monocular vision

Imagine a person wearing a monocle: the image of a bad critic with a single critical lens engaged on a work.

chop chop

This or that critic, as a way of calling a poem basic, often balks at its being “just prose chopped up into lines.” Reader, this statement may sound radical at first, but it couldn’t be more obvious. Poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. I mean this to be final, categorical, and no slight to poetry.

—Elisa Gabbert, “What Poetry Is,” The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018)

just say it

“In this essay I propose to study the development of...,” is an example of what makes academic essays insufferable.

slack science

Critical writing using the language of science without its necessary rigor.

cheap talk

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."

Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930)

The cheaper the critic, the gaudier the patter.

stuck here & there

After the critic got finished with the poem it was a pincushion of far-fetched associations.

recycled crit

The kind of criticism that recycles familiar quotes and formulaic clichés of poetics, and thus uncovers nothing original, gives us nothing from which to learn.

note totems

When scholarship becomes ritualistic practice, it’s all about getting the footnotes right.

bloodless

The anemic criticism of one who has clearly not read beyond the contemporaries.

half measures

Poets write criticism as though they were unaware of all the resources of prose.

tactics of bad critics

First, select the worst passage from the poet’s book/oeuvre, and then scale that up, magnify it, shine an unforgiving spotlight on it, until it’s made out to be a grotesque representation standing for the poet’s life-long output.