The Art of Quotation (Part II)

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

One of the best quoters I’ve ever read is Helen Vendler. She ingeniously spliced quotation with commentary, creating miniature cabinet-of-wonders assemblages. This one, for example – from her brilliant “Notes from the Trepidarium,” a review of Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion:

The poet’s Gothic, so indispensable to her early work, has become “plain” in her flattened menagerie, in her taciturn journeys (“The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain”), in her description of a mummified bird placed in its owner’s purse “circa 1892” and hidden behind the chimney bricks in the Dumas Brothel Museum: “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.”

There are three types of quotation involved here. First, there’s the parenthetical “The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.” Second, there’s the use of the tiny detail “circa 1892” to describe the mummified bird in the purse. And, third, following the colon, there’s the “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.” The combination makes for a delightfully strange sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great quotation.