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Daily Notes on Poetry

15 November 2004. Dan Schneider is someone I exchanged jibes with a while back. I thought he had backed off but today I found he had responded to my blog entries on him in an essay he posted 7 October at his website, "Postcards From Pluto: The Small World Of Bob Grumman" (without ever telling me). Take a look at it. It's standard Philistinism, for the most part, but he catches me in several errors (like mistyping "hausfrau" as "housefrau" but also real errors) and makes a few interesting points.

I went to his website by mistake. He had posted something at New-Poetry that I replied to, and I wanted to mention it, and him, here, with a link to my other entries about him. So I did a search on his name, forgot I wanted to find where he was in my blog and went to the first link, which was his website. I then found his piece on me. (My relevant entries were posted 16 June 2004, 17 June 2004, 18 June 2004 and 19 June 2004)

In my post to New-Poetry, I only responded to one thing he said In his own New-Poetry post--with something I say all the time against the stupid idea that it's "unethical" to review the work of a friend, as Schneider believes:

Dan, I totally disagree with you. If you review a friend's poems favorably and support your judgement with quotations and intelligent arguments, your friendship is irrelevant. If you review ANYBODY'S poems favorably and fail to support your judgement, then a reader should ignore your review. If he doesn't, he's a moron, and who cares if he's persuaded by your incompetent review. Ditto if you review someone's poems unfavorably.

And if you want to be really ethical, you probably shouldn't review, because there are all sorts of unethical reasons you might review the poetry of someone you don't personally know favorably or unfavorably. The point is, what you say in your review is what counts, not your motives for saying what you do.

That's it for Dan Schneider today, but I'll be hacking away at him some more soon.





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