Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Recent online authorial meltdowns over less-than-stellar reviews have brought me back to the question of what the appropriate way for an author to respond to a review is. I still remember my high school journalism teacher telling us that when someone wrote a letter criticizing our work we should print it without comment and trust readers to be intelligent enough to decide for themselves if the critique was fair. There is something appealing in applying that idea to book reviews—an appeal to our better selves and to what we as authors hope for in an audience.

That said, book reviews occur in a different context from letters to the editor: whereas the latter are read by someone who has already chosen to pick up the paper, the former may influence the choice to pick up the book (though a book that receives negative reviews will probably sell more copies than a book that isn’t reviewed at all: name familiarity does play a role). Thus, it may be a bit more reasonable for an author to respond to a review that they feel is unfair or untrue.

But what are the bounds of an acceptable response?

1. Debate the points made by the critic, not the critic’s status or authority. Alice Hoffman asked who Roberta Silman was. I’ve had someone respond to a negative review of one of his poems by saying that I’d never written a memorable line of poetry in my life, which if true wouldn’t have had any impact on whether my critique of his work was fair. These sort of maneuvers don’t advance the discussion and are a sort of silencing: don’t go after me, or I’ll use my higher status to hurt you.
2. Don’t encourage other people to join in attacking the critic. This is a variant of the status argument: I will hurt you by bringing other people (my fans, since I’m more popular than you are) to say nasty things. No matter how thick your skin, it takes time to go through a deluge of emails, phone calls, or even blog comments.
3. If you feel the need to rant, do so but it in private. Have a friend you can complain to, preferably over a glass of whiskey. If this friend can double as someone to check your public response for constructiveness, that’s even better. Ranting can help get it out of your system, but screaming at people doesn’t help advance the conversation about literature.

What other guidelines should an author who responds to a review follow? Or do you think writers should never reply?

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Issue 1, I mean. I’m on page 2614, though they left out my middle name, which I prefer to use. It’s a mediocre poem, though a bit too coherent to be the work of a scraper. (Amy King hopes they’ve been reading the work of three thousand plus poets for the past few years, and they’ve written a poem in response to each poet, attaching the poet’s name to their specially-tailored odes.) The use of “twilight” in both the title and body certainly reflects one of my obsessions, though it wouldn’t take much doing to figure that out given the title of my journal. Superficially, the poem moves around the page like one of my less structurally dramatic works, but given how many of the poems do so, I can hardly conclude that there was an attempt to imitate my style, especially given the prevalence of capital letters. The total absence of punctuation suggests my work of a few years agon than my current work, though I still don’t always use punctuation.

That said, I would have found this whole “anthology” beneath mention– boring– if not for the various reactions of various poets and their hives. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, the whole poetry community is pissed off. If so, I’m not part of that community. Then again, given that he refers to the anthology as pirated, perhaps he’s the one who isn’t really part of that community. Either he is insufficiently familiar with enough of the poets listed to realized that we didn’t write “our” poems, or everything written today is too similar for anyone to realize it (or, more likely, some combination thereof). Of course, such lack of distinction is only bad according to a highly individualistic model of artistic creation.

In various comment sections, there have been angry responses by included poets and other comments mocking the angry responses. I don’t feel that I can really mock anyone, however, given that I have to admit to taking some pleasure in being selected, though I still don’t know exactly what that means. (I guess we never do know what it means to selected, whether for publication in a journal or membership in a social group.)