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Here's a furious row that is riveting the attention of the poetry world in America. A well-known poet and university professor, Rita Dove (University of Virginia), has edited the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. When the New York Review of Books sent this to be reviewed by the doyenne of American poetry critics, Helen Vendler (Harvard), they could have predicted that the result might not be pretty, not because Professor Dove is black and Professor Vendler white - though black and white comes into the dispute - but because Vendler is prickly and possessive and has her own horse in this race. An old horse, yes: The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985). But a horse nevertheless.
Anthologies of this kind are liable to provoke rows, and for understandable reasons. Because of copyright fees, it is very hard to put together a major anthology of modern poetry. Small publishers sometimes achieve it by arm-twisting the contributors, but when a large publisher such as Penguin or Norton produces such a volume it is intended to stay in print for a long time and to become a standard work in schools and colleges. To be included in such a volume could make a big difference to an author's reputation. To be excluded can be, of course, depressing for the poet and aggravating for his or her admirers.
So, feelings can run deep. And, sure enough, Vendler took Dove's anthology apart. The best thing Dove could have done was shut up and let people draw their own conclusions. Vendler is known to "bear, like the Turk, no rival near the throne". Perhaps this was just another example of territoriality.
Excepting that it wasn't. In most, though not in my opinion all, of her criticisms, Vendler put her finger on blatant weaknesses, although she ignored the most obvious weakness of all: nothing by Sylvia Plath, and nothing by Allen Ginsberg. Dove explains in her introduction that her permissions funds did not run to such expensive poets, and she says to the reader: "For these involuntary gaps, I ask you to cut me some slack."
This is just not good enough, and the fault here is largely with Penguin for not seeing the difficulty Dove was in and coming to her aid. A small publisher might plead for the reader's understanding over such omissions. A large one has to decide whether it is prepared to stump up the money to do the job properly.
Vendler provokes a yelp of anguish from Dove simply by quoting Amiri Baraka's Black Art, a poem Dove includes, and asking her to explain the "literary standards" of "the New Black Aesthetic" it is supposed to represent. Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones, was out to shock what he thought of as liberal sympathies:
We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews.
There's more of this obsessive and anti-Semitic rant ("another bad poem cracking/ steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth"), which Vendler calls "showy violence" that then turns sentimental. She's right. What was Rita Dove thinking of when she reprinted this dreck? What was her commissioning editor at Penguin, Elda Rotor, thinking of - or did she even read the text?
Dove replied (in the New York Review dated December 22) in fury at what she affects to see as a sly attempt by Vendler "even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies" to Amiri Baraka. "Smear by association ... sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defence 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."
Once again: this wordy outrage will not do. It is Dove who has come to the conclusion that because Black Art is a "historically seminal poem" it deserves to be drawn to the attention of her readers. She's the one inviting comparison between Baraka and, say, WH Auden, who gets represented by a mere two poems (neither of them written when he was an American citizen). It is Dove who gives us page after page of the pretentious or ludicrous agit-prop from Melvin B Tolson:
The New Negro,
Hard-muscled, Fascist-hating,
Democracy ensouled,
Strides in seven-league boots
Along the Highway of Today
Towards the Promised Land of
Tomorrow!
No cause is served by the over-promoting of weak or positively bad art - bad black art included. But good art can also suffer from exaggerated praise. There is much to admire in Gwendolyn Brooks, without the reader agreeing that her first book "confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race". Tartly, Vendler inquires: "As richly innovative as Shakespeare, Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one."
These quarrels stir up a great many feelings - racial, historical, artistic, social, personal - and have provoked many angry letters in response to Vendler's review. But an anthologist of this kind would do well at the outset to realise that she is, herself, a campaigner, an advocate, a propagandist if you will. And she is in a strong and privileged position, having been offered a commission to put together a collection that exemplifies everything she admires.
It is a strong position, but it is also horribly exposed, since her choices and omissions among the living are bound to cause hurt and offence. The same is true for the reviewer, whose job it is to express a frank judgment. Vendler replied to Dove's anguished tirade: "I have written the review and I stand by it." She gets much the better of the argument, and that's that.
Reader views (7)
Poetry is lost to this world. Rejoice! The frontal lobe no longer processes the genre. If you see a bum, give him change. If you come upon a poet reciting a poem, advise him to take his life. "What? Oh, yes of course, Mr. Dickens, 'Decrease the surplus (poet) population.' Indeed!" Tea and crumpets at Four, chip, chip, cheerio!
Space aliens abducted T.S. Eliot and urinated celestial puss down his throat, hence, The Waste Land. Robert Frost's left big toe inspired him to write very badly. Anne Sexton smoked used Tampons driving her to confess. The entire collected poems of poets throughout history are absent one verity and mere to take up space. Poetry, you are now of the Charnel House.
- Chris Roberts, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 31/12/2011 20:13
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The suicide issue raised by Dove is no issue. It flows in the veins of all poets and is not exclusive to the confessionals. To wit, Hart Crane, his end of times:
The Water Looks Lovely Indeed
Self-murder burns its own special incandescence. Suicide is a light affair because it is entered into lightly. The one-thousand questions asked by those left behind are without weight because it matters nothing to Death. Grieving embarrasses the suicide itself, especially so in poet Hart Crane’s case, by the very act of memorializing it in writing and twice-fold in the reading of it out loud at a service. The point of self-murder is too leave everyone and thing behind, not be followed after with airy prayers and ornate praise.
The author mentioned above is mere an example of self-inflicted mayhem perpetrated by poets over the years. Suicide manifests itself through a natural extension of self and there really is no mystery, no self-recriminations. A life lived is light too in contrast to the epochal march. What came before, the now and what is future days converge to present the opportunity for self-murder. It is only a question of method, not if, and the suicide’s fatalistic joining with absolutism. Death, a singular death, is a trifle. Suicide as method is inconsequential in its repetitiveness and endlessly leads to the next man waiting in self-murderous solitude. And yes, living poetry will more than likely drive one to thoughts of self-annihilation.
Chris Roberts
- Chris Roberts, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 27/12/2011 20:40
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Call this the best or the worst part of the South African Global Warming Agenda. India, China and Russia may be, are for our sake, the polluters, they say USA is the huge polluter, at that time Canada withdraws from the Kyoto Protocol.India is purely agriculture land and not bursting in IT. The Hotmail came from India, now she is polluter. Say the Global Warming and the politicians with UN, SEC, IMF, CIA, FBA, Scotland Yard seems to be working on one number. Crime. If this is not crime, I have no idea what is crime. This warming will make poor, poorer and rich, richer. TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
COMMUNISM
You have two cows. The state takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM
You have two cows. The state takes both and sells you some milk.
BUREAUCRATISM You have two cows. The state takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk away.
AMERICAN VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four c
- Firozali A.mulla DBA, Dar-Es-Salaam, 13/12/2011 04:31
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Both Vendler's review and Dove's response are readily available on the Web, so everyone interested in this issue can read (and judge) for him- or herself -- and will see, for example, that Mr. Foy's assertion that Rita Dove defends her "selections based on how many PRIZES certain poets won" is not based on fact but prejudiced (embittered?) misreading. It might also be a good idea to take a close look at the anthology itself, all 650 pages of it, before rushing to conclusions -- something that James Fenton, in his journalistic dash to deliver his column on deadline, obviously also didn't do.
- Fred Viebahn, Charlottesville, VA, USA, 12/12/2011 12:20
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This is the first intelligent word I've read about this dust-up. Nobody in the states seems able to perceive how obviously disturbing Dove's response was, or at least nobody is expressing as much. It is ludicrous to assume that as an anthologist one might be able to jettison all personal bias and exercise no principle of selection; yet when Vendler takes Dove to task for this, Dove's rejoinder is nothing more than a dodge in its assumption of objectivity and its claim that Vendler is an elitist for questioning the absence of rigor back of such assumptions. One additional facet of Dove's response that ought to be getting more attention is her defense of selections based on how many PRIZES certain poets won. If we needed purer proof of how coopted by the creative-writing industry poetic discourse and aesthetic judgment have become, look no further than Dove's reponse and those in the blogosphere coming to her defense. At the end of the day, perhaps, the debate means little: for history will show us that Vendler's body of criticism will outlive both Dove's own poetry and the cultural values that condone her shoddy work as an anthologist.
- johnny foy, palo alto, CA, USA, 12/12/2011 02:03
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Nice try. Dove's point was that she wasnt putting Baraka on a level with Auden but, in her words "give space to poets as different from my own “style” (whatever that is; hopefully, I’m still evolving) as Ashbery, Koch, Silliman, Mackey, Hijinian, and, yes, Baraka—the list goes on—stands as testimony to my endeavor to be honest to the many facets of poetic expression, whether I “approve” of them or not? " In other words, do the job of an anthologist. What you, Vendler and all people who have resorted to race base critiques of her anthology aren't doing is the job of the ethical critic.
- Robert Lashley, Bellingham, WA, USA, 10/12/2011 08:16
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As to the omission of Sylvia Plath and the permissions fee problems, Rita Dove has this to say in an interview in the Dec. 2011 edition of "The Writer's Chronicle", an American magazine for professional writers and creative writing programs: "... the worst offender by far [demanding outrageous fees] was the publisher of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, whose 'couldn’t care less' attitude resulted in none of this house's authors being included ... Negotiations dragged on literally until the day when the anthology went into production; seeking common ground, I offered several solutions, including reducing the overall number of poems ... while meeting their exorbitant line fees ...The answer was nothing less than shocking: All or nothing. In other words, if I didn't pay the same high line fees for all their poets as well as, unbelievably, take all the poems I had initially inquired about, I couldn’t have Ginsberg nor Plath ... Pleas from upper Penguin management and even from one of the affected poets, who declared his willingness to forgo royalties, fell on deaf ears; the day before the anthology went into production, [the publisher of Plath and Ginsberg] withdrew all pending contracts and declared the negotiations closed." Dove also explains that even if the budget had allowed paying more to this publisher's poets, it would have violated agreements with other publishers that did not permit to "be robbing Peter to pay Paul".
- Fred Viebahn, Charlottesville, VA, USA, 10/12/2011 00:17
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