The Art of the Blurb

First, let me give a shout-out to leftover birthday cake. Can't get enough of it.

Each day I visit two poetry web sites: Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. I'm not writing to say anything about the sites' credibility--go to Foetry if that's the tune you want to hear. (Already I can feel the bile rising in the back of my throat. More on Foetry later, probably.) I see poems I like on these sites, and poems I don't. I think that's their point: to celebrate the aesthetic diversity of contemporary poetry. It's a good thing.

A few days ago, VD (that's unfortunate) featured a poem by David Petruzelli, whose book Everyone Coming Toward You has been published by the admirable Tupelo Press. The poem, "The Conch in the Next Life," was decent enough to prompt me to check out the author page. Below the brief bio of Petruzelli was a blurb of the book from Campbell McGrath, and it's this blurb I'm here to discuss. Here it is in full, as I don't want to risk taking anything out of context:

"I admire the calm, deliberative power these poems generate, image by image, tale by tale. Reading Everyone Coming Toward You is like perusing an elliptical album of sepia photographs soaked by a warm, evening rain. 'When I talk about remembering/this is what I mean,' concludes the poem 'Hallway', which closes a deft reconnoitering of the corridors of the past, a lyrical journey on which the reader is as likely to encounter W.C. Fields lost in the fog as fossil starfish shining 'like blaze marks.' Deeply ruminative, often narrative, sometimes mysterious, always smart, David Petruzelli bears articulate witness to the omnivorous appetite of memory."

Look closely at that second sentence. Doesn't that sound like a treat: get out your elliptical album (elliptical, from the Greek meaning "defective") and enjoy some rain-soaked photographs. What does McGrath mean here? I wonder if he knows. I'm sure I don't know. If anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it. Maybe it's a record album, warped by the heat before a storm?

Here's the thing: I'd happily accept "an elliptical album of sepia photographs soaked by a warm, evening rain" in a poem. In that context, we might muse on the trickiness of that word 'elliptical,' the relationship to the past implied in the image of the wet sepia photos, or.... I don't know. I didn't say it would make a good poem. But the purpose of the blurb, as I understand it, is to COMMUNICATE SOMETHING about the book. It's not art. "Meaningful ambiguity" is not effective in a blurb. And I suspect this ambiguity to be meaningless.

So what am I doing here: trying to raise the standard for blurbs? Hopefully I'm doing something more. Hopefully I'm calling out those who write about poems using thinly-veiled nonsense to say nothing. People write stupid meaningless crap about poems because poems are art, and sometimes it's hard to know what to say about art. Art just is, right? But McGrath does Petruzelli's book a profound disservice by praising it with empty language. What do we know about the book from reading McGrath's statement? That the poems are about memory, and that some contain narrative. That's a hell of a blurb.

Cheers.