I just received a review copy of the New Directions reissue of poet Kenneth Patchen’s The Walking-Away World. I’m not sure why, since at first glance it seemed unlikely that I would have anything to say about the volume that would help publicize it. The illustrated poetry inside is a far cry from science fiction or fantasy, and so I’m not sure what the PR department was thinking, since there’s no hook that would cause me to review the book in either Science Fiction Weekly or SCI FI magazine.

Then I read the introduction, since I enjoy reading writing about writing, regardless of the genre. It turned out to have been written by Jim Woodring, the cartoonist of the surreal wordless series Frank. I can only assume that he was chosen because of the parallels between his work and the three picture-poems of Patchen’s which are gathered here.

So the reason I’m sharing about The Walking-Away World is due to an anecdote Woodring shares in his introduction, one which relates to the recent brouhaha concerning the proper way to respond to bad reviews. Since I have no one-star Amazon reviews of my work and therefore can’t respond to this fiasco the way John Scalzi did, I figure this is the least I can do.

Based on this excerpt, Patchen had the right idea of it:

He responded once to all the negative criticism with an act of almost masochistic toughness: on the inside dust jacket of his book Cloth of the Tempest, he compiled not a collection of laudatory blurbs but some of the most egregious attacks on his work. Under the heading “WHAT SOME CRITICS HAVE SAID OF PATCHEN’S POETRY,” we read:

“The biggest collection of arrant nonsense ever printed in America.”—The Springfield (Mass.) Republican

“Patchen is not a serious poet. And his fulsome self-indulgence, combined with the continual intrusion of a personality that insists on talking, singing, weeping, fighting, and cooing to itself, is very trying … “—The Nation

There are two more. Needless to say they had the effect of making his fans feel even more devoted to their talking, singing, weeping, fighting and cooing hero.

I’ve always agreed with the above method. When I was writing the Captain Marvel comic book back in the ’70s, and received a letter from a reader saying that he was glad that Jim Starlin was gone and if only I would also leave the book his life would be complete, I was amused, and saved that letter like a badge of honor. And when I was editing SCI FI Universe in the ’90s, and received a letter calling me a media whore, I not only published it but had a business card mocked up not only to print in the magazine’s letters column, but also to carry around and hand out.

The proper way to respond to such reviews and criticism is to laugh them off. These things only hurt if we let them hurt. Why can’t people see that?