Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler may be America's most important poetry critic. Awinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vendler has remained a key figurein the academy while also teaching a much larger public how to read and enjoy poemsand poetry through her many articles for the New Yorker, the New York Ti [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

Helen Vendler may be America's most important poetry critic. Awinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vendler has remained a key figurein the academy while also teaching a much larger public how to read and enjoy poemsand poetry through her many articles for the New Yorker, the New York Times BookReview, the New Republic, and the New York Review ofBooks.With Something Understood, some of the mostimportant poets, critics, and scholars in the United States, Canada, the UnitedKingdom, and Ireland pay tribute to five decades of Vendler's work. Included hereare new poems, written especially for this volume, from such luminaries as Nobellaureate Seamus Heaney, former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, and Pulitzer Prizewinner Charles Wright. The essays, also exclusive to this book, address a spectrumof issues, from the vastness of the poetic tradition to poetry's irreduciblebuilding blocks. Elaine Scarry considers what poetic vocation has meant to Heaney, Thomas Hardy, and to Vendler herself. Deborah Forbes asks what the poems of JohnKeats have to say to the people of Zambia. Jahan Ramazani provides arguments andadvice that any teacher of poetry can use.All thecontributors have learned from Helen Vendler or been inspired by her work. Theresult is not only a celebration of Vendler's critical powers but also a majorcompilation of poems and essays representing contemporary American poetry as it ispracticed and debated.ContributorsJohn Ashbery *Frank Bidart * Lucie Brock-Broido * Stephen Burt * Eleanor Cook * Bonnie Costello *Rita Dove * Heather Dubrow * William Flesch * Deborah Forbes * Mark Ford * RogerGilbert * Albert Goldbarth * Jorie Graham * Nick Halpern * DeSales Harrison * SeamusHeaney * August Kleinzahler * George S. Lensing * Christopher R. Miller * CarlPhillips * D. A. Powell * Laura Quinney * Jahan Ramazani * Elaine Scarry * DaveSmith * Willard Spiegelman * M. Wynn Thomas * Charles Wright