A furious row has broken out in the rarefied confines of American poetry circles after grande dame of poetry criticism Helen Vendler attacked former poet laureate Rita Dove’s anthology of 20th-century American poetry for its focus on “multicultural inclusiveness” rather than quality.
Dove’s collection, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, is the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and professor of English’s pick of the best US poetry of the last 100 years.
Vendler, a critic and Harvard professor, laid into the book in an excoriating write-up in the New York Review of Books, criticising Dove for deciding “to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors”.
Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Sterling Brown are left out of the anthology — although Dove explains in her introduction that this was down to a rights issue: Penguin’s budget was not enough to secure rights to include their poems in the book.
Vendler lambasts Dove for her inclusion of “some 175” poets and for her choice of poems: “mostly short” and “of rather restricted vocabulary”, she says.
‘Elitism’
“Multicultural inclusiveness prevails,” she writes. “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as ‘elitism’, and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom.”
Later, Vendler enumerates that “of the 20 poets born between 1954 and 1971 (closing the anthology), 15 are from minority communities (Hispanic, black, Native American, or Asian American) and five are white (two men, three women)”, saying that “Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic voiced in the introduction”.
And Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets she includes “with hyperbole”, says Vendler.
“It is legitimate to recognise the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks ‘confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race’?
As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest.”
‘Barely veiled racism’
Dove has now responded in kind, accusing Vendler of “barely veiled racism”, “condescension” and “lack of veracity” over her review’s depiction of the anthology as featuring “mostly short poems of rather restricted vocabulary”.
“I cannot let her get away with building her house of cards on falsehoods and innuendo,” writes Dove in a letter to the New York Review of Books.
“The amount of vitriol in Helen Vendler’s review betrays an agenda beyond aesthetics. As a result, she not only loses her grasp on the facts, but her language, admired in the past for its theoretical elegance, snarls and grouses, sidles and roars as it lurches from example to counterexample, misreading intent again and again. Whether propelled by academic outrage or the wild sorrow of someone who feels betrayed by the world she thought she knew – how sad to witness a formidable intelligence ravished in such a clumsy performance.”
In an interview with the Best American Poetry, Dove went further, asking if criticism of her inclusion of “minority” poets was “a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets of different skin complexions and different eye slants? Were we — African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans — only acceptable as long as these critics could stand guard by the door to examine our credentials and let us in one by one?”
And the totting up of the number of poets of different races in her anthology signifies, says Dove, “that we are not a post-racial society; that even so-called ‘intelligent’, ‘sensitive’, ‘liberal’ people who call themselves ‘humanists’ are often warped by their preconceived notions of class, race, and privilege”.
‘Deeply flawed’
The row has now extended beyond Dove and Vendler, with America’s poets taking sides in the debate.
Poet and English professor Robert Archambeau calls the anthology’s representation of poetry “deeply flawed”, while poet and novelist John Olson says it is a “travesty” and that “Dove’s exclusions are breathtaking: Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Niedecker”.
But others support Dove: poet Marguerite MarÃa Rivas asks how Vendler could “get it so wrong and be so out of touch with the ethos of contemporary American poetry”.
“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?” wonders Rivas, criticising “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”.
American poetry circles, says the Chronicle of Higher Education, “have seen nothing like this since the teeth-gnashing of the Foetry skirmish in 2004”. —