That could well describe NSN�s poetry career." That's it for his "analysis." Nearly all assertion. He does make the point that Nye is guilty of over-writing. I would have suggested she cut, "What flag can we wave?/ I wave the flag of stone and seed,/ table mat stitched in blue" and "Who calls anyone civilized?" (a really bad line, because so standardly noble-hearted)/ Where can the crying heart graze?" (which seems to me to be straining to be poetic, but coming off simply illogical). I'd have her keep "What does a true Arab do now?" to tie the poem together.

I don't find either version of Nye's poem very musical, which isn't surprising, since it's basically nearprose. "Pleading with air" works for me as an expression of helplessness, although it's not genuinely very fresh. The image of the little Palestinian dangling a toy truck is effective. What makes the poem minor, at best, though, is that it is so standard--in outlook, subject-matter, form, technique. Schneider only partially indicates this, and fuzzily.

Nor does "Blood" attempt to achieve and/or express beauty, except secondarily to its trivial attempt to elicit sympathy. I consider the pursuit of beauty and the search for truth vastly more important than the yearning for sympathy and having much more potential, as a result, for giving pleasure, but I admit that that may be my personal bias, so won't go further into it.

The rest of Schneider's discussion concerns an interview of Nye that Schneider quotes and comments on. At one point, he writes, "Is it me or do they just not make interviewers the way they used to? These questions are as off-the-rack as NSN�s answers are. Where would NSN be if she actually had to think & answer a query she had not hear 10,000 times before?" The interview and the answers are off-the-rack. I suspect that's been the case with almost all interviews since the first one, however It's also the case with Schneider's piece of criticism. He is mainly against Nye's outlook, which is what just about all that bad critics are significantly concerned with in poetry. He has no problem with his victim's small and very conventional tool kit--I suspect that, as a poet, he has the same tool kit, just thinks he uses it better than she. He does little more than tell us in his cheerfully contemptuous way that she's no good. That's not enough to convince me he's close to being the major literary critic he advances himself as--however better he is than the ones currently being published in the mainstream.