[R. S. Gwynn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/bo...d=1&ref=review

[Susan McLean]

Thanks for bringing the article to my attention. It was an interesting read. The status of poetry reviewing is a complex problem, and there are no easy solutions. The network of acquaintance among poets makes objectivity almost impossible for poet-reviewers. Academic connoisseurs can bring knowledge and passion to the task, but not being working poets themselves can perhaps skew their judgments, too. I was appalled to hear that Vendler thinks The Aeneid ought to have been burned in fulfillment of Vergil's wishes. But we all have our own idiosyncratic values.

Susan

[Janet Kenny]

As a foreigner I find her an attractive personality.

As a singer I found her reading of Keats's To Autumn to be self-consciously self-effacing and amateurish.

I appreciate her wish not to overwhelm the poem with interpretation or dynamics and I also liked the way she read against the meter but homed in on it at essential moments. I suppose her age would explain some odd breathing points. I would have liked the poem to be read more slowly and clearly (not ponderously) and with a great deal more sensuality.

The opening line is most difficult to bring off when reading aloud. I don't think she did it. The exclamation mark is not there for nothing.

If she was raised speaking Italian she should have heard how the best Italians read poetry. They show the shape and feeling of a poem but with restraint.

Thanks Sam for drawing our attention to this article.

Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 09, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Vendler is at least partly responsible for Jorie Graham's rise, which speaks heavily against her--but I don't get the sort of "corrupt old asshole" vibe I do from Bloom, for instance.

Quincy

[Robert J. Clawson]

Vendler needs a reading coach. She mailed it in.

[Gregory Dowling]

Vendler has done some good criticism - her two books on Stevens, for instance - but she has very narrow views on what constitutes good contemporary poetry. If you read her books on recent poetry everything is always being compared with Stevens and Ashbery, even when there is absolutely no connection. And she's one of those who's always banging on about the superiority of American colloquial, as if there were no such thing as British colloquial (and as if everything must always be colloquial). There's a good essay on her by Bruce Bawer which concludes with the sentence: "While Helen Vendler, in short, is not a thoroughly bad critic, it is without question a thoroughly bad thing that she wields such unparalleled influence upon the direction of American poetry in our time."

After all, what can you say to someone who didn't include Hecht in the Faber (or Harvard) Book of Contemporary American Poetry (that is to say, she favoured Jorie Graham and Rita Dove over him)?

[Janet Kenny]

Originally posted by Gregory Dowling:

After all, what can you say to someone who didn't include Hecht in the Faber (or Harvard) Book of Contemporary American Poetry (that is to say, she favoured Jorie Graham and Rita Dove over him)?

Gregory,
Words fail me for once.

She left out Hecht?

Of course she fluffed the first line of "To Autumn".

I am vindicated.

Janet

[R. S. Gwynn]

I'll second what Bruce Bawer said. I wrote a decidedly mixed review of one of her books some years ago and later discovered an excerpt from it being used by her publisher to plug the book.

[Rose Kelleher]

The thought of any critic wielding any influence at all on the direction of contemporary poetry is something I don't quite understand. What exactly is the direction of contemporary poetry? What does that mean? Does it mean the selection of poetry to be reviewed by prominent critics and included in important anthologies? Does that matter?

This may be getting off-topic, but this thread made me think of that 9th c. Irish poem I linked to in my own thread, and the fact that it's survived as long as it has. It probably wasn't preserved by critics or anthologists, but by people who simply liked it and thought it worth remembering. So what if Vendler thinks Hecht isn't worth bothering with? Somebody ripped the cover off the Book of Kells, but it survived. And nowadays anyone who wants to can back stuff up on CDs and email it to other people who can back it up on CDs. It's the readers who matter, and if the work is good, people will read it. Those who rely on critics to tell them what to read may not read it, but who cares?

[Janet Kenny]

Originally posted by Rose Kelleher:
The thought of any critic wielding any influence at all on the direction of contemporary poetry is something I don't quite understand. What exactly is the direction of contemporary poetry? What does that mean? Does it mean the selection of poetry to be reviewed by prominent critics and included in important anthologies? Does that matter?

This may be getting off-topic, but this thread made me think of that 9th c. Irish poem I linked to in my own thread, and the fact that it's survived as long as it has. It probably wasn't preserved by critics or anthologists, but by people who simply liked it and thought it worth remembering. So what if Vendler thinks Hecht isn't worth bothering with? Somebody ripped the cover off the Book of Kells, but it survived. And nowadays anyone who wants to can back stuff up on CDs and email it to other people who can back it up on CDs. It's the readers who matter, and if the work is good, people will read it. Those who rely on critics to tell them what to read may not read it, but who cares?

Rose,
Of course I agree with you except, people all over the world, many of them without access to the internet, will read something as important as a Faber Anthology and not meet the work of someone as powerful and moving as Hecht, because of the power of one critic. Some people who would have benefitted and grown from encountering Hecht will not do so. As a child who scrambled for books in a far flung island I know how sad that is.

(Which reminds me that a Hecht anthology I ordered from Amazon a couple of months ago has still not arrived.)
Janet