Helen Vendler died this spring at the age of 90.
Vendler was a celebrated poetry critic and teacher. She was the first woman to be given the designation of “university professor” by Harvard (the highest honor the university bestows). Her criticism appeared in The New Republic, The London Review of Books among others.
Twenty years ago she was invited to give the Farnum Lectures at Princeton:
Helen Vendler will argue that lyric has recently been undervalued because it does not, for the most part, offer concrete data about social practice and social groups; but lyric—even though it is spoken in privacy with no other living person present—does, in its exemplification of intimacy, offer models of what the ideal relation between speaker and listener might be.
Vendler’s students have written movingly of studying with her. “If you offered something about a poem she had never thought of before, she would say so—and make you feel how much it meant to her, that you’d given something new,” writes
.Nathan Heller says Vendler “relish[ed] taking people as they came” and notes, as Turner does, her penchant for handwritten feedback on student papers. Her long-running undergraduate course at Harvard was titled “Poets, Poems, Poetry.”
The Farnum Lectures became the basis for her 2005 book Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery.
All three poets address absent, impossible listeners. Vendler argues that through the lyric form, these three poets redefine what is possible between two people—“intimate a Utopia”— in the now.
George Herbert addresses God (usual enough). But rather than writing to him as a supplicant, Herbert imagines him as an equal, a friend. Walt Whitman addresses a future cohort of lovers/comrades “ who look back on me because I look’d forward to them.”
When considering Ashbery, Vendler takes up his famous “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” named for the painting by Francesco Parmigianino. Ashbery, Vendler writes, “sends out a ray of social imagination to Parmigianino’s era, and a further ray to the terminology of art criticism from Parmigianino’s time to our own.”
To read Vendler is to slow down. To time travel back to a language of the academic that most of us left in high school or college. It was for me (for most of us, I’d guess) a time where this type of close academic consideration was work.
To revisit poetry with Vendler’s eye during summer is a vacation. To borrow from Vendler, “One is freer than on a literal plane, freer to imagine, to experiment and to speculate.”
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Ann Rower has also been listening to Taylor Swift.
“I used to call it a 'cock' but lately I seem to like calling it a 'dick.' Like I used to call it a 'cunt,' but now I prefer 'pussy," I answered. I'm intrigued by the way the language changes with the times and cultural shifts. Even in novels and especially song lyrics, for more than a decade I've noticed everyone, especially girls, singing about fucking again, or even just using "fuck" for emphasis, like Taylor Swift's "Snow on the Beach"-weird, but fucking beautiful.
Ann Rower is an NYC writer whose short story collection If You’re A Girl was the first publication from Chris Kraus’ Native Agents imprint in 1991.
An expanded edition was released in April by Semiotext(e) with an introduction by Sheila Heti. This new version contains pieces of the original, along with new stories composed in 2020s, and excerpts from other works by Rower.
Semiotext(e) has gone this route before. Their expanded edition of Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black shares its name with a collection Mueller originally published in 1990.1
I am guessing the choice to give expanded editions the same title allows them to harness interest, but has the unintended effect of collapsing time. The book exists both as the object you’re holding, and as a character within Rower’s contemporary writing.
In “The Crush,” Rower recounts reading to a new lover from a work published 20 years prior. We’ve just encountered it 60 pages before:
My only mistake, the only line I crossed, was to read her the sex scene in ‘Baby,’2 which I thought might turn her on. But after I finished reading all she said was ‘That made me very uncomfortable,’ which made me so uncomfortable I shut down too much to ask why.
Rower plows right into every subject. Her marriages to men. Her late-in-life embrace of her lesbianism. Her crushes on Eileen Myles (relatable). The suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis. (Halfway through reading Rower I spent far too much money on a copy of Lewis’ out-of-print House Rules which is a deliciously difficult read.)
If You’re A Girl is the 300-page version of the voice memo you receive before your eyes can focus that has you laughing manically while walking the dog in your pajamas.
“Her habit of writing loosely, organically, one thought leading to another, an act of free association,” says
. “The tone is loose, casual, first person, confessional, a diary.”The longer I read, the more I liked that I got to hear Rower calling me from across the decades. Her first kiss with Lewis under a pink sodium street lamp. The blackouts she experienced in her first marriage: “There’s this ‘my’ shit again. My wife! My husband! My attacks!”
Rower is always on to the next story, the next joke. And yet she is still surprising herself with lust and desire:
But they will, if they're lucky as me, one day be old and still have ample amounts of lust and desire and plenty of blue talk, as they used to say, on the tip of their tongues in their otherwise scarily deteriorating old bodies.
Vendler dedicated Invisible Listeners to her grandchildren, who she wrote, “will I hope find my voice in it when they grow up.”
Part of what pushed Rower to start writing again was finding her own younger voice—the girlfriend of a girlfriend found her original draft of If You’re A Girl on a bookshelf and reunited it with its author.
Perhaps in this new edition, Rower has pulled off an impossible, utopic conversation with herself. She has certainly given us a lyric of unmatched energy.
Cookie Mueller was the subject of a summer ‘23 Diptych.
Thank you to Anne-christine D’Adesky, who enlightened me that this story first appeared in Lee and Elaine, “a fantasy story in which she reimagined the famous Abstract Expressionist writers Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning hooking up for a lesbian romance, grooving on each other more their more famous male lovers, the 50s hot art bad boys Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.” !!!