Thomas Bottle was thinking of all the things he hated: hair down his back when he got a haircut; his Aunt Fern’s kitty litter; ringworm; the loud women in baseball caps who came every summer to paint the ocean below his house; and Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to sell him Awake! and The Watchtower. Thomas Bottle felt he could take care of himself, in his own clean way, without someone muscling in to tell him how. There were a number of other things he hated, but before he could list them there was a knock on the door. A pair of gleaming Orientals in muskrat stoles stepped in and invited him to follow them. He parried their invitation by asking what they did in their spare time. One bowed and said, “I am a third degree black belt.” The other just smiled, showing two enormous gold teeth. Thomas Bottle was suddenly frightened, and ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. After about fifteen minutes he came back down. The black belt had disappeared. The other one—who continued to smile those gold teeth—was sitting at the dining room table, polishing the wax fruit with a filthy handkerchief. Thomas tried to be calm. He said, “At the risk of sounding rude, I must ask you to go. I admire your resolve, but I have problems of my own.” The Oriental continued to polish the fruit. “I don’t think you understand my position,” Thomas said. “Moreover, I pay taxes.” The Oriental only smiled, holding a pear up to the light. Then the black belt reappeared, followed by a striking blonde who had to be six feet tall. “I suppose she’s going to take off all her clothes now,” Thomas told them. “I suppose that’s what you’ve got up your sleeves.” He was getting angry. “But it won’t work! I say it won’t work, damn you! I keep my hedges trimmed! what do you want, blood from a stone!” But Thomas Bottle’s protests were in vain. The blonde slipped off her jogging togs and stood before the bowl of wax fruit, holding her palms up; she was flanked on either side by the Orientals, and all three were grinning profusely.
Suggested Reading
Making of a Poem: Maureen N. McLane on “Haptographic Interface”
By Maureen N. McLane“The speaker is a kind of Keats-bot, perhaps.”
The Daily
On Poetry
The Art of Criticism No. 3
By Helen Vendler
Helen Hennessy Vendler was born in Boston in 1933. She studied chemistry at Emmanuel College, a Roman Catholic school for women in Boston, and went to the University of Louvain after graduation on a Fulbright fellowship. She took her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1960 with a dissertation on Yeats, and the following year began teaching at Cornell. She later held regular appointments at Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University, as well as a Fulbright professorship at the University of Bordeaux. In 1981 she joined the faculty of Harvard. In 1990 she was given the title of Porter University Professor.
Vendler’s academic successes have been complemented by numerous appointments in non-university settings. She has been consultant poetry editor to The New York Times, president of the Modern Language Association, and since 1978, poetry critic for The New Yorker.
Vendler’s books include Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (1963), On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’s Longer Poems, which was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize in 1969, The Poetry of George Herbert (1975), The Odes of John Keats (1983), Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984), The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995), The Given and the Made (1995), The Breaking of Style (1995) and Poems, Poets, Poetry(1995). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1981 for Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. She has edited two books: the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry in 1985 and Voices and Visions: The Poet in America in 1987.
The following interview with Helen Vendler took place in the second-floor living room of her townhouse in Cambridge, a few blocks away from the Harvard English department. Mrs. Vendler wore a loose maroon sweater and black slacks. Around us were the mementos of a life devoted to poets and poetry. “Everything in this room was given to me,” she admitted. As we began our interview, Mrs. Vendler looked weary, but seemed to get a second wind as we continued. She’d awoken early that morning, worried about a meeting with her tax accountant. It was one of many appointments necessary before leaving for England, where she would be in residence at Magdalene College in Cambridge for the spring. After the interview we lingered on her stairwell, where many framed holographs and broadsides of poems—from A. R. Ammons, Frank Bidart, Seamus Heaney, Howard Nemerov, and Stephen Spender—were hung. There was also an occasional poem, a quatrain accompanying a stamped print of a peacock, received from James Merrill. And there was a poem, sent along with a dollsized gavel, from Elizabeth Bishop, when Mrs. Vendler was elected the second vice president of the Modern Language Association. An expression of anxiousness came over Mrs. Vendler’s face as we looked over this large wall of mementos, until she asked, like a concerned parent, if she had forgotten to mention anyone in her interview.
INTERVIEWER
Under the burden of manuscripts to read, letters of recommendation and endorsements of tenure to write, and student papers to grade, when do you find time to write?
HELEN VENDLER
I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you’re doing many other things. Your unconscious mind is turning this over and over underneath, and then one morning you wake up with a whole lot of things formulated that you haven’t been consciously working on. At that point you can sit down and write. So, it’s not that it takes very long when I actually do it, but it takes quite a long time to work up to it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that your teaching has helped your criticism?
VENDLER
Oh, it would have to, if only because you learn more poems by heart every year from teaching them. They work on you then in a different way from the way they work on you when you’re reading them off the page. They live in you in different rhythms and come to mean more when you know them by heart.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write for a particular audience?
VENDLER
No, I write to explain things to myself.
INTERVIEWER
So your audience is yourself.
VENDLER
Well, I think of my audience in part as being the poet. What I would hope would be that if Keats read what I had written about the ode “To Autumn,” he would say, Yes, that is the way I wanted it to be thought of. And, Yes, you have unfolded what I had implied, or something like that. It would not strike the poet, I hope, that there was a discrepancy between my description of the work and the poet’s own conception of the work. I wouldn’t be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.
INTERVIEWER
No poet has ever done that?
VENDLER
No, not yet. I should add that they may have been too polite to say that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your criticism is hard to read?
VENDLER
I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you’re not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I’m using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience. People who write about science for the general public also have to think a little about making certain concepts clear that would be second nature to anyone in their labs.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as the heir to a particular critic? You worked on your Ph.D. with I. A. Richards, didn’t you?
VENDLER
No, I audited two classes of his when I was in graduate school at Harvard. The chairman would not permit me to take Richards’s class because Richards was based in the School of Education, not in the Department of English (Richards came to Harvard on a Carnegie Grant developing Basic English). His course was scratched off my program card by the chairman, and Chaucer was sternly substituted for it. Nothing daunted, I simply audited a course and a seminar from Richards. He certainly was the most important influence on me, except for John Kelleher. They were the two most indelible teachers that I had at Harvard—I. A. Richards because he gave full weight to every word in a poem and might track the history of a word back to Plato, taking it back through various philosophical and literary associations until the whole historical and cultural richness of the word was exposed. And John Kelleher, because he saw the human situation from which a given poem would arise; since he was an historian, he noted the political situation, or the social situation. In each case, in his class in Irish poetry, the poem was seen to spring out of the trial, struggle, relation of events in the history of Ireland. So in those two ways—both contextualizing ways, historically contextualizing in the case of Kelleher, and philosophically and literarily contextualizing in the case of Richards—they influenced me. They were both magnificent readers of poetry aloud.
From the Archive, Issue 141
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
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