Survival of the fittest …

… Good Poetry, Bad Poetry, and Good Poetry Read Badly > G. Kim Blank. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Likewise, although theoretically—and approach-inflected readings du jour attempt to chase down great poetry, they never catch it, themselves becoming dated, and often very quickly, and often because of the miscalculated inwardness of their idioms (a.k.a jargon) and their derivative expertise. Take three of the latest critical fads: environmental, neuroaesthetics, and evolutionary literary criticism. Beyond the obvious, they usually have little to say about form or literary worth, about how the work provokes us to feel, think, and imagine, even if what is happening in your anterior insula can be subcortically measured; they do not help us to profitably, richly, repeatedly read a poem. They only reveal that funneling poetry through some styles of literary criticism may have an insecure, market-driven side, a side often too eager to borrow from other disciplines it knows little about in order to sound like it knows something—well, something seemingly new. A good-enough name for this is over-reaching is trendism—a term William Deresiewicz recently used (and just before he left academia—or it left him): it is, he says, “the desperate search for anything sexy.” Raymond Tallis, in a critique of these “flaky” approaches (and “neuro-lit-crit” in particular), points to what results from such funneling: “the habit of the uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are consequently lost.” The endgame, he writes, is “a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity.”