Unfit Criticism 1-6

A record of lifelong dedication to poetry criticism.

1 (retractable devil horns: criticism 1999-2018):

“Poisonous Frame”; “Public Hanging”; “Harbourfront Pigs and Lipstick”; “Rules of Thumb for an Aspiring Critic”; “Pretending to be Great”; “High School Confessional”; “Measured Advice”; “Reaching for Al Purdy”; “Solway the Sad Balladeer”; “Critics at Large”; “The Invisible Man is in your Caesura”; “Introduction to The Pre-Poem Moment“; “Eventual Development”; “McCartney Sings the Blues”; “Recovering the Stars”; “Beauty and Representing Mental Illness”; “Interpreting the Interpreter of Dreams and Culture”; “True Words in the Word Cloud”

2 (personal investments): “Time and Fever”; “Freedom”; “Language on Holiday”; “The Festival of No More Words”; “Explosions”; “Finnegan’s Wake in the Porridge Universe”; “Borrowing Magic”; “David Shields and the Laziness Inherent”; “Coda”; “The Poetics of Plot”; “Zero Chronology”; “But Transcendence”; “How Bad is this Book?”; “It’s Not All About the Brain”; “Healey and Goliath”; “The Paradox I’m Really Pulling For”; “Anticlimax”; “Nice Try, Dostoevsky”

3 (marginal): “How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing”; “The Backwoods Sobriquet”; “Regionalisms 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond: Reading Maritime Poetry Anthologies Backward”; “Foosty Boost: The First Two Books of Anne Compton”; “Dr. Acorn, or: How I Joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and Learned to Love the Stern Nurse Fusion Bomb Sun”; “We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Progressive White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems“; “Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger”; “Visiting Lane”; “Visiting Wayne Clifford”; “Crossing the Campus”; “Clifford the Not-Sonneteer”; “A shared text is an act of friendship”; “Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack“; “In Some More Distant Key: an Interview with David Helwig”; “Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: on J.J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds“; “Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Chaisson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc“; “Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.”; “Obituary”; “Angelic Salutation.”

4 (the negative review season one):

“Return of Thematic”; Spoiled Identity and the Frozen Now”; “Crito Revolta”; “Missing Vision”; “Like My Dad, Rapping”; “Dionne Brand is the Most Powerful Poet in Canada”; “The Rebranding”; “CanLit Twitter Matchmade me and Holy Wild“; “The Protest is this Way”; “The Neilson Ratings”

5 (the negative review season 2): “Rocky Mountain Opportunity”; “How the Hell Did Waldo get Published by Dionne Brand? A Tetraptych”; “Sharing and Staring: I Give Best Canadian Poetry 2021 a 1/3 of a Pea rating on Goodpeas (max 5 peas)”; “The Topic of Whiteness in Canadian Poetry”; “Reviewing Reviewing”; “Runaway Griffin Jury 2022”; “Imaginary Griffin 2022 Conversations”; “Can Kevin Connolly Do Anything Right?”; “Maybe . . . Recuse?”

6 (the negative review season 3): “Trend Unsettler”; “Behind the Progressive Times”; “Science Flowers”; “Essaya*ona*Selecteda*Poemsa*ina*Threea*Partsa*”; “The Mid to Mild Kinglet”; “Unpublishing the Archive”; “Men at Play”; “Repetition and Gallstones”; “No Joke”; “On Wunker’s The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth-and-Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry“; “All’s Punny in Ding-Dong Land”; “Marred by Association”; “Losers Gotta Lose: Smile for the Screenshots”; “The Marvel Superhero Movie Post-Credits Scene: TNR Project Debrief”