Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.  

The Art of Quotation (Part VIII)

My favorite form of quotation is the parenthetical extract. I learned it from reading Helen Vendler. It’s an effective way of illustrating a point. Here’s an example from Vendler’s “ ‘Oh I Admire and Sorrow,’ ” a review of Dave Smith’s poetry collection Cumberland Station (1977), included in her great Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980). She’s commenting on the poem “On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg”:

There are many daring flashes: the demotic beginning (“maybe / fifteen thousand got it here”); the surrealistic fantasy (“If each finger were a thousand of them / I could clap my hands and be dead / up to my wrists”); the dismissive meiosis for the atomic bomb (“one silly pod”); the substitution of birds for the soldiers in blue and gray uniforms (“a gray blur preserved / on a blue horizon”); the unobtrusive symbols (the drummers, “rigid as August dandelions,” yield to “one dark stalk snapped off,” and the hint of death in the “drift of wind / at the forehead, the front door”). 

I love this form of quotation. It embeds fragments of the subject text in the commentary. When done well, it’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. 

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

The Art of Quotation (Part VII)

I’ve always admired the “fishnet” image that Robert Lowell used to describe his poetic endeavour. In his poem “Fishnet” (included in his 1973 collection The Dolphin), he wrote,

I’ve gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Helen Vendler cherished these lines, too. She quoted them in two essays – “A Difficult Grandeur” (included in her 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us) and “Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell’s Day by Day” (in her 2010 collection Last Looks, Last Books). In the first piece, she quoted the above lines and offered this interpretation: 

The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, like all other natural species devoured by time, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell’s votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.

I like how she reused Lowell’s “bronze,” converting it to “bronzed” – “bronzed to imperishability,” a wonderful phrase.

In the second essay, Vendler provided this interpretation of Lowell’s beautiful lines:

The poet’s net of forms in The Dolphin will remain, in his hammered phrase, “nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

Note the way she builds on Lowell’s “fishnet” and “bronze” metaphors – “the poet’s net of forms,” “his hammered phrase” – deepening their meaning. 

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by Stephanie Mitchell. 

September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #5 “James Merrill’s ‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker’ ”

James Merrill (Photo by Jill Krementz)

This is the sixth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “James Merrill’s ‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker’ ” (December 6, 2016):

Great poets make poetry out of the damnedest things. Prime example: James Merrill’s “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker.” I first read it when it appeared in the February 24, 1992, New Yorker. I remember it for the white windbreaker imprinted with a world map delightfully described in the first stanza:

The windbreaker is white with a world map.

DuPont contributed the seeming-frail,
Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail.
Weightless as shores reflected in deep water,
The countries are violet, orange, yellow, green;
Names of the principal towns and rivers, black.
A zipper’s hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes
Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap.

But, as Stephen Burt points out in his marvelous new book The Poem Is You, Merrill’s poem contains two windbreakers – a white one and a black one. The black one briefly materializes in the second-last stanza (“It’s my windbreaker / In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat”). Burt comments,

Merrill learned in 1986 that he had HIV, for which in the early 1990s there were no effective treatments; “Self-Portrait” has also been read as his plan for his funeral, a self-elegy complete with choice of coffin. As Helen Vendler explains, by the penultimate stanzas Merrill has decided that the original windbreaker, “white with a world map,” cannot be his shroud: the “black celestial twin of his jacket,” however, strikes him as a “garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful.”

The reference is to Helen Vendler’s “Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts” (Last Looks, Last Books, 2010), a brilliant study of Merrill’s dying self-portraits, in which “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” is described as an “organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.”

Merrill’s world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker may be absurd and surreal, but I like it. I suspect Merrill secretly did, too. After all, as Burt points out, he wore it. And wearing it is what inspired this beautifully flowing, chiming poem. 

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. 

The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

James Wood's Puzzling Use of "Re-description"

James Wood (Photo by David Levenson)

What does James Wood mean by “re-description”? He mentions it at least six times in the Introduction to his Serious Noticing (2019):

1. “After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.”

2. “But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative.’ ”

3. “This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny.”

4. “All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.”

5. “It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate ‘creation’ (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’).”

6. "And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.” 

Why is the “re” necessary? Why not just “description”? “Re-description” implies do-over – rewriting a previous description. But that isn’t what Wood does in his own work. Take, for example, his review of Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors, in this week’s New Yorker. He calls it “an assemblage, a house of curiosities.” He refers to its “manner of layering the narratives.” He says,

Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night “flaking around the lamps”; elsewhere, also at nighttime, “a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.” Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: “His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.” Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street.

That’s primary description, is it not? Nothing is being re-described or re-voiced. Maybe Wood considers use of quotation a form of re-description. But that doesn’t make sense. Pointing out felicitous passages in a work is a form of descriptive analysis, is it not? How is it re-description? It seems to me Wood’s “re” is redundant. Earlier in his Introduction to Serious Noticing, he does omit the “re”: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (my emphasis). Maybe he sees the book as description, and his review of it as a form of re-description. In his essay on Virginia Woolf (included in Serious Noticing), he comes close to saying that. He writes, “If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to re-describe the artwork in its own, different language.” That’s a big “if.” Helen Vendler, in the concluding paragraph of her “The Function of Criticism” (collected in her The Music of What Happens, 1988), says, “No art work describes itself.” I agree. 

Description or re-description – does it matter? Yes, absolutely. It goes to criticism’s purpose. Vendler, in the Introduction to The Music of What Happens, writes,

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique confirmation.

Wood might find that statement too simplistic. But, for me, it’s a touchstone. In comparison, Wood’s notion of re-description seems vague. 

January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Vendler on Glück

Louise Glück (Photo by Webb Chappell)

Dwight Garner, in his “Louise Glück, a Nobel Winner Whose Poems Have Abundant Intellect and Deep Feeling” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 8, 2020), quotes my favorite literary critic, Helen Vendler. He says, “Helen Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said that Glück’s poems ‘have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words.’ ” The quote is from Vendler’s “Flower Power: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris” (The New Republic, May 24, 1993; included in Vendler’s 1995 Soul Says). 

Vendler wrote another great New Republic piece on Glück – “The Poetry of Louise Glück” (June 17, 1978; collected in Vendler’s 1980 Part of Nature, Part of Us. In this earlier essay, Vendler says of Glück, “She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope.” That strikes me as valid. I find Glück’s poetry remote, detached, cold – far removed from what Tolstoy called “the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind.” But as abstraction, it’s exquisite. For example, “Messengers”:

And the deer—
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of the sunlight.

Best of the Decade: #8 Joseph Mitchell's "Street Life"

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #8 pick – Joseph Mitchell’s wonderful “Street Life” (February 11 & 18, 2013).

This piece is Mitchell’s paean to walking as a way of becoming part of the city. He says, “What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city.” What makes the piece memorable for me are its many long, flowing sentences – almost stream-of-consciousness-like. This one, for example:

At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and tantalizingly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.

And this:

I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles and the stone owls and the stone dolphins and the stone lions’ heads and the stone bulls’ heads and the stone rams’ heads and the stone urns and the stone tassels and the stone laurel wreaths and the stone scallop shells and the cast-iron stars and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to the capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and the scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses.

Mitchell’s depth of observation in this piece is astonishing. His love of lists – a sure sign of true interest in real reality – is everywhere present. Consider this beauty:

Pretty soon my obsessive curiosity began to dominate me, and I went to a succession of Masses in St. Patrick’s that encompassed seven Sundays, the Easter-cycle Masses; and then I went to Masses in some representative Eastern Catholic churches that are in union with Rome, Syrian-rite churches and Byzantine-rite churches and Armenian-rite churches; and then I went to Masses or Liturgies in some Orthodox churches, Greek Orthodox churches and Russian Orthodox churches and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox churches and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and Albanian Orthodox churches and Bulgarian Orthodox churches and Serbian Orthodox churches and Romanian Orthodox churches; and then I went to Liturgies in two so-called Old Catholic churches, one that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Manhattan and another that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

Helen Vendler says, “Finally, the only test of a poem is that it be unforgettable.” The same applies to essays, in my opinion. Joseph Mitchell’s splendid “Street Life” easily passes the test.  

Neil Corcoran's Wrong-Headed Criticism of Seamus Heaney

I’m currently reading Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998). In the Preface, Corcoran says he hopes his book “offers some original and provocative readings and re-readings” of Heaney’s work. Well, it didn’t take him long to provoke me. In the book’s first chapter, titled “Roots and Readings: Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), he says some of Death of a Naturalist’s poems, including “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed,” “tend toward pastiche.” He writes,

These poems have their eyes so eagerly trained on The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes’s first two books, that, even allowing for the element of comedy that undoubtedly inheres in them too, they tend towards pastiche.

I disagree. Ted Hughes wrote about hawks, crows, sheep, eels; Heaney wrote about turkeys, cows, trout. Both wrote about the natural world. But that’s where the similarity ends. Hughes’s governing aesthetic is violence. Helen Vendler says of him, “This is a poet who wants to write words like “Blood ball swollen” and “sliced … throat strings” and “hacked-off head” (The Music of What Happens, 1988). Heaney’s aesthetic, in Death of a Naturalist, is pleasure – sensuous, tactile description: “He once complained extravagantly / In an overture of gobbles; / He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud / With a grey flick of his Confucian eye” (“Turkeys Observed”); “It seems she has swallowed a barrel. / From forelegs to haunches, / her belly is slung like a hammock” (“Cow in Calf”); “Hangs, a fat gun-barrel, / deep under arched bridges / or slips like butter down / the throat of the river” (“Trout”); “Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions, / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations” (“The Diviner”). 

Corcoran rightly praises certain Death of a Naturalist poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” “Blackberry-Picking,” for their striking alliteration and onomatopoeia. But his characterization of “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed” as “pastiche” is wrong-headed. Heaney imitated no one. 

On Lucie Brock-Broido: Chiasson and Vendler

Lucie Brock-Broido (Photo by Karen Meyers)

Hannah Aizenman, in her “The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), From The New Yorker Archive” (newyorker.com, March 8, 2018), refers to two New Yorker reviews of Brock-Broido’s work: Helen Vendler’s “Drawn to Figments and Occasion” (August 7, 1989) and Dan Chiasson’s “The Ghost Writer” (October 28, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are admiring. Vendler says of Brock-Broido’s “Elective Mutes,” “The rhythmic momentum of this piece of Americana and the audacity of throwing it into a poem about mad English twins suggest the drivenness of Brock-Broido’s imagination, which at other times can be delicate and lyrical.” Chiasson writes, “Brock-Broido’s poems can be baffling, but because of their stylish spookiness (some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks) they are never boring.” Note that “stylish spookiness”; Vendler calls Brock-Broido’s “Heartbeat” “spookily lyrical.”

Both pieces are also critical. Vendler writes,

Some of the hazards of Brock-Broido’s enterprise are easily seen: preciousness, exaggeration, a histrionic use of the more sensational edges of the news. Other hazards, less immediately apparent, take an insidious toll in the long run – chiefly the persistent use of a few obsessive words, among them the adjectives “small,” “little,” “tiny,” “frail,”, “fragile”; the nouns “child” and “girl”; the verb “curl.”

Chiasson says Brock-Broido’s poems have a “blurted quality, as though long-roiling tumult finally blew off the stopper.” He continues:

The thrill of improvisation is precisely that it cannot be isolated from the risk of mere looniness or doodling. I don’t like everything in Brock-Broido’s work, but, to steer clear of tour de force, a style like this one has to fail some of the time; it has to find some subject that suits it badly.

I like that “thrill of improvisation.” It gets at the quality in Brock-Broido’s work I most enjoy – its combinational wizardry. Vendler catches this quality when she says of Brock-Broider’s “I Wish You Love,”

A broken heart, death, the exhumed body of Mengele, ecological disaster, commercial slaughter, the humdrum, the extravagant, the technological, the distorted, the lyric all lurch together into an eclectic postmodern elegy.

That “lurch” is inspired. It exactly captures the wayward dream logic of Brock-Broido’s dazzling art.

Helen Vendler's Brilliant "Lowell's Persistence"

Robert Lowell (Photo by Steve Shapiro)

Dan Chiasson, in his “The Mania and the Muse” (The New Yorker, March 20, 2017), a review of Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, says, “Jamison’s study tells us a lot about bipolar disorder, but it can’t quite connect the dots to Lowell’s work. Poetry doesn’t coöperate much with clinical diagnosis.” A study that does connect those dots and shows the ways Lowell represented his depression in verse is Helen Vendler’s brilliant “Lowell’s Persistence,” included in her 2015 collection The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar. Vendler notes a number of characteristics of Lowell’s depressed style, including obstructive line stoppages (“In For the Union Dead, Lowell’s stoppages reflect a mind moving sluggishly to organize its materials, as though it were an effort to find a piece of wit to join subject to object”), corrupted flashbacks (“But the seepage of compositorial depression corrupts the colors of the past, both by finding the simile of rot for the remembered hue of the rocks, and by aggressing against that false visual appearance of purple by insisting on the true and banal substratum of gray”), and immobility (“The depressed mind, even if capable of momentary relief, knows the immobile backdrop is always there unchangingly waiting: ‘water, stone, grass and sky’ ”).

Lowell’s depressive style isn’t totally negative. It has, as Vendler points out, its beautiful aspects. One is its beauty of accuracy. Another is its beauty of vividness, of the arresting image. Vendler says of Lowell’s “Florence,”

Just as the monsters are wonderfully found images for the formless, nonthinking, “decapitated,” foundering, and festering state of the depressed body, so the phrase “my heart bleeds black blood,” with its spondaic and alliterative monosyllables and its gradually thickening vowels – from the scream of “ee” to the flatness of “a” to the subvocalic clotting of “uh” – offers a feeling image (in appropriate language) for the festering, oozing decline of the depressed soul.

Vendler’s great essay expands my appreciation of Lowell’s aesthetic. She shows him to be a powerful artist of the inner life, “not flinching before its deserts of drought and paralysis.”

James Merrill's “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker”

James Merrill (Photo by Jill Krementz)

Great poets make poetry out of the damnedest things. Prime example: James Merrill’s “Self-Portrait inTyvek™ Windbreaker.” I first read it when it appeared in the February 24, 1992, New Yorker. I remember it for the white windbreaker imprinted with a world map delightfully described in the first stanza:

The windbreaker is white with a world map.

DuPont contributed the seeming-frail,

Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail.

Weightless as shores reflected in deep water,

The countries are violet, orange, yellow, green;

Names of the principal towns and rivers, black.

A zipper’s hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes

Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap.

But, as Stephen Burt points out in his marvelous new book, The Poem Is You, Merrill’s poem contains two windbreakers – a white one and a black one. The black one briefly materializes in the second-last stanza (“It’s my windbreaker / In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat”). Burt comments,

Merrill learned in 1986 that he had HIV, for which in the early 1990s there were no effective treatments; “Self-Portrait” has also been read as his plan for his funeral, a self-elegy complete with choice of coffin. As Helen Vendler explains, by the penultimate stanzas Merrill has decided that the original windbreaker, “white with a world map,” cannot be his shroud: the “black celestial twin of his jacket,” however, strikes him as a “garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful.”

The reference is to Helen Vendler’s “Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts” (Last Looks, Last Books, 2010), a brilliant study of Merrill’s dying self-portraits, in which “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” is described as an “organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.”

Merrill’s world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker may be absurd and surreal, but I like it. I suspect Merrill secretly did, too. After all, as Burt points out, he wore it. And wearing it is what inspired this beautifully flowing, chiming poem. 

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

Elizabeth Bishop (Photo: Bettman/CORBIS)

Megan Marshall, in her fascinating “Elizabeth and Alice” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, October 27, 2016) identifies “you” in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (The New Yorker, April 26, 1976) as Bishop’s partner, Alice Methfessel, who left Bishop, in 1975, after a five-year relationship. Marshall also reports that “One Art” went through seventeen drafts. She writes,

As late as draft eleven, the loss of Methfessel still registered in the poem’s concluding stanza as the one misfortune Bishop could not withstand: “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.”

Marshall concludes, “But, though she later described “One Art” as ‘pure emotion,’ Bishop guarded her feelings in the final version’s last stanza, pretending bravery.”

I confess that “pretending bravery” irks me. It makes it sound as if “One Art” ’s stoicism is a put-on. I think when Bishop says, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she means it. Helen Vendler, in her brilliant “Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III” (included in her 2010 Last Looks, Last Books), writes,

By bringing “One Art” down to the very moment of present writing, by lifting her pen after she writes “like” and then reinscribing “like” after her tenacious interpolation of self-command “(Write it!),” Bishop turns once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin. Her art, wrung from loss, paradoxically becomes her life principle.

What Bishop wrote in her eleventh draft is interesting. But what she wrote in her final draft is determinative. That draft shows her, as Vendler says, “turning once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin.”  

Helen Vendler's Great "Stevens and Keats's 'To Autumn' " (Contra Mark Jarman)

Mark Jarman, in his “The Judgment of Poetry” (The Hudson Review, Autumn, 2015), praises Vendler as “one of the best close readers of poetry today.” But his treatment of her great “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” seems peevish. He writes,

In her discussion of Keats’s “To Autumn,” she hears the great ode in Stevens’ poetry, especially in the final strophe of “Sunday Morning.” Her argument is illuminating, and yet it seems as if no other modern poet read Keats as Stevens did. She believes the central problems of Keats’s ode “become central to Stevens’ poetry as well.” But what about the fact that Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” gathers together two of Keats’s great odes, “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” and links sleep, poetry, and imagination in similar ways?

At no point in “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” does Vendler argue that Stevens is the only poet to rework the materials of Keats’s ode. But I think it’s safe to say, based on Vendler’s essay, that the magnitude of Stevens’s rich reworking of it is unmatched by any other poet. Frost may have had “To Autumn” in mind when he wrote “After Apple-Picking.” But his poem doesn’t come close to reinterpreting, reusing, and recreating “To Autumn” the way that, say, Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” does. Vendler writes,

The resemblances have been often remarked. Both poets use successive clauses of animal presence (gnats, lambs, crickets, redbreast, and swallows in Keats; deer, quail, and pigeons in Stevenson; both poems close with birds in the sky (gathering swallows in Keats, flocks of pigeons in Stevens) and with the sense of sound (including a whistling bird in each); Keats’s soft-dying day becomes Stevens’s evening.

Vendler shows that the end of “Sunday Morning” is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s “To Autumn.” But what’s even more arresting is her analysis of how Stevens, in his rewriting, made the materials of Keats’s great poem distinctly his own:

Keats writes a long clause about the gnats, then follows it with shorter ones dwindling to “hedge-crickets sing,” then broadens out to end his poem. Stevens writes short clauses followed by a final long one. The result is a gain in climactic force and explicit pathos, but a loss in stoicism and discretion of statement. Keats’s pathos (at its most plangent in the small gnats who mourn in wailful choir, helpless in the light wind; less insistent but still audible in the bleating lambs; but largely absent in the whistle and twitter of the closing lines) reaches us with steadily diminishing force, in inverse relation to Keats’s recognition of the independent worth of autumnal music, without reference to any dying fall. Stevens’s pathos, on the other hand, is at its most evident in the closing lines. In short, Stevens has adopted Keats’s manner – the population of animals, the types of clause, the diction, even the sunset landscape – without embracing Keats’s essential stylistic argument against nostalgia. Nor has he imitated Keats’s reticent diction and chaste rhetoric; instead, he writes with an increasing opulence of rhetorical music, and imposes explicit metaphysical dimensions on the landscape.

Jarman calls Vendler’s discussion of “To Autumn” and “Sunday Morning” “illuminating.” Yes, it certainly is. But it’s more than that. It’s an extraordinary work of comparative analysis. Jarman doesn’t do it justice.

Postscript: Helen Vendler was The New Yorker’s poetry critic from 1978 to 2001. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones.