Vol. 9 No. 7 · 2 April 1987
pages 20-23 | 4711 words
Vendlerising
John Kerrigan
- The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry edited by Helen Vendler
Faber, 440 pp, £9.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 571 13945 0
- Selected Poems by John Ashbery
Carcanet, 348 pp, £16.95, April 1986, ISBN 0 85635 666 2
- The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 edited by Jonathan Barker
Hutchinson, 94 pp, £4.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 09 165961 2
- Two Horse Wagon Going By by Christopher Middleton
Carcanet, 143 pp, £5.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 85635 661 1
Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the publishers, who have produced a tome so stoutly handsome that it’s hard to tear the pages out to read the texts as broadsides. An unsewn paperback would ease this problem.
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[*] Ten Sonnets from the School of Eloquence (Anvil, 12 pp., £1.95, May 1987,0 85646 1814). The Fire Gap: A Poet with Two Tails (Bloodaxe, 1 p., £1.95, October 1985, 0 906 427 81 5).
[†] Edited by John Alexander, Alison Rimmer, Peter Robinson, Clive Wilmer. 96 pp., £3.95 (plus 60p p+p), 0950 2858. 6 Kingston Street, Cambridge.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 11 · 4 June 1987
From Clive Wilmer
SIR: A question for your readers. What do the following poets have in common: R.L. Barth, Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis, N. Scott Momaday, John Peck, Timothy Steele and Alan Stephens? I can think of four answers. All of them have spent at least part of their lives in California. All of them at one time or another have been nourished on the poetry and teaching of Yvor Winters. All of them have written marvellous poems (though not all those poems, I hasten to add, were or would have been approved by Winters). And not one of them appears in Helen Vendler’s Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry. (Anyone who doubts the seriousness of this omission should take a look at the selection from Bowers’s work in Donald Hall’s Penguin Book of Contemporary American Poetry.) One could draw up a still more impressive list of poets in the ‘open’ tradition indebted to Pound and Williams who are similarly excluded from Vendler’s book – Thomas Clark in the latest issue of Agenda lists some twenty such.
John Kerrigan, in his interesting review of the anthology (LRB, 2 April), draws attention to other misjudgments and omissions, but is altogether too kind. Vendler’s selection is so partial as to be virtually sectarian. Anyone who can manage the stylish neuroticism favoured by the Sixties or the formless solipsism of the Seventies and Eighties is in – provided they are recognised in New York. This last seems to be the key to the book, which is in fact the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry slapped between Faber covers. It seeks to promote the assumption that contemporary American verse is anything from New York that confirms the literary theories of Harvard professors. That assumption has now received the Faber imprimatur: which means in effect that it has been endorsed by the similarly powerful London-Oxford axis that holds sway over here. The tragedy is that, whatever objections are made to it in reviews, it will possess for years to come an authority it does not begin to deserve. The real sufferer will be poetry itself, if poetry is concerned, not with elegant fantasy, but with accuracy – of thought, feeling, perception, form and rhythm.
Clive Wilmer
Cambridge
