Sherry Chandler

A little bird tells me that Kentucky’s own Jim Tomlinson has won the University of Iowa short fiction award for 2006.

The collection, with a working title Things Kept, Things Left Behind, is due out this fall.

I raise a blogging toast to Jim, who also won an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council last year.

The passage below is from Merle Rubin’s review of Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, & Ashbery (Princeton University Press 2005) by Helen Vendler. The review originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor:

Vendler theorizes that the need to address an invisible listener arises when poets find lacking in human relationships the kind and degree of intimacy they are seeking. By addressing an invisible, hypothesized listener or engaging in an imagined dialogue, Vendler believes, poets like Herbert work out models that point us toward “better forms of intimacy in the actual world.”

Whitman’s desire for greater intimacy included the sexual form, Vendler notes: “Among the causes of Whitman’s invention of a comrade-in-futurity, one was … [his] love-disappointments in life. … But his messianic tendencies,” she goes on to suggest, “also played a part in drawing his eyes toward the future, as did his belief in scientific and evolutionary progress.”

…

Throughout her book, Vendler takes issue with those who criticize lyric poetry as an emotional genre unconcerned with ethical or social matters. Since Herbert’s religious concerns and Whitman’s democratic ideals are widely acknowledged, her argument becomes particularly relevant in her discussion of Ashbery, whose work has been called arty, over-ingenious, and narrowly self-absorbed.

Focusing on “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery’s colloquy with 16th-century Italian painter Francesco Parmigianino, Vendler makes a good — albeit slightly strained — argument for its ethical content.