You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My name is Michael Silverblatt.

My guest today is Helen Fendler, and the subject is contemporary poetry, modern poetry.

She has published in the last year or so three books on the subject.

One is a collection of the essays that appeared in the New Yorker,

the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, as well as elsewhere under the title Sol Says,

the title of a poem by Jory Graham. The other two, the breaking of style and the given and the

made are made of memorial lectures that have been given

at different universities.

They are all published by Harvard University Press.

And it is inevitable that one say that Helen Vandler is one of the few ongoing, impassioned in public commentators on modern poetry.

It is a record not only of the poetry, but of her responsiveness to it that one reads,

that in these briefer books, the breaking of style and the given and the

made, these are questions that I wish I had read about years before.

The given in the maid is about the very central subject right now.

What do you do with the materials you are given? Lowell's

aristocratic background, barrimands, alcoholism, the black skin of Rita Dove, the trilingualism of

Jory Graham. These are the givens. What is it that makes art? How are the givens turned

...