Lazy Bastardism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Poetry by Carmine Starnino (review)

This provocatively titled assemblage of reviews and prefaces, while less contentious than Carmine Starnino’s previous collection of essays on Canadian poetry, is structurally similar to 2004’s A Lover’s Quarrel. A longish initial essay sets out a problematic in Canadian letters, which is then followed by a series of reviews of individual poets who either exemplify Starnino’s grouse or else provide a possible antidote to what he sees as a fundamental failing in modern and contemporary Canadian verse.

In the earlier collection, the primary target was what Starnino viewed as a misrepresentative Canadian canon. According to Starnino, somewhere during the modernist period, Canadian poetry went astray, rejecting A.J. M. Smith’s plea for cosmopolitanism in favour of a chauvinistic and insular nationalism. This led to the championing of a localized vernacular, best exemplified by Al Purdy, which ignored the innovations of international poetics and valorized poetry that was plain spoken rather than metrically regular and acoustically alliterative. In many ways, A Lover’s Quarrel was an apology for a new formalism, singing the praises of such earnest neomodernists as Richard Outram and David Solway while denigrating the advances of postmodernists like Christopher Dewdney and Christian Bök.

With Lazy Bastardism, Starnino moves out of his comfort zone to address some innovative Canadian poets such as bpNichol but, for the most part, maintains his pantheon of male versifiers who employ rhyme and emphasize sound effects in their diction (Eric Ormsby, Michael Harris, Peter Trower). While not as imbalanced in gender as his previous collection, which examined two female poets in contrast to twelve male poets, Lazy Bastardism would still not score favourably on the VIDA Count, this time offering considerations of six women poets in comparison to sixteen male poets and critics. This gender disparity is somewhat explained by the collection’s opening essay, a statement of his personal poetics, where Starnino expresses anxiety about the virility of his chosen vocation as poet-critic: “one of the central activities of my life is tinged with the sense of being dissolute, escapist, fey.”

It is also in this opening essay that Starnino explains the source of his title and defines lazy bastardism as a type of poetry that is simplistic and caters to the tastes of a hoi polloi readership: “Lazy bastardism kowtows to the convenience of see-Jane-run simple-mindedness because, by gosh, that’s what most people want from their poetry. … Lazy bastardism will never come clean and tell you that poetry is an acquired taste … will never insist that you should read a lot of poems … will certainly never stress that you need to love poetry’s artificial and formal aspects.” From here Starnino presents his elitism as a commonsensical response to a blinkered readership that seems to prefer Margaret Atwood to Irving Layton.

Thus, in his following analysis of poets, Starnino quotes liberally from his favourite (and inevitability unappreciated and misunderstood) poets who utilize formal prosody and becomes increasingly exasperated with Canadian readers who do not appear to appreciate the genius of poets who exemplify Starnino’s own taste, seeming not to realize that, as Pierre Bourdieu (among others) has demonstrated, the concept of “taste” is not neutral and is, rather, constructed by such categories as class, race, and gender.

Starnino himself would likely argue that he is interested in aesthetics rather than identity, but is it really too much to ask, in a book of nearly 300 pages, that he address a single non-white poet? This absence is particularly glaring considering that, during the decade in Canadian poetry that Starnino primarily addresses, George Elliott Clarke, Fred Wah, M. NourbeSe Philip, Annharte, and Dionne Brand were producing major collections, and such younger poets as Wade Compton, Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Priscilla Uppal released innovative and accomplished books of poetry.

Starnino not only neglects the racialized aspects of Canadian poetry and downplays the importance of gender but is also sloppy in his attacks on those poets and critics...