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How should one deal with reviews and critiques that don't all agree? Books dealing with the issue Many years ago I.A. Richards wrote "Practical Criticism" (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929) in which he analysed the comments of a group of students who blind-read poetry. I think P. Hobsbaum in "Theory of Criticism" also covered this issue. He suggested that a good poem can support many interpretations (indeed, benefits from them) whereas a bad poem can't. Influence of critics' experience It may be that better critics agree with each other more than worse critics do Alternatively, "Lesser critics try to normalize, to chastise the poem for straying outside the expected parameters. Bad poets want to be certain more than they want to explore where a poem might be going" - Mike Alexander. Critics vary because there are Inarticulate critics - people who can't find the right words for what they feel. I think in general critical languag...

The Sameness In Us by Juri Morioka Curated by David Gibson The Educational Alliance 197 East Broadway, New York [One block East of where Canal and Essex Streets meet] September 18-November 23, 2007 Shelly Bahl (Canada/India) Ula Einstein (Switzerland) Nancy Friedemann (Colombia) Tine Kindermann (Germany) Chang-jin Lee (Korea) Juri Morioka (Japan) Hannes Priesch (Austria) Flavia Souza (Brazil) Yona Verwer (Netherlands) The ‘ USA ’ of the title is a more rarified territory than one might think. Its area is measured in blocks, not square miles. But more than that, it is measured by the variety of nationalities that make residence here, and the tradition, however altered in recent years, of emigration. This exhibition explores the nature of idiosyncrasy in consideration of ideological and cultural definitions of identity. Who is the individual and how do many disparate entities become a single community? -- How does that community come to embody a meaningful representation of Americ...

"Garden Confrontations" June 29-August 19,2007 Victoria Calabro, Chrissy Conant Julianna Dail, Katherine Daniels, Mark Power

"By Invitation Only" May 21-July 21,2007 Marcy Brafman, Leemour Pelli Mark Power, Raven Schlossberg, Conrad Vogel Marcy Brafman Leemour Pelli Conrad Vogel

The mouth of Franz Hals' "Laughing Cavalier" is a smear of red highlighted with what looks like toothpaste. Close up you'd be hard pressed to say what the marks represented. By 1851 that style was out of date. Late one summer's evening, Millais rowed across a river to sketch the flowers on the far bank by lamplight. You'll see those impossibly detailed flowers in the Tate's "Ophelia". In contrast there's Picasso's drawings - bare lines on a white expanse - and Schiele's work where areas of untouched canvas compete with highly wrought flesh. Later still came hyper-realism, where painting aspires to photography. When a poet writes "he rowed across the river to paint flowers", readers are trusted to fill in the details if they wish. It doesn't matter if they erroneously think that daffodils proliferate on the riverbanks. The poet's "flower" is that of a toddler's first doodle: a generic icon. If the write...

Theory The cute thing about knowing lots of theory is that you can use it to prove whatever you like - you can applaud "clarity" or you can mock its naivity; you can claim that disorganisation is amateurish or that it emulates our troubled times; a joke can be "weak" or "subtle" depending on how you like your humour served. There's a workshop exercise where one first gets the group to "objectively" list the technical features of a poem, then breaks the group into 2 - one subgroup being told to use these features to show why the poem's good, and the other subgroup using the same features to show why the poem's so bad. It's fun. Fashion plays a role here. One of the more common swings in taste involves what might broadly be termed "flashiness" (or "foregrounding language and technique") versus transparency - sometimes Donne is a showman, sometimes Larkin's inhibited. With some writers (topically Derrida) opi...