18 June 2004. Now a look at Dan Schneider as a poet. He considers himself about the best poet around. I've read very few of his poems but called him a sub-mediocrity on the basis of those few, and his criticism. In an e.mail, he replied, "As for sub-mediocrity or my poems being not good. Well, if you cannot even tell that the 2 sonnets quoted are excellent at minimum- you've already severely undermined your arguments for being an astute critic."

I replied, "If you want to debate that, you need to rise above argument by assertion."

"Bob, you've not even shown that you can separate your intellect from yr emotions re: art. When you can then you can deconstruct my or anyone else's poems," was his comeback to that.

Why do I bother with him--or with others whose poetry I find defective? I've been hit with this question more than a few times. Just yesterday, for example, I was criticized by someone at New-Poetry for "always" roughing up poems that aren't burstnorm. My critic wanted to know what I thought I was getting out of it. After all, nothing I said would have any effect on the world of poetry.

This is a tough question to answer--because of the disorganizedly many answers I have for it. One is simply that I find analyzing poetry, good or bad, of way of keeping fit as critic and poet. Posted or printed, a negative analysis (and no one seems to wonder about the value of posting positive analyses) also may help the poet whose work I analyze, or teach some other poet things to avoid, and/or a way of looking at poetry that might prove useful to him. It may help critics improve. At worst, it will help provide the poet whose work I analyze data to gauge how his work is being taken--which I can't imagine he would not be curious about. Aside from that, I think it would help a poet to know what those who don't like his work think of it, so he won't be taken unawares by future attacks. And how can it not give him something to mull over, even if he considers it completely wrong-headed, for it should help him know what he's doing better, and become better able to defend what's he's doing, if only to himself?

Slamming crap must also be morale-boosting to others who share one's opinion of the crap, but are discouraged by the praise it's gotten from the big names. This could inspire them to reveal their own misgivings about poets they consider over-rated. Consequently, they might merge into a genuine movement instead of simmering mutely in separate, solitary marginalities and actually make inroads into the deader precincts of the mainstream.

Another way negative criticism might affect the poetry-world-at-large, would be by making a few editors have second thoughts about what they're publishing, perhaps without really thinking about it--automatically publishing second-rate work by prize-winners, for instance.

And, hey, what if the slammer is wrong?! There's a chance someone will point that out to him, and help him.

As for Dan Schneider's poetry, I doubt I'll help him much, but he seems to have this important trait in common with me: he can take negative criticism in stride. He's also completely candid. So maybe he'll counter with attacks on my poetry (which he seems to think like Wilfred Watson's, I guess because Watson invented something called "number grid" poems that have numerals scattered through them; in any event, Schneider doesn't think much of Watson's or my poems). I'd love such attacks because they would give me an excuse to talk about the poems he attacks, and as any reader of my blog must be aware, there's nothing I more like doing.

Okay, now at last to the two poems Schneider, for some reason, calls "sonnets"--I suppose because they're 14-liners. Actually, I've decided to accept this after long feeling a sonnet had to rhyme and be in iambic pentameter. I merely distinguish "plaintext sonnets" for "songmode sonnets," the latter, it should be obvious, being the traditional kind of sonnets.

The poem is near prose. The diction, or turns of phrase, are somewhat individualistic but, as observed, blurry. The poet tries for metaphor but none of them work, for me. He uses a little rhyme, a little near-rhyme, but basically his piece is nearprose. I detect no mastery of traditional technique or use of innovative technique. Using Schneider's way of scoring poems on a zero to one hundred scale, I'd give it around a twenty. However, I would credit the poet with possibly having a few semi-fresh ideas that might form the basis of some future much more coherent poem. His greatest flaws seem those of a poet trying to do more than other poets, not those of a poet badly imitating other poets.

His second plaintext sonnet starts horribly with a gross cliche worsened by a poeticism, "an X so unique that no poet has described it," ending with "limned." I now fear I should not have bothered with these poems, after all. There simply isn't anything much to say about them. They're just meditative free verse, although the second's lines are at least mostly about the length of iambic pentameters. There may be pathos in this second one, but one can't be sure. Something in the girl of the poem's eyes is "echo(ing) the stars collapsing into death." A poetic image--but what does it mean? Is something in her eyes going nova? And what kind of disease that makes her father think she'll "defeat the fates" by living another five years does she have? Maybe I'm not being fair. The poem is cohesive and coherent and probably shouldn't be more explicit. A sad little piece on a happy little girl who will soon die (in the cold immensity of the universe), and her father's love for her. But so what? Lots of human beings die way too soon. As poets and others have lamented. What's the point of going there yet again, in a poem with no truly fresh imagery or anything else to make it worthwhile?

My rating, using the Schneider system: maybe a 40. That is, not too much below the rating Schneider gave the Nye poem of entry.