Wednesday 29 October 2014

I like Richard Rohmer.  I really do.  But the fact that the chairman of the Royal Commission on Book Publishing wrote these poems, and that they were then published by a Canadian publisher -- or at all -- is a disgrace.

What self-delusional hall of mirrors does a guy have to live in to believe that these would exist in print except as a favor in return for a favor, or in hopes of a favor yet received?

And to have the natural-gas-tanker-sized balls to make the first one an attack on critics, who don't understand art, because they're just in it for the money?

Breathtaking.

7 comments:

  1. This from the man who begins How to be a Be$t $eller: "Let's get one thing straight at the beginning: the book you are going to write will be a best seller. Otherwise why bother writing it?"

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  2. Um, that's How to Write a Be$t $eller,

    Both work, right?

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  3. I like "How to be" better - you are your novels, your novels are you - why distinguish?

    The poetry in this book (of which I have not yet finished) is sometimes beyond belief - it sort of renders the ability to write parodies of any poetry impossible by virtue of the fact it's so earnest. How do you parody something when this stuff exists?

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  4. By the way - try reading a section of one of the poems out loud.

    Especially the first one.

    Just try - I dare you.

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  5. You guys are going to spoil it for me. Because I have it as an inter-library loan, I'm right now reading Sir John A.'s Crusade. Poems will have to wait for the weekend.

    Spoiler: There's a villain in it named Kelly.

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  6. A villain named Kelly? Maybe Rohmer is Nostradamus and knew we'd being doing this blog one day...

    Wait a minute - the fact we're doing this blog and critiquing his work means that CRITIC is aimed at us.

    "If you are a critic and therefore a perverted, certified insanist with no relationship to the real world..."

    I need to get business cards made up where I can identify myself as a "certified insanist".

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  7. What Stan said. These are beneath parody. Dreck that a fourteen-year-old would blush at, if she found it in a journal she kept when she was twelve. The man was 56 years old. If he'd just written them and put them in a drawer, you'd think, "Well, no harm done. You're just a headcase." But Richard Rohmer was a popular author and a respected political figure. And he gave these things to a publisher. And the publisher printed them.
    And Rohmer was in a position to influence government agencies to provide loans to publishers, to promote Canadian culture.
    There should have been a crown commission, and people should have lost their jobs.

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