Best poetry critic alive. Prove me wrong if you can.
a) Writing in a scientific fashion, with almost mathematical precision;
b) Analyzing poems like a coroner or surgeon eviscerating a body: studying and cataloguing every word like organs that compose the whole of an anatomy;
c) Doesn’t get mystical. While she was analyzing Shakespeare’s sonnets she stated that a lot of critics want to see more in the poems then the poems really offer. She states that Shakespeare’s sonnets often offer only a small and un-complex message (love is a maddening fever; time is all destroying; progeny can be a small victory over time, etc.), and that’s not what makes them great – it’s the use of language, and not the thinking of the poet what makes them eternal;
d) Starts a book about Keats with this extremely pratical and realistic view of a poet’s work: “ ‘Whatever I do’, Keats cried in a 1926 letter, ‘poetry will remain a torture.’ Over and over in the intervals he had set aside for writing poems, he complains of the ‘strain’ of writing lyrics, of the ‘exhaustion’ they caused. ‘Creative work always ruins one’s nerves for a time’, he said as early as 1908. Keats best known comment of this sort appears in ‘Adams Curse’, as he asserts that getting a single line right can take hours. In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ he claims (and his letters bear it out) that for six weeks he had sought in vain for a theme; he speaks elsewhere of having to wait until his mind ‘fills up’ again, as if he had drained it dry. Even when he could not actually compose verse because of the pressure of other work, he often felt themes running thorough his head; at such times he entered ‘paragraphs’ or ‘sketches’ into a notebook summarizing the theme (and sometimes the internal evolution) of poems to be written up latter in verse form. What tormented him was the putting of his themes (and even the words used in prose sketches) into verse.”;
e)Showed courage when she stated that a Penguin Anthology of modern verse compiled by a black poet was flawed because it was more preoccupied with adding a lot of black, Latino and marginal poets to the collection (regardless of the merit of their poems) than with exposing a lot of facets of critically acclaimed poets (like Wallace Stevens), who were included with only some few scraps of their production.
She takes the cake. If you never read her, just do it now.
>showed courage when she stated that a Penguin Anthology of modern verse compiled by a black poet was flawed because
sounds good to me
Parker Young
INTERVIEWER
How is your study of the Shakespeare sonnets different from others? I gather you do not read with the usual social or cultural or moral agenda.
VENDLER
During the nineteenth century, the study of Shakespeare’s sonnets was governed by a biographical agenda. Later, it was also governed by the “universal wisdom” agenda: the sonnets have been mined for the wisdom of friendship, the wisdom of the acquiescence to time, the wisdom of love. But I’m more interested in them as poems that work. They seem to me to work awfully well (though not everyone thinks so). And each one seems to work differently. Shakespeare was the most easily bored writer that ever lived, and once he had made a sonnet prove out in one way, he began to do something even more ingenious with the next sonnet. It was a kind of task that he set himself: within an invariant form, to do something different—structurally, lexically, rhythmically—in each poem. I thought each one deserved a little commentary of its own, so I’ve written a miniessay on each one of the one hundred and fifty four.
INTERVIEWER Do you feel confined as a female critic in any way?
VENDLER No, I don’t think the mind is gendered. I know that’s not a popular position these days, but I never felt the mind to be gendered and perhaps that may be because I always read poetry. When I was a young girl reading and the page said, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,” or, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life,” it never occurred to me that these thoughts were not available to me because they had been uttered by an author who was male. I didn’t care who had uttered them. They seemed good things to say at a given moment.
>i like this
INTERVIEWER In the introduction to your latest collection of reviews, Soul Says, you speak of the soul and the self in the lyric as different from one another. Could you say a little bit about that?
VENDLER Well, with the rise of identity defined almost solely through race, ethnicity, or gender, I think we’ve forgotten the identity that speaks when one is speaking to oneself. That is to say, one is more conscious of those things—class, race, age, sex—when one is in the presence of others. It’s the difference principle that makes you consciously say, I am black and you are white; I am old and you are young; I am a woman and you are a man. But when you’re by yourself you don’t need so powerfully to assert any one of those identities; when you speak to yourself, you rarely say, I, as a woman, am saying this to myself, or, I, as a sixty year old, am saying this to myself. You tend merely to say, I am saying this to myself, because in the absence of others you can be yourself without external reference. Lyric comes out of that self that is less socially marked than the self that we normally refer to as our social identity. That’s why I took the title Soul Says from the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, because I think the word soul sums up the speaker of lyric.
>i like this
All memes aside user I feel 0.04% more intelligent having read this interview. Thanks for introducing Veeky Forums to Helen Vendler
Joshua Harris
>Writing in a scientific fashion, with almost mathematical precision Dumb STEM bitch
Noah Kelly
this bitch is based...
Samuel Butler
Wrong.
Lincoln Scott
>Writing in a scientific fashion >Doesn’t get mystical > extremely pratical and realistic view Missing half the fun desu.
