Reading the essays and reviews in the new Pleiades. Mark Halliday leads off the prose with a mainly unpersuaded look at Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners. Halliday's insight average is among the highest of poet-critics working today -- he's also among the quickest to speak from conflict and a purported self-doubt (Jorie Graham only does this in her poetry, as far as I know) and the hand-wringing nearly spoils the fun every time, even when it doesn't lead to a self-congratulatory coronation of earnest paraphrasable meaning as it does here. (I'm just saying. It works in comedy, the Richard Lewis-ish agita, and whether or not Halliday'd acknowledge this as his mode, it works in poetry too.)

Briefly: The book collects a recent series of lectures at Princeton on intimate address to absent strangers, a form Vendler asserts is rare in the history of the lyric. Her examples come from Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery. Through a series of rhetorical feints, Halliday establishes a bit of an Ahab/Ishmael duality -- is it his obsession with Vendler that will dominate the essay a la Nicholson Baker's U and I, or will we be persuaded that Vendler is shoehorning Ashbery's work into yet another questionable interpretive framework.

It's an entertaining piece, and it has me thinking I need to re-read Herbert and finally get to Vendler. What it does not do is persuade me that what Halliday calls "postmodernist blur-buzz" in Ashbery is nefarious, specious, or even irrelevant. In fact, I'm tempted to connect Halliday's anti-irrationalist prose with the frustration that usually dampens Halliday's poetry but sometimes threatens to ignite it. I have to wonder, what's so threatening here, what quality of his own is Halliday perceiving?