I link here her essay:

The Ocean, The Bird, and the Scholar

This was a wonderful piece, and perfect for the podcast audio format. I often wish I could be more poetry-literate, but I find it very difficult to casually read literary criticism (although Prof. Vendler’s books come highly recommended, of course). What a treat, then, to have her “teach us a poem” in a format we can chew on in highly digestible sound bites. I like learning this way!

I read and analyzed “Sailing to Byzantium” in high school, but had not revisited it since then. Even recently having seen “No Country for Old Men,” I didn’t give the poem a second thought or really even notice the reference to the poem in the title. Listening to Prof. Vendler’s analysis gave me a whole new appreciation for the movie as well as the poem. The Coen Brothers invite us to interpret Yeat’s journey to another shore through the lens of a violent psychopath who terrorizes the Texas border, searching for drug money in a race against a trashy-but-upstanding drifter and a contemplative cop. The camera ultimately settles its lens on the cop (played brilliantly by Tommy Lee Jones), who soliloquizes about his life and its meaning after he retires from work (the criminal, disturbingly, still at large). This “country”–the time, the place, the polity, the culture–is no longer for him. It perhaps is only “for” those younger men able to dance to the absurd and pointless “sensual music” without disengaging in quizzical disgust. But Jones’ character has arrived at this literal and metaphoric border, and with him we see a point of no return.

After thinking thoroughly about Yeats, my imagination can better continue this character’s story, past the blackness of the final credits, to the places he may reach through buoyant verse. I wonder what shape in “gold enamelling” he would take? That of an Oscar statuette, perhaps?

“[...]

it comes from the unaware

simple evolution cortex expanding

to word objects not real

but describing the real

and then beyond when words became

the description of events

or words described the arrangement of words

[...]”

look forward to many more programs to come!

http://www.tannerbrockwell.com/poems/how-words-make-one-quiver/

To hear the old wobbly real player sound from that era makes me think of how much better the podcasts are technically. Not everything gets worse.

We do very well here focussing on music and poetry to uplift ourselves and then the general vibration in this season. Thank you for leading the way Chris.

To all my cyber pals here wishing you a good holiday season and sending also a big thank you for all your wonderful posts and the good company.

On more then one occation I’ve come across Seamus Heaney quoting the Yeats line and challenge, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.”

Heaney says we can look to our poets to help with this challenge – and I believe him.

I was astonished in Googling “Vendler Yeats” yesterday to come very quickly to a Connection conversation I’d had with Helen Vendler about Yeats when her book was in gestation in February, 2000. It’s less than 8 years ago, and I’d almost entirely forgotten it. What I’d remembered better was a program shortly before with Christopher Ricks of Boston University and the new Oxford Book of English Verse. I teased Ricks some about having as many pages and poems in the new Oxford from Kipling as from Yeats — a mismatch, no? But Ricks came back with a vengeance. He dismissed the great Yeats as “the most overrated great name in 1000 years of English literature… all voice, no heart… all rhetoric, no poetry.”

I must have put out the call to Helen Vendler to say a word of encouragement to those who thrill to so much Yeats (I long ago memorized his “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and can’t imagine a more brilliant lyric) and hear a certain tin-horn racist-imperialist nonsense in the war ditties from great novelist of Kim.

In any event, Helen Vendler joined us again on The Connection to talk about Yeats and this book project just underway. We began with the recorded voice of Yeats himself reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and closed with a great variety of terrific callers. Listen in here:

http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/w/b/wbur/connection/audio/2000/02/con_0208b.rm

Somewhere in our old suggestions threads here on ROS I had asked for her after I read her excellent article in The New Republic (2004): “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: How the Arts Help us to Live”. As well how I remember her from the old Connection days when she spoke of Shakespeare’s sonnets.