The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler were both on my Christmas list this year. Dove’s long-awaited anthology is a book to be savored. Not only is its design handsome, making the book a pleasure to hold, but its contents are immensely satisfying. Dove presents us with American poems she sees as, “emblazoned on pennants along the road we have just traversed.” Dove explains that these are poems “interpolated with the times in which they were forged and upon which they exerted their spirit.” The anthology includes poets who have been canonized and whose work has been taught throughout the century. It also presents us with accomplished and significant poets who might have been overlooked twenty years ago by a literary establishment bent on maintaining a stranglehold on the canon of contemporary American poetry.

            Helen Vendler’s 2010 book on Dickinson is one that I have been waiting to own as well.  Many of us now working in academia, as well as students and lovers of poetry, cut our teeth on Vendler’s literary criticism. We admired it for its finely-wrought prose and insightful analysis. Vendler’s careful work illuminated important texts (like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Wallace Stevens poetry), thus instilling in many of us a life-long love both of poetry and literary criticism. It was, therefore, with anticipation that I approached Helen Vendler’s review in The New York Review of Books of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

            I looked forward to Vendler’s intelligent commentary, adroit comments, and keen observations. Stunned, deeply disappointed, and almost embarrassed for Vendler were my emotional reactions to reading just the first two paragraphs of the review. Vendler’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?” disappoints and fails as legitimate critique. It is more diatribe than review, riddled with thinly veiled ad-hominem attacks and elitist meanderings of the most repugnant sort. Vendler’s piece does not even give the reader a sense of the anthology, for it is difficult to discern any reasoned analysis beneath the vitriol. “Out of touch,” “inaccurate” and “racist” were my initial thoughts. This was not the Helen Vendler I was expecting; this was not the review worthy of her vast talent. It was nothing short of astonishing to read Vendler’s caustic spew and relentless excoriation of Dove’s anthologizing and essay writing.

             How is this review to be taken seriously? How could Vendler get it so wrong and be so out of touch with the ethos of contemporary American poetry?  Vendler asserts that no century is capable of producing 175 poets (the number of poets in the anthology) “worth reading.” This is the jumping-off point for Vendler’s rant, prefaced by her whiny observation that Dove’s anthologizing “shift[s] the balance” by “introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors.” At no time does Vendler consider that institutionalized racism is to blame for these poets having been excluded from the canon in the first place. At this point in our nation’s history, it is astounding that there are people left in academia still having this conversation.

            Vendler queries, “Why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?” Vendler’s surly question reveals the mindset of one so entrenched in an elitist literary establishment, so imbued with prejudice (in every sense of the word), that she is unqualified to assess an anthology such as Dove’s.  Vendler is so enraged by Dove’s inclusion of those who have been, or would have been, dismissed out-of-hand because of race or gender that she renders herself impotent.  Does she become blinded because she sees herself losing her tight-fisted grasp on American poetry?

            That any reviewer in the twenty-first century would count the number of authors from “minority communities” in a book she is reviewing is as telling as it is provoking. Is this the Helen Vendler to remember? There are so many things right about Dove’s anthology and so many things wrong about Vendler’s piece that it is hard to know where to start, to decide which of Vendler’s criticisms or invectives to answer.  I think it best to watch Rita Dove do so herself in, “Defending the Anthology,” her response to Vendler’s review:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/defending-anthology/

For Helen Vendler’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?” click here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/are-these-poems-remember/?pagination=false

Marguerite María Rivas

NYC  10 December 2011

Marguerite María Rivas teaches English at The City University of New York.  She holds a doctorate from Drew University and a master’s degree from CUNY, both in literature. Her work has been published in The Americas Review, Earth’s Daughters, Multicultural Review, Acentos Review, Changing English, and The Más Tequila Review, among other publications. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Marg Chandler Memorial Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation and was cited by the New York State Assembly for her contribution to the literary arts. Her book of poems, Tell No One: Poems of Witness is forthcoming from Chimbarazu Press in 2012.