The only thing worse than a long manifesto is a loud sigh.
Helen Vendler's review in this month's NYRB has me pissed off. She's entitled, of course, to a modicum of critical self-confidence, but it sounds here as if the insouciance of his tone has started her tumbling down the hill to smugness and vapidity:
"I was once (not recognizing an allusion to the Finnish epic the Kalevala) dead wrong in these pages myself, in thinking that an Ashberry poem was about awaiting Death. Ashberry told me, with bemused sympathy for my misapprehension, that it was really about awaiting love. I suppose one could still say it was about awaiting, and that that was what mattered."
I have no doubt that Vendler knows whether waiting for love in Ashberry is like waiting for death. (It is, perhaps, in Eliot and ain't in Herbert or Ginsberg.) But the absence of analysis here--and as it continues throughout the piece--wears on me like a sandy swimsuit. Many of her close-readings end where I'd like them to start, or start where I'd like them to end. She mentions, for instance, Wordsworth's "I see by glimpses now...", only to adapt the word "glimpse" to refer to the brief moments of imagistic narrative in Ashberry, by mentioning that Ashberry's "glimpses" are coarse presentations of age. Very well. Glimpses of corporeality tinged with meditations on the incorporeal are occur periodically in contemporary poetry, and Vendler certainly knows one when she sees one. But, well, so do I.
Likewise, when she says that in reading the book she wrote down the names of "Stevens, Baudelaire, Emerson, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, Pater, Williams, Bishop, Shakespeare, Southey, Byron, Verlaine, Trollope, Dickinson, Lowell, Whitman, and Milton" and adds that she "may have missed many more," I learn very little about Ashberry (He is an American and writes poems) and more about Vendler (She writes "Shakespeare" in her books!). The question of how he relates to these poets, beyond his surface allusiveness, is never quite taken up.
I would be more sympathetic to Vendler's attempts to describe Ashberry's tone and gloss his themes if she didn't periodically gesture at larger questions that seem to me more basic. She notes, for instance, that "Ashberry has staked his poetic wager on our recognition of his lexical and tonal hospitality, and what it enables him to say about the circumstances--mechanical, physical, and emotional--of modern living". But rather than elaborating on what he is enabled to say, or how our recognition of "hospitality" in his verse is in someway primary, she retreats to his clear contributions to the tone of the modern lyric. In this, she may be influenced by Stevens, who remarked in one of his letters that the philosophical positions he stakes out in his verse are just "tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry," and to be more fair, she does treat his meditations on style with insight and perspective, but I can't shake the idea that she's talking around the poems itself, rather than fighting with them.
Early in the review, she announces that "Like all lyric poets, Ashberry is convinced that his musical invention can rescue, from the tinny clang of contemporary noise, those universally felt surges of emotion and flexings of language in which readers can recognize themselves." If this is true, should not any aesthetic criticism of poetry examine this space between the "flexings" and the "surge"--that is, the fine-grained ways a series of words can amount to, acknowledge, or create emotional recognition or response?
Then again, would I argue that political criticism of poetry should likewise lie between the "invention" and the "rescue"?
