[The original review appeared in Envoi 134 and was responded to in Envoi 135 by Emma Lee and myself. Huw Watkins' response is published on this site.]
What follows was emailed to me on Oct 21, 2003, with the heading: Justice.
Dear Mr Fewster,
I would be obliged if you would publish this response to the attack made on
me personally by Huw Watkins on your web site. Also, you will know that your
link to my review, "Repellent, amoral" is misleading since this is a
characterisation of one poem and you have written that you agree with that
characterisation. Thank you.
Rob Withers
Rob Withers then addresses himself to Huw Watkins.
Dear Huw Watkins,
I know that one cannot reliably tell from their poetry what a person is like
but I have the sense that Brian Fewster is fair-minded with a concern for
justice. Therefore I am confident that he will have the decency to publish
this in full alongside your attack on me on the web. Only in that way will
there be some chance for me to put straight your travesty of a review of me.
That it is a personal attack you make clear from your title, which is not,
as it should be, “Review of a Review” but “of a Reviewer.”
I do not attack you for failing completely to understand my review you read,
since I think that you are unfamiliar the genre. I think this because you
demonstrate a systematic misreading, in which you take it for granted that a
review must be about covering a book and can only be either praise or
criticism. Interestingly, most poets seem to use this futile bi-polar logic
in a way that artists do not. Few contemporary painters would suppose that
to point out that their work was not evaluative was a criticism. Indeed,
most would take this as obvious. In fact it is clear from what you write
that you agree with me on this point about Brian’s work, that he does not
evaluate but leaves that to the reader, since you labour to establish
precisely what I tried to add concisely. Your disagreement is illusory.
Since it is likely that most who will read your harsh attack on me are
likely also to be poets with a traditional lens for examining reviews,
perhaps it would be helpful if I tried quickly to summarise what was going
on, and to explain the source of your misunderstandings, in a series of
bullet points.
- Your bafflement is baffling. Your whole piece demonstrates that, like me,
you are Brian Fewster’s kind of reader. I say “like me” because we both
admire his intelligence. Why else do you suppose that I would have read,
re-read and yet again read the collection and have included him in my
review? I don’t have time to devote to pointless attacking of work in which
I see no merit. Why do you have a problem with the idea, wholly familiar in
literary theory, of “ideal reader”?
- You fail to mention that my piece was about applying to poetry concepts
drawn from painting and film. I wrote about framing, and that is why in
Brian’s case I wrote about the cover. It is also why I was not concerned at
all with his sonnets and all your huffing and puffing about that and whether
or not I care for iambics is utterly beside the point. I was not writing
about that.
- Concerning your remarks about fairness, consider your own gratuitous
insults “Why not? Perhaps he did not get that far” and “I suggest this
harsh critic re-reads Poor Tom's Revenge with more diligence.” Perhaps you
might find it instructive to examine these remarks of yours to see what they
reveal.
- You have got into a strange twist over production values. I was pointing
out that filmic high production values have no place in his project. It was
intelligent of Brian to realise this and pull off his entirely appropriate
cover - an intention which you describe as ‘ridiculous’ - yet you describe
in detail aspects of the deliberately unappealing design, of which I was
aware and was commending, as if I were ‘caustic’. You seem to want to say
that he was after all aiming at Merchant Ivory. If you were right (which I
hope you cannot be!) then Brian would surely have failed; if I am right,
then he succeeded admirably; I am appreciative but through a misplaced
anxiety to be put me in the frame of idiot critic, you undervalue his
achievement.
- I almost despaired when I read the strident bit about my being unable for
mysterious reasons “to accept” Brian’s approach to freeze-frame. The point
is that the virtues you assert for slowing the concrete event in this
respect would follow not from repeated pause, which would be jerky and
obvious, but from slow-motion, which is what you are thinking of since,
though you seem not to have noticed, you actually use the expression
“SLOWING up”. [For what it's worth, successive freeze-frame (about one every half-second, which appears to the viewer as punctuated slow motion) was the effect I intended, though Rob Withers is of course free to argue that slow motion would work better. Brian Fewster] This has nothing to do one way or the other with “coldly
logical appraisal”. I can’t see why you find it so upsetting that I suggest
that a bit of analysis here could be helpful.
- Finally, you will know that it was wholly unfair to use the expression
“harsh critic” out of context. I was referring to the work of another poet
who I think would benefit from assistance, in private, to prune some
excesses from some of his poems to bring them up to his own standards in the
rest of his work. I was not writing there about Brian Fewster, I am scarcely
at all a critic of Brian Fewster and it is a complete misreading to say that
I am harsh.
Rob Withers
When I received this I was on my way out to catch a train, and felt that I could not agree to the request without speaking to Huw Watkins, so I sent the following acknowledgement:
"I'm in London for the next few days and will reply more fully in due course."
Rob Withers' reply was immediate and was as follows:
Dear Mr Fewster,
No need to reply. In fact, I have found including your poetry in my review
such an unexpectedly unpleasant experience that I wish now to forget about
it and would very much appreciate it if you would not communicate further.
Yours sincerely,
R. Withers
An open letter to Rob Withers
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