/lit/ - Literature

Is Rebecca Watts, dare I say it, /ourgirl/?

>"WHY IS THE POETRY WORLD pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work."

>"Of all the literary forms, we might have predicted that poetry had the best chance of escaping social media’s dumbing effect; its project, after all, has typically been to rid language of cliché. Yet in the redefinition of poetry as ‘short-form communication’ the floodgates have been opened. The reader is dead: long live consumer-driven content and the ‘instant gratification’ this affords."

>"The ability to draw a crowd, attract an audience or assemble a mob does not itself render a thing intrinsically good"

>"McNish’s philosophising (‘and i wonder why we’re here […] and i wonder what the point is […] and what the fuck we’re on this rock for’) leads her simply to ‘remind myself / this is not all about you, hollie’. Unfortunately the thought, like a tweet, is no sooner expressed than forgotten."

>"by making a virtue of her arrested development McNish shields herself from accusations of puerility. The book is deliberately bad: it is predicated on the defiance of all standards by which it could be judged."

http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10090