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[Helen] Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone. [...]
Small-circulation journals do still publish criticism of contemporary verse. But the reviews often appear to be written in code -- poets making polite, vague noises about one another's work, in an exquisitely cryptic form of logrolling.
For her part, Ms. Vendler, now 71 years old, has stepped back from the role that made her so influential. She is candid about hitting the limits of her interest in new work. After reviewing several generations of rising poets, she says, "you get to a group whose references are not yours any longer. They're talking about the cartoons they watched on television when they were children, the movies they saw, the music they grew up with, the kinds of activities they engaged in. And I fear I have lost touch." [...]
She quotes a favorite verse from Dylan Thomas:
All I have to give I offer"It means that you offer your little capacities," she explains. "And every generation is astonished that the capacities on offer are not better. 'Are we all there is?' you say to yourself. And you wish you were better. You wish your tastes were more catholic, perhaps. But all you can do is offer what you have.
wine, bread, and halter.
- SCOTT MCLEMEE, "The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism," the chronicle of higher education January 28, 2005
posted January 27, 2005 in print.