particular competitive circuit. Helen Vendler has written books on Shake-
speare’s sonnets and Keats’s odes, whereas I myself have gravitated to the ar-
tistic and philosophical af¤liations of the twentieth-century poets we both
study.
It is odd, then, that we are often endowed with an af¤liation neither of us
sees herself as having. Then again, as I realized recently when Helen and I
were invited to be on a joint panel at the Poetry Society of America, in one
sense we are af¤liated—namely, so far as our attitudes toward work are con-
cerned. We both came of age in an academy that, as I have mentioned, de-
manded a criticism informed by knowledge. If we didn’t know the Romantics,
then we couldn’t write intelligently on Yeats or Stevens or even on Ashbery.
If we weren’t able to recognize a particular reference, we went to the library
and looked it up; we didn’t just speculate or go online to ask our chat group
friends what a certain word might mean. Professionalism, in other words, was
and remains a deeply ingrained re®ex.
But then what does professional mean vis-à-vis new poetries? I have
learned, the hard way, that if one says something about a living poet at a
conference or in a critical journal, and that poet happens to “disagree” with
what one says, he or she won’t hesitate to stand up in the audience and make
an objection or to write vituperative letters to the author and her friends.
The poet Tina Darragh, objecting to a statement I made about another poet,
Leslie Scalapino, in an essay published in Critical Inquiry (summer 1999),^3
had no compunction about reading an “open letter of protest” about me at
various poetry readings around the country. It does not seem to have oc-
curred to this poet, whom I know very slightly, that this is not appropriate
professional behavior. As I wrote to her, she might have written a letter to the
editor of Critical Inquiry, or she might have challenged me to debate on an
MLA panel or comparable event, but to read a statement of attack as part of
a poetry reading, at which I was not present to defend myself, seemed quite
appalling to me until I realized that it was a question of con®icting concepts
of af¤liation. In the circle of Language poets to which Darragh belongs, her
behavior was evidently not considered inappropriate. No one, I gather, got up
and walked out when she read her protest statement at the Small Press Traf¤c
auditorium in San Francisco.
Ironically, although for over two decades Language poets have argued that
the author does not “own” his or her poem, that the reader constructs the
text, and that there is no one “right” (and hence “wrong”) reading, it remains
the case that when an outsider like me (professor rather than poet) says
something the poet herself ¤nds questionable, her fellow-poets rally to that
poet’s cause in an us-versus-them pattern at least as insidious as the Stanford
Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry 265