Helen Vendler

In December of 2006 the New York Times published an article about poetry critic and teacher Helen Vendler. Here are some excerpts:

. . . Vendler was born Helen Hennessy in Boston in 1933. Although she was encouraged to read poetry — her mother, a former schoolteacher, had memorized many poems, and her father taught Romance languages at a high school — her parents forbade her to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School for Girls, and later Radcliffe, because, like many devout Roman Catholics at the time, they accepted the church’s strong disapproval of secular education. Instead she enrolled in Boston’s all-female Emmanuel College, hoping to study literature, but “literature, I discovered with disgust, was taught as a branch of faith and morals,” she recalled in a 2001 lecture. That experience “inoculated me forever against adopting any ism as a single lens through which to interpret literature.”

Vendler switched to the sciences, and after graduation was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study mathematics in Belgium. “I loved math and I loved organic chemistry because they have structures and I love structures,” she said. But on the stormy trans-Atlantic voyage, Vendler had a reckoning with herself. “And I decided, now that I was free, I would do English, because that’s what I had always wanted to do.” With the Fulbright commission’s blessing, she switched to literature.

. . . Today Vendler seldom reviews poets under 50, since their “frames of reference,” she says, are alien to her. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when they were growing up. And that’s fine. It’s as good a resource of imagery as orchards. Only I’ve seen orchards and I didn’t watch these cartoons,” she said. “So I don’t feel I’m the best reader for most of the young ones.”

These days Vendler is more focused on late style. In April, she will deliver the prestigious Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Her topic will be the final books of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, and how each wrestled with what Yeats called “death-in-life and life-in-death”: writing about life facing impending death, and writing about death while still immersed in the world. “It used to be easier to deal with when you had heaven to believe in, when there was another place to go at the end of your poem,” Vendler said, as the late afternoon sun came through her office window. Death without heaven “produces more stylistic problems.” Vendler has recently finished the book on Yeats’s poems that she first wanted to write as a dissertation, but abandoned, she said, because at 23, “I didn’t have the life experience to penetrate them or resonate with them.” Life and life’s work, seamlessly intertwined.

Read the full article at the NY Times site.

Links to several of Ms. Vendler's articles can be found at the NY Books site. The site allows access only with paid subscription.
Here she is in a brief (~2min) video at You Tube:

About This Blog

This blog stems from an activity begun in Saginaw, Michigan, by the River Junction Poets. The activity was designed to provide opportunities for readers to share poems they like and to learn about poets and poems about which they maybe don't know so much. By celebrating birthdays of poets, we reminded ourselves of the human sources of poems. This blog features multiple contributors, lists of poets and their birthdays, titles of their recent works, and links to publishers and other pages with information about the poets. This blog has occasionally featured pieces written by other bloggers.


About the activity: from June 2005 to 2009, the River Junction Poets hosted readings on the occasions of birthdays of poets at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Saginaw, Michigan. Several of these blog posts describe these events, which were announced by the bookstore in its monthly in-store Newsletter. One of the store managers was so enthused by what our group was doing, he arranged for a sign to announce our activity and also arranged a shelf of poetry books near our group. Often, we sent a birthday card to the poet whose work we read, and we included the store newsletter that mentioned the event after we had all signed the card. We've received Thank You notes from several of these poets, which you can see in blog posts here.

If you are wondering what it would be like to host such an event yourself, consider what it would be like to sit and read poems by yourself in a place where others could join you. When we did this in Saginaw, we decided together on the dates to meet at the bookstore, and then I e-mailed the dates to the manager at the Barnes & Noble. At least one of us chose to act as host for each occasion, but, officially, no one signed up to attend any events; usually, however, people in our group would say if they were planning to be there or not. For me, it wasn't time wasted if I was host and no one showed up. That happened once, when I was the only one at the Lewis Carroll birthday reading. I actually ended up talking about Lewis Carroll, his poetry, and our group with two shoppers who happened to be there at the time. It was obvious that I was there for the occasion because there was a sign there announcing the event, and I was sitting there reading work by Lewis Carroll.

Jane Beal at The Poetry Place

The following was written by Jane Beal:

Poetry is passed from one generation to the next because it is taught.

In general, teaching gets a bad rap because it can be done and sadly, is often done in a way that sucks all life out of the subject. Hence the adage, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” and Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

Yes, I must agree with Whitman: many times, seeing the stars with my own eyes is a much more beautiful and agreeable experience than listening to someone else drone on about them. But good teaching is not about lecturing, however much teachers or students may think we learn from lectures. Good teaching invites listeners to experience, for themselves, whatever is being taught. The teaching of poetry needs to be like that if it is to be real to the souls of young poets and lovers of poetry.

Simply put, people encounter poetry through teaching. Sometimes the teachers are professors or parents, books or songs. The world is full of poetry teachers! And people encounter poetry–they hear it, they read it–sometimes like a comforting grandparent or an old friend, sometimes like an new lover (so exciting!) who becomes a dear, familiar love with the passing of years, sometimes like a stranger passing by in the street. But poetry, unlike most strangers on city streets in America, actually wants to be known. Therefore, it must be shared. The good teaching of poetry is a way of sharing poetry that is deeply meaningful.

In the pages offered here, there are some invitations to poetry through teaching. Use them as you wish!

Excerpted from The Poetry Place accessed 7/30/08.

Here's hoping you will embrace poetry and make it part of your life.