Dave Birkimshaw said:
>I don't know a lot about Helen Vendler, nor the age of her bricks, as in
>school, but I do know that I once saw an anthology for Faber or Oxford that
>she once did, and it was like a roll-call of zero taste, how to project if
>you don't give a toss about poetry but what matters to you is accreditation.
>
>Power-plays and poetry, what a joke of a combination.
I tend to agree with this, but I do think it's important to recognize that
even people we think are completely wrong can also be very intelligently
wrong. That's what I fele about Vendler, & so, when she is talking about
some of the poets she actually likes whom I feel are worthy of such notice,
she can be interesting. But she is committed to a version of peotry that is
simply too narrow & seems to miss the point of all the North American
poetry & poetics that flow from Pound-Williams. I remember hearing her give
a apper at a conference on poetry & history where she gave a rather
brilliantly wrongheaded reading of melville's sequence of poems on the
Civil War in which everything she said about them suggested they were a
prototypical serial poem, but, because she could not accept serial poems,
Jack Spicer, as 'poetry' in her sense, she had to keep saying, no, no,
these are really lyrics, they just dont' seem to be. It was a wondrous
example of self-defeating rhetoric, all unconcious. whew.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I put the difficulty down to god
Who failed to be unambiguous in such matters
Eli Mandel
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