Samuel Beckett's Hobby

GP Interviews Halen Vendler

GP: How many times have you been arrested?

VENDLER: I was sorting out books and I picked up John Ashbery’s “As We Know.’’ I have found him difficult in the past. You forget that after you’ve gone through something with difficulty when you go back it seems easy. I was just reading poem after poem without that undertow of difficulty.

GP: Recently a certain irate poet called you the "critic that doth vent Trinculos." What does that mean?

VENDLER: People put their strongest work at both ends so I usually start with the opening and the closing.

GP: To get down to more serious matters, what influence do you feel Mickey Mouse has had on the American imagination?
VENDLER: D.A. Powell, whose work I love. I’m reading his “Chronic.” I also got an anthology edited by the poet Mark Ford called “London: A History in Verse.”

GP: What is the best way to find a new friend?

VENDLER: I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us. I’d like to go back and just read the ones I’m capable of reading, such as the rhymed plays by the poet Luis de Góngora, a contemporary of Shakespeare.

GP: Why don’t you like people?

VENDLER: No.

GP: Have you ever?

VENDLER: No. I’ve always felt somewhat ashamed about that.

Derrida's Blue Steel, after Stiller

Bleu Acier

Anne Sexton Reads the Happy Version of "Wanting to Die"

An Interview with Eeyore

 

Eeyore

[Philosopher, character in books]

“I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

We went to see Eeyore last year at his home in Connecticut. The eighty-three-year-old was promoting his latest book, Epistles About Thistles, about writing letters to himself about thistles. He came to the door with his dog, Herman (after Melville), and for the next two hours was everything one might expect him to be: furious, caustic, darkly hilarious, and, above all, warm about life and love and what matters most.

After his death, in May, much was written about Eeyore’s legendary crossness, but it was really just impatience with artifice. “I refuse to lie to children,” he said. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.” There was no roughness in his delivery. It was spiked with merriment. He was also very tender. Famously, he hated being called a “children’s book character”—it reduced him, he thought.

—The Editors

G'MORNING POETRY: Do you miss the city, living out here?

EEYORE: I really don’t like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It’s too tumultuous. It’s too crazy. I’m afraid of falling over in New York. People are all insane and talking on machines and twittering and twottering. All that. I’m here looking for peace and quiet. A yummy death.

GP: You do some teaching out here?

E: I have a fellowship that started last year, two men and two women living in a house, and I go over when they want me to critique, or whatever the hell. I just talk dirty. They’re nice people. Young. It’s probably not very original, but old artists like to have young artists around… to destroy. I’m joking. I really want to help them. But publishing is such an outrageously stupid profession. Or has become so.

GP: What do you think of e-books?

E: I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex.

GP: Are you happy now?

E: [Sighs] My friends are all dying. They have to die. I know that. I have to die. But two friends died last week. I was completely broken by it. One was a publisher in Zurich. I loved him and his wife. It’s the loneliness that’s very bad. They’re doing what is natural. If I was doing what was natural I would be gone, like they are. I just miss them, terribly.

GP: Did the success of Winnie-the-Pooh ever feel like an albatross?
 
E: It’s a nice book. It’s perfectly nice. I can’t complain about it. I remember Herman Melville said, “When I die no one is going to mention Moby-Dick. They’re all going to talk about my first book, about fucking maidens in Tahiti.”

GP: How come you've never married or had children?

E: There’s a young artist in this town who’s remarkably gifted, and I’ve been tutoring him on the side. And he had this marvelous girlfriend, and I saw what was happening. And I said, “Look, don’t marry. Happily you can live together without any stench.” And they married and within eight minutes she was pregnant. And now they have a child, and all they do is complain about not having time and having to get a job. Fuck you!

GP: Thank you for talking with us.

E: Thanks for noticing me.

Illustration by Tony Trillionaire

guerrilla poetry meets gorilla poet!

Please Let Us Know

Is Robert Frost the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Edith Sitwell the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Margaret Atwood the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Gwendolyn MacEwen the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Emily Dickinson the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Franz Wright the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Bruce Andrews the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Robert Fitterman the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Sir Thomas Wyatt the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Joe Mulitis the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Susan Howe the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Anne Carson the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Suzanne Buffam the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Poetry (Chicago) the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Osip Mandelstam the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Dante the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Gertrude Stein the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Francis Ponge the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Geoffrey Chaucer the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is John Keats the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is John Cage the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is John Clare the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Philip Larkin the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is TS Eliot the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Elizabeth Barrett Browning the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Christina Rossetti the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Geoffrey Hill the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is the Norton Anthology of Poetry the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Edgar Allan Poe the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Leonard Cohen the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Rene Char the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Douglas Dunn the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Billy Collins the Paris Hilton of poetry?

Is Carol Ann Duffy the Paris Hilton of poetry?