weak critic

A critic who only took on books by no-accounts so as not to offend any of the gatekeepers.

no tail no donkey

…one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write—a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems—people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets—it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

—Randall Jarrell, from the brief essay “Bad Poets” (1953)

review work

It’s harder to review a book of poems than to write one.

cards play themselves

In poker, when the cards are laid on the table, we say ‘the cards play themselves’: no interpretation needed to determine who has the better hand. So it should be in book reviewing—quote heavily from the book, and let the lines themselves show their relative value.