Praise, Blurbs and Randall Jarrell’s White Blackbirds
I know, it’s a crow.
Recent whirligigging over at The Guardian and at Salon.com about blurbs and hyperbolic praise reminds me again of how antithetical capitalism is to honest criticism; also of how raised expectations necessarily lead to disappointment, to ebay bidder letdown. It magnifies too, the truth that most of what is written, regardless of when it may have been written, is crap. Or as Randall Jarrell once put it, much more eloquently: "Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth l, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive. And there follows another law about critics: if a man likes a great many contemporary poets, he is, necessarily, a bad critic."
Much as Jarrell wanted to praise, much as he hated criticizing the ordinary, – feeling, in so doing, like a devilish ’spirit who denies’ - he nonetheless held that disliking what is bad is only the opposite face of liking what is good, " and the good in poetry, is always a white blackbird, an abnormal and unlikely excellence "
