12 Aug 2010 12:42:23
The writer and poet Anis Shivani's In, gets in the 15 contemporary American writers, he believes are most overrated, laying into the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Junot Diaz, Michael Cunningham and.
A lot of different critics say that Shivani has been brewing this piece for some time. These aren't wild, bitter stabs in the dark; his jibes have barbs to them. It's also extremely amusing – I'm still chuckling at his Sharon Oldstakedown: "Childbirth, her father's penis, her son's cock, and her daughter's vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch. Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover." And I haven't read Helen Vendler, apparently "America's most banal critic", but if the sentence Shivani highlights from her work is anything to go by – "no new generalisations about [George] Herbert are proposed in this book" – he may have a point.
He's generated a huge response online - 1,500 comments and counting on the HuffPo. It's clearly a topic which has hit a nerve in America, where critic Lee Siegel recently pronounced fiction to be culturally irrelevant – although he wasn't the first. But the question of whether the 15 writers are indeed overrated is, I think, a personal one. Overrated by the literary establishment? Maybe. Overrated by readers? That's trickier. We read what we like; we don't have to justify our choices. So what if people prefer Billy Collins to Geoffrey Hill? Telling them they're wrong isn't going to change that, unless they're really desperate to impress. His point, I suppose, is that, faced with a glut of publishing, we're led to our choices by the literary establishment, thus buying into the overrating without realising it. (I also think it's a little unfair to describe any poet as overrated – poetry sells so very little that I feel we should rejoice in any rating it gets at all.)
Shivani is also promising to share his thoughts about the most underrated American writers today, and is planning similar lists for the past century, and for global literature. Bring it on, I say. But in the meantime, have a read of his first hitlist: William T Vollman, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Helen Vendler, Antonya Nelson, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, Michael Cunningham, Billy Collins and Michiko Kakutani. What you think about his choices? Who do you think are the most overrated writers today? And don't stick to America: the world is our oyster.
A lot of different critics say that Shivani has been brewing this piece for some time. These aren't wild, bitter stabs in the dark; his jibes have barbs to them. It's also extremely amusing – I'm still chuckling at his Sharon Oldstakedown: "Childbirth, her father's penis, her son's cock, and her daughter's vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch. Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover." And I haven't read Helen Vendler, apparently "America's most banal critic", but if the sentence Shivani highlights from her work is anything to go by – "no new generalisations about [George] Herbert are proposed in this book" – he may have a point.
He's generated a huge response online - 1,500 comments and counting on the HuffPo. It's clearly a topic which has hit a nerve in America, where critic Lee Siegel recently pronounced fiction to be culturally irrelevant – although he wasn't the first. But the question of whether the 15 writers are indeed overrated is, I think, a personal one. Overrated by the literary establishment? Maybe. Overrated by readers? That's trickier. We read what we like; we don't have to justify our choices. So what if people prefer Billy Collins to Geoffrey Hill? Telling them they're wrong isn't going to change that, unless they're really desperate to impress. His point, I suppose, is that, faced with a glut of publishing, we're led to our choices by the literary establishment, thus buying into the overrating without realising it. (I also think it's a little unfair to describe any poet as overrated – poetry sells so very little that I feel we should rejoice in any rating it gets at all.)
Shivani is also promising to share his thoughts about the most underrated American writers today, and is planning similar lists for the past century, and for global literature. Bring it on, I say. But in the meantime, have a read of his first hitlist: William T Vollman, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Helen Vendler, Antonya Nelson, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, Michael Cunningham, Billy Collins and Michiko Kakutani. What you think about his choices? Who do you think are the most overrated writers today? And don't stick to America: the world is our oyster.
