I mentioned in Reading Tonight that Matthew Dickman is reading poetry at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. Well, Slog tipper Matthew (no relation to Matthew Dickman, I promise) informs us of a little bit of a kerfluffle that has blown up around Dickman's book.

Michael Schiavo tore Dickman's book up one side and down the other on his blog:

These poems are precious and affected—that is, artificial, pretentious, and designed to impress—vague as a fortune cookie or horoscope composed to please the reader without making any connection with him. Again, in “Slow Dance,” Dickman writes, “It’s all kindness like children / before they turn three.” What? Anyone who has dealt with a human being going through his terrible twos knows this to be false. Just because a poetry is supposedly free of irony doesn’t mean it is free from the responsibility to be truthful.

And then again in the comments:

To even describe these poems as shit is to assign value to them. Shit is the root of things, rids the body of toxins while building up the natural world that surrounds us. It’s part of nature, part of a process that has meaning and power behind it. It’s disconcerting to hold in your hand something that rightly shouldn’t exist. But that’s exactly what you do when you pick up All-American Poem.

HTMLGIANT has written a negative review of the negative review:

So, it’s agreed: we need negative reviews.

But, seriously now, the negative review should be fair also. Smart. Well thought out. And it should not, as it exposes shit, be full of it too. (And when I say “shit” here I mean the bad kind. The toxic kind.)

Schiavo’s negative review is to a certain extent successful, but, unfortunately, it is also, at its heart, prescriptive, fanatical, and self-righteous. It is, at its heart, full of shit.

It's a fun little diversion for the inter-webs on a Friday. I think that negative reviews are necessary. Of course I do. In a newspaper with limited review space, I think the reviews should try to lean more toward the helpful, but on the internet, with its unlimited canvas, I think one's entire reading life should be fair game, and that includes the good and the bad. Someone who repeatedly seeks out bad work to rail against quickly grows tiresome, but bad reviews are essential and important if just to make the good reviews stand out more.

And I don't really know Dickman's poetry—I've just read a bit here and there to determine whether I should star his reading or not in our readings calendar. But the thing about Shiavo's review is that it's very, very poorly written, and its attacks on Dickman's poetry (especially the awful "terrible twos" argument posted above) are idiotic. The HTMLGIANT review is at the very least amusing and well-written (though admittedly not structured well.) Which means I have to give this round to Dickman-via-HTMLGIANT.