Critical reviewers are absolutely necessary. There are so many new poems, movies, readings, quintets, novels, plays, trios, stories, TV shows, paintings, slams, concertos, recordings, installations, bands, sculptures, performance pieces, drawings, and everything else that no one can experience even a significant fraction of the artistic deluge, and we must make our choices with whatever help we can find — but we won't find it in theory. Neither Kant nor Derrida can help us decide whether it's Dana Gioia or Ron Silliman who is worth our time and money. But if theory is merely useless to art's audience, it can be death to art. Especially in its postmodern varieties, it is a quicksand, a whirlpool, an addictive drug. To the extent a work of art requires theoretical explication, that work has failed. To the extent a work of art based in theory succeeds beyond providing grist for academic mills, that work has transcended, and its maker has betrayed, ignored, or misunderstood, its theoretical underpinnings.
Most contemporary theory begins with the completely noncontroversial observation that there are large parts of the world we cannot experience at all, and that what we do experience is manipulated and filtered in various ways by our bodies, previous experience, and language. Language, in particular and more controversially, is said to be problematic: Narrative is necessarily selective and always biased; metaphor is distortion; literary "texts" (the scare quotes are deliberate) are more about their internal structures and their relationship to other "texts" than to the world, and in any case the meanings readers will make of the experience are more significant because more present in the reading than are the intentions of the author; much of our mental world is pre-verbal and therefore cannot be expressed by or even known to the language-using parts of our selves; merely making statements about the world creates a false sense of understanding; systematic disruption of ordinary language can provide access to deeper truths by clearing away the fog of false consciousness. Because the most radical claims of postmodern theory involve language, and because poetry, the art most intimately involved with something like pure language, is the game I know (if I know any), I'll stick to poetry in what follows. Modernist and postmodernist musicians can be horrified by this (via Arts & Letters Daily).
Theorists often pretend to a scientific basis for their talk, using caricatures of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem or of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (mercifully, Freud is less often cited these days, and Jung nearly never) to justify their claims for a radical uncertainty at the root of language and literature all human thought except, perhaps, their own. The most polite reaction of physical scientists themselves, however, and of linguists and analytic philosophers (Richard Rorty is a qualified exception), is a stifled yawn. Alan Sokal was famously much less polite.
It's reasonable to ask why it matters that the editors of a leading journal of postmodern theory could not distinguish deliberate nonsense from serious work in the field. If the editors were hoodwinked, does that vitiate the sort of basic claims named above? If it does, why don't poets just ignore those claims? If they don't, how does that hurt their poetry?
To answer the second question first, it's because, increasingly, they're the same people, and for good reason — poets can't make a living writing poetry and second best is a living talking about poetry, which the universities are happy to provide. But what do you say about poetry to seventeen-year-old freshmen who have been taught that Maya Angelou is a significant poet, or to PhD candidates who have never read "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? How do you write an original dissertation? What in the world will get you tenure? Who needs another close reading of the Pisan Cantos? How do you impress those other really smart folks, who quote Foucault and Lacan? How do you justify that cushy life — I've been in it, and it's a cakewalk compared to any other job I've had — except by doing something obviously hard, whether it makes sense or not? And how can you invest four-to-six years of your life in something without taking it seriously? It will even help your poetry get published, and it's easy to tell yourself that the only readers who matter are people who have worked as hard as you have and who care about the things you've learned to care about.
This is long enough (too long?) for one post already, and I need to spend some time actually writing poems, so the answers to the first and third questions will have to wait till later in the week.
7:18:57 PM 
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