Review: Echo and Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech by Florian Gargaillo
Reviewed by James Davis
Louisiana State University Press. 2023. 198 pages.
“What’s so bad about clichés?” a Beginning Poetry student asked me early in my first semester teaching the course. The question caught me off-guard—why would anyone defend something so patently indefensible?—and left me stalling for an answer. I couldn’t say what I really thought: clichés are lame, uncool, corny, rendering their sayers and hearers stupider through mere utterance. What I settled on was a culinary analogy: clichés are like shelf-stable boxed dinners, easy to make but sterile, bland, not nutritious. Expressing your own original statements, like prepping a dish from scratch, requires time-consuming work with the raw material of language.
It didn’t land, this analogy (itself a cliché of creative writing). The student would later call the class a “drag” on their end-of-semester evaluation, rightly. Had I had access to Florian Gargaillo’s Echo and Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech, I might have responded to the question in a way that affirmed the student’s correct perception of clichés’ power and value. Clichés are less like food than drugs: concentrated, potent, and, as Gargaillo quotes Randall Jarrell criticizing W. H. Auden, “habit-forming, something the style demands in ever-increasing quantities.” Throughout this slim but wide-ranging book, Gargaillo never condescends to clichés or their users. Instead, he shows how poets writing in the United States from 1930 to 1970 developed a stay against the narcotic effects of cant, a versatile technique “to renew our attention to political clichés and help us to view them critically, so that we might better understand and control them.” This critical but open-minded examination of a highly stigmatized category of language makes Gargaillo’s book a valuable resource for not just scholars but also writers and teachers of contemporary poetry.
The antidote that mid-century poets devised (or at least popularized) is a version of call-and-response that Gargaillo calls “echo and critique.” It’s a simple enough pattern: the poet inserts a cliché from a certain sector of public life into a poem and then uses the many tools at the poet’s disposal—often rhyme but also enjambment, meter, juxtaposition, and typography—to expose the cliché’s implications. It’s a simple, intuitive description of a technique most readers would recognize from dozens of contemporary poems, a field in which Gargaillo is well versed. In addition to holding a doctorate in English from Boston University, teaching literature as an Associate Professor at Austin Peay State University, and serving as secretary of the Wallace Stevens Society, Gargaillo is also a widely published reviewer of contemporary poetry collections. In the Coda of Echo and Critique, he cites Terrance Hayes’s 2010 poem “Support the Troops!” along with recent poems by Franny Choi and Jorie Graham. Hayes’ exclamatory title echoes an extremely familiar line of hawkish cant. In the poem’s first two lines, its speaker declines the title’s imperative: “I’m sorry I will not be able to support any soldiers / at this time. I have a family and a house with slanting floors.” Gargaillo reads the poem’s critique as fighting-fire-with-fire, “answer[ing] a specific type of cliché (the jingoistic slogan) with the stock gestures of another genre (the formal letter).” The critique works two ways, Gargaillo points out, drawing attention to the phoniness of jingoistic jargon but also critiquing the liberal tendency “to bristle at jingoistic clichés before turning back to [one’s] own affairs.” The goal is not to dismiss clichés; in fact, it might be the opposite. Ideally, echo-and-critique “renews our attention to the cliché and challenges the temptation we may feel to simply pass over it, forgetting what phrases such as these conceal and enable.” The book is clear-eyed in its beliefs that clichés aren’t going anywhere, and no one is immune to them. Even though the argument focuses on poetry written from 1930 to 1970, Gargaillo shows in the Coda and elsewhere how understanding this pattern benefits the contemporary reader and writer.
Each chapter of the book is dedicated to one poet and one type of cant: “W. H. Auden on Bureaucratese,” “Randall Jarrell on War Propaganda,” “Langston Hughes on War Propaganda and Racial Injustice,” “Claude McKay on the Political Clichés of the Home Front,” “Robert Lowell on Political Speeches,” “Josephine Miles on Business Talk,” and “Seamus Heaney on Public Talk.” Of these seven poets, I was least familiar with Miles, and the book’s introduction to her work alone was worth the read. Each chapter synthesizes the poet’s biography with historical context, interviews of the poet, reviews of their work, prose from experts in a variety of fields related to the type of cant, and close-readings of excerpts from four or five poems selected to represent the progression of the poet’s interests in public speech. This is a lot to juggle in a tight space, but the argument maintains both insight and clarity throughout. Miles’s chapter is especially important in that it argues how, by the 1960s, “business talk had become the dominant form of public speech in the United States and infiltrated other rhetorical genres,” and that “Miles was one of the first poets to examine this phenomenon in depth across multiple poems, making her an important figure in the history of echo and critique.” This importance could be extended to Miles’s significance in American poetry more broadly. Gargaillo argues convincingly not just for the importance of a craft phenomenon but also for individual poets.
The author’s love of poetry comes through the book-length study loud and clear. His attention to the particulars of the poets’ verse makes the argument especially lucid. For just one example, I’ll cite the same passage Gargaillo cites in the third chapter from Hughes’s poem “The Black Man Speaks” from Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943):
I swear to the Lord I still can’t see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. I swear to my soul I can’t understand Why Freedom don’t apply To the black man. I swear, by gum, I really don’t know Why in the name of Liberty You treat me so.
Immediately following this quotation, Gargaillo points out that “none of the abstract values rhyme.” That is, Democracy and Freedom are “burie[d]” midline; and Liberty, the one capitalized abstraction dignified as an end-word, is the C to gum’s A in the ABCB quatrain. This attention to the minutiae of word-placement and end-rhyme effectively illustrates how the capitalized abstractions had become clichés of WWII propaganda. Their refusal to work within the rhyme scheme echoes a similar mismatch between the ideals trumpeted to justify participation in the War and their lack of application in the Jim Crow South. The author’s analysis is attentive not just to sound but also its absence; such careful listening reveals the subtleties of these poets’ critiques. The tone of Hughes’ poem is quite different from “Support the Troops!” due in part to the decades separating their publication, yet Gargaillo shows how echo-and-critique functions in each to reveal similar hypocrisies in the language of pro-war propaganda. The author lends his book-length argument coherence through such continuities and demonstrates how the forty years of the technique’s genesis echo in contemporary verse.
I found the term echo-and-critique so intuitive and useful that I started to wonder what examples the author could provide that predate Auden. My mind went straight to Polonius, the famous cliché-spouter in Hamlet. One of those clichés: “To thine own self be true,” or as Vonnegut glosses it, “Be an egomaniac!” What realm of Elizabethan public speech did Shakespeare draw this “echo” from? Aside from passing mentions to Byron and Swift in the introduction, Gargaillo limits the scope to the 1930s and onward, a testament to its central claims about the importance of World War II and the post-War encroachment of business jargon into every sector of public speech. The book is focused, stimulating, and relevant to a wide audience of poetry lovers.
Gargaillo is already at work on his second book, which, per the author’s website, “studies the central but little-discussed role of allusion in the development of queer poetry from the Oscar Wilde trial to the Stonewall riots.” The author is developing a particular book-style, focusing on poetic craft in the development of larger, ethical trends within a fixed window of time. Gargaillo has a clear, inclusive vision of criticism that makes him a compelling voice for poetry in the twenty-first century.
James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q (Waywiser 2020), which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His work has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in two installments of the Best New Poets series (2011 & 2019). Recent poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Nashville Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of American Literary Review. His website is jamesdavispoet.com.