"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Introduction.

The term "Kitchen Criticism" comes from Clive James' most recent (and probably last) collection of poetry criticism and commentary, Poetry Notebooks: 2006-2014. He borrowed it from Samuel Johnson and the Elizabethans, and I am borrowing it from him (40-43). In short, the term relates to the reading and critiquing of the practical matters of poetry, mostly to do with metre. I'll broaden my use of the term to include grammatical and rhetorical matters, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of the term.

Put another way, I take kitchen criticism to mean looking at--nay, unpacking--the raw ingredients of a poem. How does this differ from regular old criticism? Well, we'll have to see. To me, it's about the basics of poetry, not the highfalutin stuff in, say, Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry (which I read the other day, so thought I'd namedrop), or Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry (haven't read yet, but about to--namedropping again). I'm reading a lot of criticism at the moment, so I'll take this opportunity to do a little myself, starting with the basics.

There's a lot of metaphysics when it comes to poetic criticism, lots of "isms" and other abstractions; I want to get back into the physics, the grammar and the rhetorical choices of poets, to see what they're up to, before we get to the higher order stuff. Perhaps kitchen criticism is just another term for grammatical criticism, or rhetorical criticism. At this point, I don't think it matters much; it's probably just best to dive in and get my hands dirty.

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As a bit of a grammar nerd, I like to see how poets play with punctuation, to observe how it differs to the way we use it in prose, even of the academic sort. I'm a stickler on the semicolon, for instance; it does a certain thing in academic prose, and I want to see it do its job! But in poetry it's another matter. We aren't so much concerned with prose conventions in poetry as we are with sound and suggestion, with intonation and implication. Punctuation performs the role of a non-verbal signifier to the eye and to the voice; it influences both the pace of reading and the logical relations of lexical items, as in the famous debate surrounding the comma from this line from Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

Later changed to:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Much meaning rests upon the presence or absence of a comma. The change may play into the perennial debate surrounding the so-called Oxford comma: should you or shouldn't you? (Yes, you should.) The change does, most people seem to accept, change the meaning of the line, and slightly the pace of its reading. The pause after "dark" is dropped, and with it the grammatical listing structure: originally, the woods were lovely, and they were dark, and they were deep; now they are lovely because they are dark and deep. A parallel relationship between the three lexical items (lovely, dark, deep), now becomes one of subordination. This is no minor change; rather, it is a change of perception, like when we change the focus of a photograph by zooming in or out, things in the foreground now blurred or clarified from our fiddling with the lens. Poets, too, must adjust the aperture of their perception to get things how they want them, and a little fiddling with punctuation may achieve just that.

There's nothing controversial about that analysis. You'd be justified in being underwhelmed thus far. So we'll just take that as a bit of practice, or a warm up; but you get the idea.

Being a formalist, Frost is a wonderful subject for such kitchen criticism, and I'll spend a bit of time with him. (I also wrote my thesis on his poetics, so that helps.) I'll be looking at other poets as well, including Australian poets Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, and Stephen Edgar, as well as American poets Theodore Roethke, Ted Kooser, and Weldon Kees. Those are just some names off the top of my head at the moment. I may even throw in some Henry Lawson. (I'm doing some research on Lawson, so this might be a good place to trial a bit of close reading.)

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I'll leave it there for now, as I have a habit of over-writing these things. I'll pick up a bit more on punctuation and more in Frost and others next time, building towards a deeper consideration of the relationship between punctuation and sound. As I get more technical and more evasive in my criticism, I'll come back to "Stopping by Woods"; there's a lot to look at--and listen for--in this short and beautiful poem.