Not infrequently, there are calls for “negative criticism” among poets and poet-critics. I am opposed to negative criticism so called--a performance in which one "takes down” another's work in order to enact evaluation or judgment--opting instead for criticism that is highly interested, motivated, desirous, devotional, conversational, dialogic, coeval, conative, and which--yes!--elects affinity. Affinity which may perpetually off-set the struggles for power that even poets so often fall prey to. Affinity, or connection, which seeks new gravity, which redistributes singularities through a process seeking love. To elect affinity is, as Bhanu Kapil suggests, to mate with the things (or people) that you may most want to become (or may already feel like you are becoming). It is, in other words, to work in the present for what we will have wanted to have been.

- Thom Donovan on the Elective Affinities site

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