Mark Halliday on The Hatred of Poetry

Very interesting piece here by Mark Halliday, responding to Ben Lerner's book (as he says, it's a pretty slim book), The Hatred of Poetry.

I think I'd tend to come down more on Halliday's side, but then I haven't been able to read Lerner's essay in full yet, so that's probably unfair. What I don't understand, from what I have read, is exactly why Lerner feels that poetry creates in us hopes of perfect works of art, hopes which are then inevitably disappointed, any more than any other artform does. Surely readers go to poetry for any number of different reasons, at different times? Surely we approach other artforms in the same way?

Still, I should read the whole thing before commenting further.

Bloggers are killing criticism?

I suspect this interview with TLS editor and Man Booker Prize judge Peter Stothard will stir up a fair old storm online. I think he's got a fair point with regards to the decline of literary criticism in newspapers and journals, but I'm not really sure what the blogosphere has to do with that. I suspect word of mouth has always been as big a driver of sales as reviews, and surely the internet is just that on a large scale?

His claim that "People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off," is rather strange. Even if you accept that the professional critics generally get things right (and they clearly don't, as they often disagree violently with each other), the book-buying public don't necessarily pay that much attention to them, and never have. I don't remember critics encouraging people to buy Jeffrey Archer's novels, for example, but his sales never seemed to suffer.