the academy—a recent phenomenon—they have wanted to out-theory the
theory gurus whom they sense to be the premier members of a given English
or Comparative Literature department—the members who possess cultural
capital. And so we now have the bizarre phenomenon of the poets trying to
emulate the very scholars who have tended to ignore their presence by jump-
ing on the theory bandwagon operative across the hall.
Ironically, the production (or overproduction) of these new poets’ “theory-
essays” does nothing so much as remind me of my academic roots. When I
read generalizations about the nature of narrative or rhythm in poetry, I
want to cry out, “Wait a minute! That’s not accurate! Where is your docu-
mentation? Hasn’t X already done this? And why don’t you just look it up?”
And in raising such caveats, I become aware that I am making my poet
friends angry. They want me to write blurbs for their books, produce ®atter-
ing reviews, and invite them to give readings at Stanford or at conferences.
But, understandably, they resent my inadvertent stance of “Criticism belongs
to me, and poetry to you!” They are hurt that I, who have advocated the
breakdown between primary and secondary discourse, poetry and its criti-
cism, now sound like any other traditional academic. And when they really
want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!
This last comment raises a really interesting af¤liation problem. Helen
Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary po-
etry and different critical methodologies, but it is assumed we are af¤liated
because we are both women critics of a certain age in what is still a male-
dominated ¤eld. Recently Michael Scharf wrote a piece for Poets and Writ-
ers called “The Perloff/Vendler Standoff/Handoff,”^2 in which he character-
ized us as “late-career professionals” and said we had had similar career
trajectories.
I wonder whether Harold Bloom has ever been characterized as a “late-
career professional.” Or John Hollander? Or Richard Howard?—all roughly
my age. More important: I wonder if two men would be said to have had the
same career trajectory if, as is the case with Helen Vendler and myself, one is
a Boston Irish Catholic, the other a Jewish refugee from Vienna whose roots
are deeply European and hence, in the case of poetry, often geared toward
German and French materials. Helen Vendler received her PhD from Har-
vard but, due to the sexism of the sixties, could not get a teaching position
there immediately and hence taught at Boston University. I, on the other
hand, was a ¤fties housewife who decided to go back to school in the imme-
diate neighborhood—which in my case meant the Catholic University. I had
no valuable connections, no Ivy League prospects, but I also experienced
little of the sexism that Vendler experienced, because I did not travel in her
264 Chapter 14