My panic whenever reviewing poetry can be explained with a story once told to an interviewer by Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. For an unauthorized lyric sheet, the band’s Japanese label had transcribed her indecipherable singing into English lines like, 'Hit me with your airplane / I don’t mend no fence / Yeah, baby, I’m a mud dancer.' Poetry criticism’s failure, I’ve always thought, is that it runs at a similar interpretive deficit as Japanese music industry interns pitted against Scottish post-punks singing in doggerel.
