{"id":1114,"date":"2006-03-19T11:27:38","date_gmt":"2006-03-19T16:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/wordpress\/?p=1114"},"modified":"2006-03-19T11:27:38","modified_gmt":"2006-03-19T16:27:38","slug":"reviewing-dave-smith-by-writing-about-william-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/reviewing-dave-smith-by-writing-about-william-matthews\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviewing Dave Smith by writing about William Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eric McHenry was paid to review Dave Smith&#8217;s decade&#8217;s worth of poems but he must have wanted badly to write a homage to Willam Matthews (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/03\/19\/books\/review\/19mchenry.html\">in today&#8217;s NYTimes Book Review<\/a>). In a seven paragraph review of Smith&#8217;s <em>Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992-2004<\/em>, Matthews and his poetry are discussed (occassionally with Smith&#8217;s poetry) in four. Hell, Robert Frost gets his own full paragraph. Even Stanley Plumley gets a few sentences. That doesn&#8217;t leave much for Smith who suffers in comparison to both Frost and Matthews. Smith doesn&#8217;t even get the opening and closing paragraphs &#8212; those are for Matthews. The second paragraph is about Smith writing about Matthews. The penultimate, Frost used to find fault in the style of the unnamed Smith.<\/p>\n<p>Now I too miss Bill Matthews and with others I regret his too early death in 1997. But does he need to rise from the grave to show us what Smith lacks? And doesn&#8217;t Smith deserve more that one paragraph dedicated to him in a review like this?<\/p>\n<p>Reading a review that is too much about Matthews as a basketball opponent and not enough about Smith as a poet &#8212; I call <strong>foul<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric McHenry was paid to review Dave Smith&#8217;s decade&#8217;s worth of poems but he must have wanted badly to write a homage to Willam Matthews (in today&#8217;s NYTimes Book Review). In a seven paragraph review of Smith&#8217;s Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992-2004, Matthews and his poetry are discussed (occassionally with Smith&#8217;s poetry) in four. Hell, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-literature","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}