Donato Mancini’s ironically titled You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence could have been a big contribution to Canadian literary studies – the first to identify, analyze and theorize the limitations of the many current and late twentieth-century reviewers of Canadian poetry. It comes close, and will likely be built upon. But it appears to have been sabotaged by careless editing – by both its thesis supervisors at Simon Fraser and the copy editors at its Toronto publisher Bookthug.
The numerous punctuation and spelling errors (including the misspelling of Victorian poet A.E. Housman’s name several times) should not greatly trouble a reader, but they do index a persistent editorial indifference that extends to the book’s structural awkwardnesses – such as its abrupt shifts of vocabulary and implied audience, and its odd chapter-long discussions of poems by Bob Perelman and Yevgeny Yevtushenko where readers have been led to expect a focus on Canadian poetry and the ideologies of its reviewers. References generally to Canadian poems or reviews are in fact disappointingly few in most of the first nineteen short unnumbered chapters of this thirty-seven chapter book, despite the wonderfully entertaining analysis of a J.R. Colombo review with which the book begins.
Mancini has several strong arguments, the central one being that most contemporary Canadian poetry reviewers appear intellectually and ideologically equipped to read and discuss only poetry based on pre-World War 2 Anglo-American poetics. They prefer such poetry, and they lament its
The numerous punctuation and spelling errors (including the misspelling of Victorian poet A.E. Housman’s name several times) should not greatly trouble a reader, but they do index a persistent editorial indifference that extends to the book’s structural awkwardnesses – such as its abrupt shifts of vocabulary and implied audience, and its odd chapter-long discussions of poems by Bob Perelman and Yevgeny Yevtushenko where readers have been led to expect a focus on Canadian poetry and the ideologies of its reviewers. References generally to Canadian poems or reviews are in fact disappointingly few in most of the first nineteen short unnumbered chapters of this thirty-seven chapter book, despite the wonderfully entertaining analysis of a J.R. Colombo review with which the book begins.
Mancini has several strong arguments, the central one being that most contemporary Canadian poetry reviewers appear intellectually and ideologically equipped to read and discuss only poetry based on pre-World War 2 Anglo-American poetics. They prefer such poetry, and they lament its
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