In poetry reviewing, the “insistent accusation” levelled is of writing bad poetry. However the poetry in question is finally judged, the redeeming, answering confession is that poetry is hard to write and I have worked hard at writing this poetry. A poet can only pre-emptively acquit him/herself by building into his/her poetry features which appear to signify the hard work it cost to write. In the consciences of some reviewers, diligence almost comes to equal quality. The formula is: work harder = write better. Aesthetic conscience, in these terms, must forcefully maintain the assumption (verifiable or not) that good poetry is difficult to write. An entire mode of value would collapse if it ever emerges that poetry is easy to write, or if poetry somehow (by computerised automation, for example) becomes easy to write. Ultimately, poetry has to appear to have been difficult to write in order to be judged good¹.

Deeply implicated in poetry’s endless “crisis of self-justification” is the mystery of how exchange value accrues to cultural objects. The symbolic value of a cultural practice like poetry (somehow prestigious yet without significant remuneration) is not easily translatable into economist terms of exchange value. Yet, with economism as a cultural dominant, ideological pressures to make that difficult translation are one of the motivators in the reviewer’s aesthetic conscience. The solution many turn to is the “declaration of innocence” made to economist morality through this valuation of writerly labour, as an attempt to translate the insubstantial illusio of poetry (as language) into that of capitalist economics. Here, as Barthes says, “labour replaces genius as a value.” The poetry is better because the poet worked harder; the social constitution of culture is reified to representations of individual exertion, effort, strain. The field vanishes from view, along with the concrete struggles that constitute the whole historical process of value creation. As Robert Lowell wrote so backhandedly to Theodore Roethke: “One of the things I marvel at in your poems is the impression they give of having been worked on an extra half day” (qtd. in McClatchy xxiii). At a not too rare extreme, reviews treat the poem-object as if it stores labour energy like a rechargeable battery, inadvertently reproducing something like the labour theory of value. As Marx writes in Capital:

A use value … has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours. (15)

To the degree that this value accumulates through labour, the poet buys his/her innocence, buys quietude of aesthetic conscience. Poets who receive negative reviews can reassure themselves that, in spite of all that, they worked hard, they did their best.

While poetry reviewers often articulate their adjudicative mandate as a guild-protecting practice of quality control, reviewing more often functions like a work ethical Neighbourhood Watch. The actual poet is assumed slothful until proven diligent. Immoral, slothful poetry is expelled from the definition of poetry. As Byron wrote of Keats’s poetry, “[it is] neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium” (qtd. in McFarland 107). Common descriptors like “excessive,” “too much,” “too often,” are moral excoriations. The poet fails to exercise the impassioned restraint through which value and absolution can be seen to steadily accrue. In a review of Anne Glickman, Anita Lahey, author of Out to Dry in Cape Breton, demonstrates the processes of this work-burdened aesthetic conscience in motion. Lahey is initially puzzled about what she judges as the unevenness of Glickman’s poetry. She then engages in some serious aesthetic reasoning, turning to other reviewers to construct a collective phantasmic panel of expert readers that can confirm her already-formed intuitions about Glickman’s aesthetic morality. Glickman, she concludes, is in sin: She hasn’t worked hard enough. Lahey polarises the logic of work (as productive accumulation and moral acquittal), against play (as wasteful expenditure and immorality):

I look up Glickman’s old reviews. I want to know how she was read when she came on the scene … I find her … praised more than criticized. But I also encounter references to weak line breaks, to a cadence ‘a bit too colloquial, a bit too Purdyish’ … M. Travis Lane suggests that Glickman gets into trouble when she tackles weighty subjects: ‘the lightness of her tone is a problem’ … Reading Running through to the end, I conclude that Glickman is too comfortable. She is enjoying herself, her rhythms and insights, but a little too much, a little more than she has earned … She has not been tough enough on herself to realise her own poetic potential. (83)

Lahey’s moral qualms drift in through the cracks, like the odour of scandal. Features like “weak line breaks” are moralised form – line breaks that don’t do enough work. Soon Lahey makes moral insinuations in the form of a discourse of manners; her lassitude in being “a bit too colloquial” evinces a lack of moral fibre. The argument is reminiscent of those who misappropriate the term “formal” to mean something very close to “formality,” as in “formal dress,” rather than an investigation of the problems related to literary form. So “the lightness of her tone is a problem” because “weighty subjects” require a prosodic suit and tie, correct discursive manners and an air of high-mindedness. If Glickman is “too comfortable,” her aesthetic conscience is weak; she is inadequately “tough on herself.” In terms of the logic of value accumulation through work, Glickman has not laboured hard enough to have “earned” pleasure by accruing the poetic quality with which to purchase that pleasure. Hard work is a basic condition for writing poetry of excellence, for realising “poetic potential” – like economic earning potential.