excerpted from http://www.historiann.com/2011/12/12/poetry-history-beauty-and-truth-vendler-vs-dove-smackdown/

Poetry, history, beauty, and truth: Vendler vs. Dove smackdown
by Ann M. Little

Have you all followed the Helen Vendler-Rita Dove smackdown lately in the New York Review of Books?  Long story short:  Helen Vendler reviewed Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and slammed it for being too inclusive, too multicultural, and too “peppy.”  Dove responded with a lengthy defense of her work, explaining her methods and goals.

What struck me about this melee is the nakedly racial ressentiment of Vendler’s critique.  (Vendler is a white Harvard professor of poetry, Dove is a black poet and scholar at the University of Virginia.)  Although Vendler doesn’t say so, she is a Wallace Stevens scholar, and she’s apparently outraged that Dove’s choices meant that Stevens must share space in this volume with unworthy “multicultural” poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and others of the Black Arts movement.  Here’s Vendler:

Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches.

Dove, in her reply, comments on how racially reductive is Vendler’s analysis:

It is astounding to me how utterly Vendler misreads my critical assessment of the Black Arts Movement, construing my straightforward account of their defiant manifesto as endorsement of their tactics; she ignores a substantial critical paragraph in which I decry the fallout from the movement (“Against such clamor and thunder, introspective black poets had little chance to assert themselves and were swept under the steamroller,” I write in my introduction) and instead focuses on that handy whipping boy, Amiri Baraka, plucking passages from his historically seminal poem “Black Art” in which he denigrated Jews, thereby slyly, even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies. Smear by association…sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth. (I could argue equal opportunity offensiveness by having printed Hart Crane’s “A liquid theme that floating niggers swell”—but perhaps that makes me racist as well.)

In the same breath, Vendler—no slouch when it comes to lumping poets together by race—makes quick work of dismembering Gwendolyn Brooks, dismissing my description of Brooks’s “richly innovative” early poems as “hyperbole,” perhaps because I dared to compare those poems to “the best male poets of any race.” Evidently the 1950 Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Ms. Brooks to award her the prize in poetry, at a time when there was little talk of diversity in America and the expression “multiculturalism” had yet to enter the public discourse. Analogous praise today, however, amounts in Dame Vendler’s eyes to nothing but “hype.”

I’m sure that anthologists of twentieth-century poetry in the middle and at the end of the twenty-first century will make different choices than Dove made.  I’m sure that an anthology of nineteenth-century American literature published in, say, 1911, would have been quite different from one published at the end of the twentieth century.  Dove freely admits that she aimed for breadth over depth in her effort to anthologize the twentieth century, but maybe that’s part of the reason for Vendler’s evident pique.  Vendler responds to Dove’s anthology as though Dove is proclaiming once and for all that she has compiled a definitive statement on Literary Truth and Beauty, whereas Dove herself is much more modest about what she can possibly accomplish barely a decade after the close of the twentieth century:

“From my choices no principle of selection emerges,” Vendler grouses, and at last we arrive at the crux of her predisposition: in her system, an anthologist must have an agenda and is expected to drive that agenda home, sidelining her enemies and promoting her preferences with no attempt at impartial judgment. Actually, I am proud that no principle of selection emerges. My criterion was simple: choose significant poems of literary merit. That these poems happen to illuminate the times in which they were crafted should come as no surprise; that the stories they tell of the twentieth century have many intersections and complementary trajectories is fortuitous, a result of having been forged by and reacting to shared sensibilities.

"No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading." - Helen Vendler

At any given time, there are exactly 10.
Let's say they have careers of 20 years.
That makes a total of 50 for the century.

Where are they right now?
Maybe one in India.
None in Australia or New Zealand.
Typically one in Nigeria.
South Africa, none.
Ireland might have one.
Scotland might have one.
None in Wales at all.
England might have two.
Canada might have one.
Two in the United States.
None in the Caribbean.
Philippines? Pakistan? Liberia?
Don't make me laugh.

How do you know who they are?
They'll still be reading this in 700 years.
There are eternal themes.
There is a modest innovation.
There is deep introspection.
They remind you of Wordsworth.
They fit into the tradition.
They gently question the tradition.
From what is on the page
you wouldn't know
if they were male or female,
white or black, or God forbid,
if they were gay or straight!

Don't waste your time with riffraff.
Choose as carefully as you would
choose a marriage partner.
Read, re-read, and re-re-read.
Don't pass yourself around
as if you were a tart at a frat party.
Eyes are the windows to the soul.

"The Aeneid should have been burned
and Kafka's works should have been burned.
Personal fidelity is more important than art."

Who wrote the content of your second post?

http://poetrycircle.com/index.php/topic,21089.0.html


In an ideal world all aims might be served by the one work, but the world is not ideal, and aims needed to be sorted out.

`

Thanks for asking, Gregory. Sorry for my sloppiness cobbling that post together. Its final lines too should have been set off somehow as being from Vendler, drawn from: "If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts, they should. I think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art.” Tom

Just to clarify, starting at "At any given time..." and ending at "...windows to the soul"---this section then is not a quote from Vendler? And if not, who wrote that part?

I find this cat-fight between Vendler and Dove interesting. Currently I'm reading up on it. Thanks for starting this thread, Tom.

My initial reaction is to side with Vendler as I've never been enamored of any black poets (and I would've been enamored if I'd found any were ever as innovative as Shakespeare, Dante or Wordsworth). I think black poets tend to write too obsessively about what it's like to be black, and therefore they limit their appeal. One black writer of talent I do appreciate is Komunyakaa, and maybe that's because, in the book I read of his, he didn't focus on the black experience. I prefer a writer who describes what it's like to be alive, no matter what one's color. I mean, one or two poems about the black experience would be sufficient if of high quality. Shylock's soliloquy suffices to describe the painful questionings of bigotry. I think a great poet (and poem) speaks for every person.

No, not quoted from Vendler, just an imaginary riff from someone else.
My guess is that every writer in Dove's anthology, in Vendler's, or in yours or mine, is the absolutely favorite of some number of readers, and absolutely detested by some other number. That's the glory of love, as Billy Hill wrote! Tom

No doubt that's true, Tom. Equally true is the fact---as this site proves---poems are moved from "Submit" to "Workshop" based on objective criteria helpful for judging quality. When popularity is the main criterion, the best food is McDonald's, the best music Lady Gaga.

I do think anthologists are hopeful creatures, wishing to immortalize their favorites. Only time will tell.

    No one with a passing familiarity with contemporary poetry, I'll warrant.

 
    Might have one?

    Let me see:  Leonard Cohen (only the best known poet in the world), Michael Ondaatje (another of the 5 best known poets on the planet).  This is before we get to George Elliott Clarke, Ann Simpson, Karen Solie and, I believe, DPK (arguably the best pixel poet alive).


     Derek Walcott?

     That at least two of these (Clarke and Walcott) are black certainly supports Rita Dove's basic contention.

-o-

I think people confuse competent, or good poets with great poets. Maybe the analogy of basketball players, or sportsman in general, would best describe my own point of view regarding the finest poets: there's a whole league full of competent players, but there's only a handful of greats: players like Michael Jordan, whose gifts go far beyond what others can achieve with an equal amount of practice---these are the pioneers. I think talent cannot be taught or learned, it is a gift. In my life of enjoying poetry I admire many poems as clever, competent, etc., but when I want to read "real" poetry---the stuff you can't imitate or learn---I have only one or two contemporary poets I feel that way about. Of course, there's taste involved, like anything, after years of reading poetry, or drinking wine, one develops a thirst for a particular private bottling.

Gregory, I don't think "objective criteria" can identify "the stuff you can't imitate or learn." Nor are they used here on PC, to my knowledge. I would never describe my own criteria as objectivel. Tom

Gregory:


    I agree in principle but it isn't clear which Ms. Vendler means by "worth reading".  "Worth reading" when and by whom?  If she means "canonical" then her choice of tenses is unfortunate and even Tom's figure of 50 may be on the high side, judging from recent anthologies.  If she means "worth reading by contemporaries" it depends on the era.  Before WWI, the figure of 175 would need to add a digit, given the number of poets being read in newspapers and magazines of the era.  If she means post-WWII poets considered "worth reading" by the contemporary reading public the number could be divided by at least 25.

Tom:


     Well, it certainly can if we, as prosodists, examine "'real' poetry---the stuff you can't imitate".  Whether or not we can learn from it may be a better measure of the teacher and student than the lesson. 

-o-

What objective criteria do you guys have in mind?

Tom:


    In my case, prosody.

Best regards,

Colin

I know you're not saying it's a great poem if it has metrical structure. Are there some particular objective metrical criteria that you apply, to reach such a conclusion?