OPINION: Actually, I'm begging for it

On the article "nobody asked for" that has the Montreal publishing scene choosing sides

This past week, Discordia staffer Sire posted “This town ain’t big enough for *34* lit mags,” a by turns acidic and constructive review of the bustling Montréal literary publishing scene and that scene’s apparent lack of rigour and direction that has split public opinion (and earned us 1700 mysterious new followers from the subcontinent). The following day Jeremy Audet, Director of Marketing and nonfiction editor at Montréal’s yolk, posted a rejoinder titled “Nobody asked for this” and writer Darby Myr also chimed in with a piece on her own Substack. Now poet Rebecca Lawrence Lynch, who worked on the Airtable of local magazine contributors that accompanied the original article and has also served on the selection committee at yolk, has penned her own op-ed on the controversy to date. Her opinions are as always her own.—Eds.

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I am an absolute slut for databases. When I’m not at work, entering data into one of several cataloguing systems, I am probably procrastinating doing something else by tinkering with my personal databases.¹ So when I learned that Sire² was collecting data on Montréal litmags and their contributors, my eyes lit up. I messaged him immediately and, before I knew it, I was spending that evening and the following day throwing together the database you can read about in his recently published article.

Some irritated ink has been spilt over said piece, and I will be the first to admit that it has some weaknesses. For one, it is entirely possible that our city’s litmags are more diverse than contributor data can reveal. A single poet can write in multiple styles. Who knows, maybe Kat Mulligan is the most polyvalent poet in the recent history of the Montréal lit scene.³ I am also not a statistician by any stretch of the imagination. Was a Jaccard index the best tool to use for the job? Fuck if I know.

So when the article came out, I expected that my rather hasty efforts would be heavily criticized. What I didn’t expect was the kind of response that characterized the article as a bad faith attack on our shared community. Although I had no editorial input into the content of Sire’s article, he did send me a link the night before it went live. If I believed that the critique presented therein amounted to a cynical hit piece on people I consider my friends, or on my community, I would have at the very least asked him to remove my name. Was it written in a provocative, sardonic tone? That much is obvious. But I find it surprising that any writer would rankle at a little sarcasm, especially when it comes from someone who clearly loves the community that they’re criticizing. True, the rhetorical style employed by Discordia and their ilk isn’t to everyone’s taste, but so what? If we can’t acknowledge that there is a role to be played by the poetry heels among us, we risk stagnation. I for one have benefited immensely from the people in my life who tell me what they see just how they see it. It’s clear to me that Sire’s article is along those lines, a good faith challenge to a community that he and Discordia have been as much a part of building as anyone else.

There is no outside

A lot of the backlash against the article focuses on the supposed lack of good will on the part of the author. This seems to be based on a broader view of Discordia as being part of a separate, more cynical, Montréal literary community. Undoubtedly, this is due in part to their own messaging. Stating that one of your aims is to cultivate an “outsider ethos” does tend to have the effect of making people view you as an outsider. Unfortunately for their self-image, even the most transgressive outsider must locate themselves relative to some kind of mainstream. For Discordia, that mainstream is our beloved Montréal literary community. A fact made clear by the reality of the scene described by Sire himself.

As the article mentions, there are no aesthetic clusters of writers within the city. Poets that publish in Discordia-esque litmags also publish in more “mainstream” mags. Those that feature at one event tend to also feature at others. For my part, I’m proud to say my first poetry publication was as a part of yolk’s In Transit series, and I don’t see myself being published in Fellow Travellers anytime soon. Nevertheless, I have featured at both a Discordia event and at the aesthetically aligned JRG Open Mic. For those who have never attended the latter, I can assure you that, despite the pro-forma allowance of booing, it is as much of a supportive atmosphere as any other literary soirée I’ve ever attended. For better or for worse, there is only one Montréal literary community and Discordia plus associates are active, contributing members to it.

This, in my opinion, grants them the right to comment on the state of the scene without having to continually field accusations of bad faith. You may not believe that Sire or Discordia respects you or your journal, and they might not,⁴ but if you believe that they don’t respect the community, or creative writing in general, because of their tone, you might need to spend more time with non-writers. The kind of person who doesn’t respect creative writing is more likely to come in the form of a bad Tinder match who, sitting across the table from you on a first date, responds with “cute” when, in a moment of bad judgement, you admit that you’re a poet. They are less likely to come in the form of someone who writes five thousand word articles on how more 21 year olds need to write manifestos. There are easier ways of getting attention.

Does that mean everyone has to like them or their style? No, and if we did they would probably be annoyed, but the accusation that the Discordia editors are nothing more than trolls dismisses out of hand the very real work they have put into the community.⁵ Like most other journals, they also host events and publish emerging writers. So tell me, where’s the good will in overlooking that? Or do we only offer good will to those who are nice to us? If so, I would like to remind everyone that a community made up of only people we like is not a community, that’s called a friend group. You can call them assholes all you want, I know I have, but there is still a valuable role to be played by the invested asshole.

Love hurts

Beyond the accusations of bad faith, the part of the responses I object to the most is the claim that criticism has to be pleasant in order to be constructive or effective. I’ll put it plainly, what makes a critique constructive is its specificity and actionability, not its tone. What makes a critique effective is its ability to inspire change in its addressee. I will return to effectiveness later, but it is difficult to argue the article wasn’t constructive. If Sire had simply written a point by point breakdown of why all the journals in Montréal sucked, I could understand why people were crying foul. Instead, he pointed out a trend regarding what he saw as the lack of a clear aesthetic direction behind a lot of the journals in the city and then provided what he believes to be the solution.⁶ To reduce that to a personal attack or infighting is frankly bizarre.

Seeing as the article has only been out for a few days, whether it will be effective in the way I defined above has yet to be seen. Maybe 34 new manifestos will be published in the coming months and Discordia’s detractors will end up looking silly, or maybe nothing will happen and everyone will forget about this. Regardless, I think it is at least a little ridiculous to insist that criticism can only be effective if it is delivered in a manner that spares the feelings of its target. The history of literature is filled with sharp wits that could be described as acerbic, bordering on mean. These people were probably disliked by many but were equally beloved by others, and history tends to see them as having provided some value to their respective communities.

A wonderful example of this kind of person is poet and critic Randall Jarrell. One of his contemporaries noted that “nobody loved poets more or better than Randall Jarrell,” yet he was also acknowledged as having “a cruel streak [...] when he attacked poets he didn’t like.” Nonetheless his contributions to his community are fêted, or at least they are in the Poetry Foundation article where I got this information from.

I stumbled upon Jarrell’s name rather coincidentally through an associative chain that began with Anne Sexton. I’ve been on a really big Sexton kick recently, not only reading her poetry, but also her collected letters, biography, and the memoir written by her daughter, Linda. In the process of doing all of this obsessive reading, I discovered that one of her early mentors was Robert Lowell. I haven’t done nearly as much reading about Lowell (yet) but I did stumble across Jarrell’s name while doing some googling. Turns out he and Lowell were roommates at Kenyon College in Ohio. Admittedly, I haven’t read much of Jarrell either but I believe his approach to criticism demonstrates my point. In his review of W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety,” Jarrell worries that Auden has gone from “one of the five or six best poets in the world” to “a rhetoric-mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” Writing about the poets Witter Byner and Leonard Bacon, he has this to say, “Mr. Bacon and Mr. Byner are traditional in the sense that an appendix is traditional; they are the remains of something necessary under no longer remaining conditions.”⁷

Now, do I think that the Discordia editors are the Jarrells of the Montréal literary scene? No, but none of us are exactly Wystan Auden either. Which raises the question, why do we take ourselves more seriously than one of the most famous poets of the 20th century? For his part, Auden himself is supposed to have quipped “Jarrell is in love with me,” in response to one of his critical essays.⁸ This is what Discordia is offering us should we choose to take them as seriously as they take us, and I would argue they take us quite seriously. Truly, who else is going to spend their evenings going through back issues of The Imagist? Critique, no matter how snarky, and no matter how much the Poetry Heel might insist otherwise, is an act of love.

More than that, what strikes me the most reading Jarrell’s critiques is how fun and alive they feel. Do we not want that sense of vigour in our own community? I know I do. Going to Discordia events like the Bonfire of the Poets is not just fun because you get to role play being a punk, a large part of the joy is watching the hosts roast the fuck out of the features. Did you know that one of our most celebrated locals self- published a fantasy novel when she was a teenager? I didn’t, but someone on the Discordia team had to spend at least some amount of time doing research to find that out. Do you do that when you host a reading? Or do you just recite their bio and say something as bland as it is kind?

A note to conclude

Personally, some of the most valuable criticism I have ever received has been extremely blunt. For instance, I once wrote a poem dedicated to my friendship with a poet whose opinion I value greatly. When I showed it to her, one of the first things she pointed out was that one stanza reminded her of John Green (derogatory). Did this hurt my feelings? Maybe a little bit, but who would it have served if she had pulled her punches? Certainly not me or my poetry. I didn’t need her to say she liked the poem to believe she cared about our friendship or my writing. I have plenty of other evidence that she cares about our friendship and respects me as a writer. She didn’t need to wrap her words in silk to demonstrate that.

Which is not to say that there isn’t an argument to be made in favour of not being a dick, and I don’t want to overstate my alignment with the Discordian ethos. You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, as the cliché goes, and frankly I’m more of a honey person. Plus if you’re always an asshole, people might, I don’t know, automatically dismiss you as an asshole and miss the point you were trying to make. I hope it’s clear that I believe we owe it to ourselves as a community to give Discordia a fairer shake, but I also think that it is incumbent upon Discordia’s editors to apply their own principles to themselves and regularly reevaluate if their techniques are suited to the moment.

That being said, what the fuck are we going to do with all these flies? Community is certainly necessary for any human endeavour but, on its own, it isn’t sufficient to produce art. To create art you need friction and a little bit of pressure. Some of this must come from inside the artist, but even that internal voice must come from somewhere else. If it didn’t, what would be the point of editors, open mic hosts, zine fair organizers and whatever other gatekeeper you can think of? One thing that distinguishes creative writers from the rest of the typing public is the desire⁹ to place our work in conversation with the work of other creative writers. Which raises the question, what are we talking about? It’s clear to me that Discordia & co. want the conversation to be about aesthetics, but I am not sure about everyone else.

Rebecca Lawrence Lynch is a Montréal-based poet, editor, and database slut. Her work appears four times on the Airtable database she built for Discordia’s previous story. Follow her on Instagram at @alliterativebychoice.

ELSEWHERE IN OPINION

1. Since you were so kind as to ask, I have two main databases. One for all of my own poetry, organized by status, muse etc., that I also use to track my submissions. The other is for poems that I have read and liked, organized by theme, imagery and form.

2. Do I really have to call him that?

Sire: Look, when I chose the name I figured I was only doing the one blog post and it seemed funny for my handle to just be Eris’s backwards because we spend so much time arguing. Now it’s been a year and I’m stuck with it and every time someone on Substack messages me to say, “Thank you, Sire” I feel like I’m forcing them to do some kind of medieval kink LARPing thing. I’m sorry!

3. Shout out Kat, taken from us (by the nation of Poland) too soon. There’s nobody else I’d rather go to Latin rite, Tridentine Mass with.

4. Depending on which editor we’re talking about, based on my experience, their general opinion could be characterized as ambivalent.

5. Since questions of identity have been raised for some reason, it’s worth pointing out that the spaces which Discordia and their associates have created appear to be a bit of an incubator for young trans women writers. Which is a group that, in my experience, has been so thoroughly infected by the brainrot of late 2010s internet culture that they are quite at home in Discorida’s somewhat caustic environment.

6. It’s worth noting that, so far, nobody has actually disputed that core claim. Nobody has even really addressed it. Which I think is odd, since there are certainly plenty of ways available to do so. For one, the way he talks about the need for aesthetic direction has a nostalgic tinge that seems in conflict with the avant-garde attitude which Discordia tries to embody. “Bring back the good old days,” I can almost hear him saying, “when poets and the journals that published them belonged to identifiable movements!” I don’t necessarily disagree, but what exactly is so revolutionary about the past? Maybe the days of manifestos are done and Sire is being myopic about the potential for a new way of being a poet.

7. Note that a Time article quoted the latter with “index” instead of “appendix” for some reason, which doesn’t make any sense and ruins the joke. You can find both of these quotes, along with a lot more interesting stuff in Jarrell’s book Kipling, Auden, & Co. https://archive.org/details/kiplingaudenco0000rand/page/144/mode/2up

8. According to this newsletter: https://audensociety.org/15newsletter.html

9. Whether acted upon or not.