R. Paul provided a link to an interview with Helen Hennessy Vendler. In
what follws I will elaborate on some of her conversational implicatures!
Q: When do you find time to write?
HELEN HENNESSY VENDLER: I always write after I think for quite a long
time, so the actual writing time is rather short.
(Implicature: "Writing" or "Speaking" and "Thinking" perhaps belong to
what Ryle calls different 'categories'. Cfr. the oddity: "I've been spending
the whole Saturday believing that God did not exist.").
Q: Do you think that your teaching has helped your criticism?
HELEN HENNESSY VENDLER: Oh, it would have to.
(Implicature: it HAS.).
Q: Do you write for a particular audience?
HENNESSY VENDLER: No, I write to explain things to myself.
Implicature: I'm a Griceian at heart -- vide "Grice without an audience".
Q: So your audience is yourself.
HENNESSY VENDLER: Well, I think of my audience in part as being the poet.
"Yes, you have unfolded what I had implied."
Implicature: there is DIACHRONY and we can speak to Shakespeare, if
figuratively. By "you have unfolded what I have implied" Hennessy Vendler
seems
to mean "what I have IMPLICATED".
Q: No poet has ever [disagreed with your explicating his implicature]?
HENNESSY VENDLER: No, not yet. I should add that they may have been too
polite to say that.
Implicature: Grice allows for 'be polite' to be a 'maxim' operative in
conversation. Robin Tolmach Lakoff was so in love with this that she turned it
into an overarching maxim. Yet for Grice, 'be polite' does not generate
"CONVERSATIONAL" implicatures, as such.
Q: Do you think your criticism is hard to read?
HENNESSY VENDLER: It may.
Q: 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?
HENNESSY VENDLER: No, but he certainly was the most important influence on
me, except for John Kelleher. [I loved Richards's] philosophically and
literarily contextualizing [a piece of poetry].
Q: How would you describe the hybridization of those two influences in
yourself?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Oh, I’m far closer to Richards, though I am much less
philosophical than he was.
Implicature: Let us recall that the early Richards (who co-wrote with
Ogden "The meaning of meaning" was a philosopher -- a recent edition of
Richards's complete works makes a passing reference to his resemblance to
Grice,
as discussed in R. Dale's essay on "The Theory of Meaning".
Q: As you age do you find yourself valuing different kinds of poems or
different traits of poems?
HENNESSY VENDLER: The only time in my life that I remember looking for
poetry, because I didn’t already have some in my head, was when I became a
mother and I was looking around for poems about motherhood. I looked, but I
didn’t find any except Sylvia Plath’s.
Implicature: On the other hand, Wordsworth has poems about fatherhood
("father to the Man").
Q: Do you feel confined in any way as a critic?
HENNESSY VENDLER: One once said to me, You’re so narrow. And I said, What
do you mean? What the person meant at the time was that I wasn’t doing
THEORY.
Q: Do you feel confined as a female critic in any way?
HENNESSY VENDLER: No, I don’t think the mind is gendered.
Implicature: the body is -- if you are a dualist.
Q: Is there anything you fear as a critic?
HENNESSY VENDLER: I fear giving short shrift to something that is really
very good. Myself with Pound whom I think of as a minor poet.
Implicature: But then even Pound said his cantos did not cohere.
Q: What about as a woman, is there something you fear?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Given my upbringing and the expectations of my society,
my behavior was NOT conventional. And I felt isolated and alienated.
Implicature: By 'conventional', Hennessy Vendler may mean something
different from what Lewis meant in his book: "Conventions" -- a conceptual
analysis.
Q: Do you think the content of your reviews ever grows as a result of your
own language instead of a poet’s?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Oh, no. My language is so much the inferior of the poets’
.
Q: Do you think you have ever damned something?
HENNESSY VENDLER: No, but some have thought that I overpraised Stevens’s
long poems, since they are seen by some as humourless and elephantine.
Q: But none that you have changed your mind about.
HENNESSY VENDLER: No.
Q: Can you give an example of an "uneven" poet?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Ginsberg.
Q: When you read a poem, do you see meaning or hear language first?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Language. Take Jorie Graham. I was reading some of her
poems in The American Poetry Review and hearing a new rhythm. I am convinced
her rhythms come from Italian. It’s some foreign rhythm that she has
brought into English.
Implicature: There's an Italian rhythm, and there's English prosody. But
the good thing is you can mix them into a powerful cocktail.
Q: Does a poet come to mind whose theme first riveted you?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Adrienne Rich: it was just astonishing (as I wrote
later) that she was writing down my life.
Implicature: Figuratively.
Q: Yet, I’ve read that you think of yourself as among what Roland Barthes
calls “explorers of the bliss of writing,” as opposed to those who look
for meaning, import, philosophy, social truth. Is this true?
HENNESSY VENDLER: On a spectrum of a to z, yes.
Implicature: Yet I realise meaning was important to Grice.
Q: What about irony? Is it something you prize in a poet?
HENNESSY VENDLER: There’s always a spectatorial irony in a poet of any
developed self-consciousness.
Implicature: This is a different view from Rogers Albritton's views on
irony.
Q: Do you have a low tolerance for humour?
HENNESSY VENDLER: I love humorous poems.
Q: Who are the other poetry critics that you admire?
HENNESSY VENDLER: I think highly of the prose about poetry that Auden
wrote.
Q: INTERVIEWER: Is there an *American* poet whose criticism you admire?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Sometimes I like what Mary Kinzie writes. She’s more
moral than I like.
Q: What about Rich’s prose?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: That has been mostly political rather than critical.
Q: The critic Bonnie Costello was a student of yours, wasn’t she?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: No, she was never my student; she was my *colleague* at
Boston. Someone like Bonnie has a more philosophical and analytic mind than
I do.
Q: What were your parents like? Did they read poetry?
HENNESSY-VENDLER:
My mother was a schoolteacher who taught the first grade for fourteen years
before she married in 1930.
Since in those Depression years married women were not allowed to teach
because it would take the money from a breadwinner, my mother lost her job and
never had a job again, which was, I think, a great loss to her.
She was a great reader of poetry from Shakespeare to Tennyson, and always
had very many books of poetry around the house.
She quoted poems naturally in conversation.
She took us to mass every morning; I was introduced early to liturgy,
hymns, Gregorian chant.
The schools that my parents sent me to from the sixth grade onward were
Catholic schools where we sang the liturgy in Latin, and that was extremely
interesting to me.
I began to learn Latin by myself in the seventh and eighth grades and then
studied it in high school.
My father, HENNESSY, was a teacher of "Romance" languages who was
bilingual in Spanish and English.
My mother was a graduate of Boston Normal School, as it was then called,
which was to become Boston State Teacher’s College.
My father, Hennessy, had graduated from Boston in 1915, and then had taken
a master’s degree in education at the Boston Normal School in 1916, where
he met my mother and proposed to her.
She didn’t marry him until 1930.
Meanwhile, he went off to Puerto Rico and Cuba and worked and taught
English there.
IMPLICATURE: She wouldn't teach'em Spanish, would he?!
HENNESSY-VENDLER:
He first worked for the United Fruit Company, but then became a teacher of
English in Luquillo, Puerto Rico.
He had kept up with my mother during those thirteen years.
Eventually he returned when she agreed to marry him.
He got a job in the Boston school system and taught Spanish, French and
Italian.
IMPLICATURE: In that order.
He also taught these languages to my sister and me.
He began a Ph.D. at Boston University but dropped out after having passed
his orals; by that time he had three children.
Later, he became Chair of the Romance languages department at Boston.
He took early retirement but he was unhappy not working, and so became a
messenger for a law firm for the last fifteen years of his life, and enjoyed
that very much.
Q: Did you write poetry as a schoolgirl?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, I wrote my first poem when I was six, and I went on
writing until I was twenty-six, and then I stopped.
Q: Is it true there was no gift-giving in the house?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: We got gifts for Christmas, but they were books,
especially books in foreign languages.
Q: Was there a TV in the house?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: No, we never had a TV.
Q: You were a chemistry major in college. Do you think your scientific
training shaped your voice as a critic, or shaped the manner in which you read
poems? I’ve heard you say that you’re quite literal-minded; is that
because of the scientist in you?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: No, I think that’s what made me able to enjoy science,
because it is so grounded in material reality. What science did for me was
to train me to look for EVIDENCE. You have to write up evidence for your
hypothesis in a very clear way; your equations have to come out even; the left
side has to be balanced by the right side. One thing has to lead to the
next, things have to add up to a total picture. I think that’s a natural thing
to do with literature too. I feel very strongly that anything you say
should be backed by EVIDENCE FROM THE TEXT so that you follow a constant loop
between generalizations and evidence. I don’t like criticism that is simply
rhetorically assertive at a very high level without much reference to
evidence in the text.
Implicature: OTOH, Griceian intentions are hard to grasp!
QDo you consider yourself a feminist?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: In action, yes.
Q: You mean in a legal sense?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, I believe women should have equal rights.
Q: But in the case of Adrienne Rich, it would appear that you no longer
feel that she is “writing your life,” as you once did.
VENDLER: Oh, she is in some ways.
Q: You have written in an essay on Rita Dove that “no black has blackness
as sole identity.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I think in America today, every single aspect of your
life, if you’re black, is affected by that identity-marker.
Q: In the introduction to your latest collection of reviews you speak of
the soul and the self in the lyric as different from one another. Could you
say a little bit about that?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, with the rise of identity defined almost solely
through race, ethnicity, or gender, I think we’ve forgotten the identity that
speaks when one is speaking to oneself.
Q: Do you think there are any huge movements in American poetry today?
VENDLER: I think of the poetry after World War II as suffused by Freud.
Some people call it confessional poetry, but it seems to me to be Freudian
poetry.
Q: Didn’t you once say that you felt there was a trend to go back to some
preliterate aspect of life?
HENNESSY-VENDLER I think I said to the perceptual: the source of the
vocabulary is not what you want to get said in a philosophical sense or
propositional way, but rather what the world is feeling like at this moment.
Q: Is there a place in poems for issues, real-life opinions, and political
platforms?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: There is a place in poetry for everything.
Q: Are you interested in politics? Do you read the newspaper?
HENNESSY-VENDLER I read the newspaper every day. Massachusetts had a
machine-politics for a long time, dominated, first, by the white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, next by the Irish.
Q: Do you have an agenda for American poetry?
VENDLER I don’t think of myself as being in American poetry. I mean, I’m
concerned with poetry. I am devoted to English because it’s my mother
tongue. I’ll never feel that way about any other language except Spanish,
which
I have also known since birth. Both of them have resonances of the mother
tongue for me, and both of them are immensely moving to me. But I don’t feel
a particular nationalistic attachment to American poetry over or against
any other poetry written in the world.
Q: Do you see yourself as anachronistic in the manner you write about
poetry as a close reader?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, I’ve never liked the term “close reading.” I’d
like to know who thought it up.
Q: What do you call it?
VENDLER Reading from the point of view of a writer.
Q: Recently in The New York Times you said, “the canon is not made by
anyone except other poets. HENNESSY-VENDLER: I think of the reviews I’ve
written
as a continuing self-seminar in contemporary poetry.
Q: What is your perception of your own power?
VENDLER I can see that it seems a great deal of power to a young writer to
be reviewed or not reviewed
Q: INTERVIEWER: I wondered how you felt being depicted in The New York
Times recently by a caricaturist as a head on a tank.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I thought it was very funny.
Q: Do you think people are afraid of you?
HENNESY-VENDLER
“I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” said
Pope, satirizing the opposition.
Q: What is your response to the criticism that you reject the romantic
tradition and all those American poets that are its literary descendants>
HENNESSY-VENDLER: The poets that I like are unsentimental; the poets that I
don’t like are sentimental, very frequently.
Q: What about the criticism that you favou a poetry of the terribly
well-educated?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: All good poets are terribly well-educated, otherwise
they wouldn’t be good poets.
Q: How do poems enter into your life on a daily basis?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: They help me to know what I’m feeling.
Q: I noticed you used the word body to describe the style of a poem in your
new book, The Breaking of Style. Why is that?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, there has been so much emphasis on the body lately
in critical language. I was trying to think of the way the physical body
manifests itself to me—other than in ordinary daily-life ways—I mean, how
it manifests itself to me in my consciousness.
Q: Then you believe that all poems, in a sense, have bodies and souls?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, the body is the sinew of the language.
Q: INTERVIEWER Does criticism have a body? Do you feel that your body is
represented in your criticism?
VENDLER I don’t think it’s a direct representation of the person’s body.
Q: In The Breaking of Style, you write, “The forgettable writers of verse
do not experiment with style in any coherent or strenuous way. They adopt
the generic style of their era and repeat themselves in it.” Yet aren’t
there extraordinary examples of poets, like George Herbert, as you point out,
who do not break their styles, or change their bodies, to borrow your trope,
as in the case of Emily Dickinson?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, each case is special.
Q: INTERVIEWER: How did you first meet Robert Lowell?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I think I had met him on a few occasions, but I really
talked to him for the first time after a reading of James Merrill’s.
Q: Cambridge can seem like a very little village sometimes. Do you ever
grow weary of the poetry scene here?
HENNESSY-VENDLER I’m not in “the poetry scene” here. That is to say, I’m
a native Bostonian, I’ve lived in this area since I was born, my parents
and my grandparents both lived here, and my sister and brother, cousins,
aunts and uncles, and friends live here. I never felt that the scene that I
was in was either necessarily the intellectual scene or the poetry scene. I’m
very happy that I will die where I was born; it is a great gift to have
continuity in your life. I was out of Cambridge for many years teaching at
Cornell and Swarthmore and Haverford and Smith and so on. But I’m glad to be
back. I go to some poetry readings, it’s true, but I also go to family
weddings and funerals and I also see old friends from Boston University and
Smith.
Q: Is there no poet for whom you would like to write a biography?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Oh, no.
Q: Do you have a favorite among your own books?
VENDLER: My favorite is my Keats book.
Q: Do you cook or sew?
VENDLER: I used to sew
Q: Do you collect anything?
VENDLER: Broadsides.
Q: Do you like to sing, or do you like opera?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I love vocal music of all kinds. I didn’t have records
when I was young, but I used to take opera scores out of the library to
transcribe. I didn’t know you could buy paper with staves on it so I used to
draw my own staves. Then I’d borrow the score from the Boston Public Library
music room (a wonderful resource) and copy down the arias I wanted on my
homemade staves and write out the words underneath them. We did have a piano,
so I could pick out arias on the piano, and I learned a lot of operas that
way. Wagner's "Ring" does seem to me the best and the most comprehensive
operatic picture of the universe, yet I’m deeply attached to lieder as the
corresponding art form to lyric.
Q: Do you have a pet at home?
HENNESSY-VANDLER: I’ve always had cats.
Q: Do you have a motto?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: “God and the imagination are one,” from Wallace Stevens.
Q: Do you like to travel to certain places?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I like to have seen the world.
Q: You went to China because your daughter-in-law is Chinese?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: No. I took my son to China with me when he was a college
senior. He enjoyed it so much that he wanted to go back; so he went back
and taught English, and met his wife there.
Q: Is there a living person you most admire?
HENNESY-VENDLER: I still am feeling acutely the impact of having lost
Sylvia Plath. Or heroines.
Q: INTERVIEWER: You mean that are not poets.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, totally inconspicuous people who have led exemplary
lives.
Q: Friends of yours, or public figures?
HENNESSY-VENDLER Some of them are teachers, some relatives, some friends.
Q: Is it hard to be friends with poets whom you do not admire?
VENDLER I don’t think I’ve ever been friends, exactly, with somebody
whose work I don’t admire.
Q: Do you think that knowing a poet could interfere with your assessment of
him or her?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I don’t think so.
Q: INTERVIEWER: Have you ever had a confrontation with a poet you reviewed?
HENNESSY-VENDLER. Yes.
Q: Are there writers you’d like to have known?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Keats, of course. Shakespeare.
Q: What about recent writers?
HENNESSY: VENDLER: I wish I had set eyes on Stevens once.
Q: Why do you think it is that prosody, lineation and grammar are not much
talked about by critics?
HENNESSY: VENDLER: Well, we don’t have rhetorical training any longer in
the school.
Q: What about creative-writing workshops, do you have an opinion about
them?
HENNESSY: VENDLER I’ve only sat in on two single workshops in my life, so
I certainly couldn’t have an opinion.
Q: Do you think there’s a subject that is taboo in poetry?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Subjects are rarely taboo in poetry these days, but
certain forms of expression are denigrated. It was hard for someone like Amy
Clampitt to be accepted because she used very ornate vocabulary, and it was
considered elitist (by some commentators) to write in the way that Amy
Clampitt wrote. It was a diction perfectly natural to her since she was, among
other things, a reference librarian, a bird watcher, and a much-traveled
person.
Q: Yet her subjects were very contemporary.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes.
Q: Are you more interested in the lyric poem than in, say, narratives or
dramatic poetry?
HENNESSY VENDLER: Yes, because I think in good narrative poetry or good
dramatic poetry the poetry has to play a subordinate role to the principal
structure that animates that genre.
Q: What, in your view, is the function of the lyric? Can it be ideological
or philosophical?
HENNESSY-VENDLER Any statement not only can be, but probably must be,
ideological, that is to say coming from some viewpoint or other. And there’s a
long and noble history of philosophical poetry, from Lucretius on, that
finds itself at home in a discourse it shares with some forms of philosophy—
discourse about the soul or the self or about the realm of ideas.
Q: Do you think there’s much cross-fertilization between American poetry
and that of Ireland and Eastern Europe or South America?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes. This kind of cross-fertilization seems to me not
only very useful—think of the influence of Trakl or Neruda or Milosz on
contemporary poets—but indispensable to poetry.
Q: Is it fair to assume that poets who do not embody your feelings are
poets you cannot write about?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: There are certainly feelings that I may not have
experienced and can’t respond to well.
Q: What’s the first poem you remember reading?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I suppose they were hymns.
Q: In Soul Says you comment that “the poets about whom I have written in
the essays in this book are poets whom I admire.”
HENNESSY-VENDLER: What I endorse in anybody (if one can speak of such a
thing as endorsement) is a style that has become recognizable among the styles
of its century.
Q: What do you think James Merrill’s contribution was to the last
half-century of poetry?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Writing the best sonnets.
Q: I think I heard that was the first poem he wrote on the computer . . .
it might be that there was something about the machinery that permitted him
that freedom. And what about Amy Clampitt? I mention these two, of course,
because they are recently deceased.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I liked Amy Clampitt’s whole project.
Q: A handful of poets have chosen suicide. Do you have a view about
suicide?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, a handful of other people have chosen suicide too.
Q: I know you’re not a practicing Catholic; does that mean that you don’t
believe in an afterlife?
HENNESSY: VENDLER: I don’t believe in anything of that sort.
Q: Meaning you’re an atheist?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes.
Q: But don’t you believe in the existence of souls?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Only so long as they have bodies.
Q: Do you think that your soul is happy in your body?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, no.
Q: INTERVIEWER: I remember your once saying that you had an Irish peasant
body. Do you still feel that way?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, I do. I see it in myself and in my father, whose
body I’ve inherited: a stocky body with stamina and a certain peasant drive,
maybe.
Q: Have you ever not been able to write?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Yes, when I was ill.
Q: Do you work daily? What is your routine?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: No, I have no routine. I hate routines. I have no fixed
hours for sleeping, eating, waking, working.
Q: Do you write at a desk or in bed or on a sofa?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: I write in various places . . . sometimes on the sofa,
sometimes in bed, sometimes sitting at the computer. I hate routine more
than anything else.
Q: How did you begin to review for The New Yorker?
VENDLER: Well, I had done reviewing for The New York Times for some years,
then Shawn phoned me up and asked if I’d like to write about poetry for
The New Yorker, and I said yes.
Q: Had he read a particular piece?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: He didn’t say.
Q: Have you been happy with your vocation?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Well, since I can’t imagine any other.
Q: I understand you’re just completing a book about Shakespeare’s sonnets.
HENNESSY-VENDLER: Shakespeare has always been there.
Q: How is your study of the Shakespeare sonnets different from others?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: During the nineteenth century, the study of Shakespeare’s
sonnets was governed by a biographical agenda.
Q: How does American poetry look to you at the end of the twentieth
century? Are you hopeful for the next?
HENNESY-VENDLER: I don’t think poetry is killable.
Q: “Is criticism a true thing?” Keats asked. What would be your reply?
HENNESSY-VENDLER: It can never be true for the poet because what the poet
has said, he has already said, and therefore criticism seems either
deflective or odious.
Cheers,
Speranza
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