An opportunity to feel ambivalent: I find myself in an anthology of critical writing by 20^th century poets whose co-editors include Dana Gioia, and whose other contributors include William Logan, Timothy Steele & Christian Wiman. The volume is Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Gioia, David Mason and Meg Schoerke. There is a companion poetry anthology more than twice the size of the poetics volume and a peek at the website informs me that I’m included in that one as well, tho I’ve not actually seen the book.

 

On the one hand, a part of me delights at the idea of being included in an anthology that includes the likes of Frost, Stein, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Jeffers, Moore & Eliot, all of whose names turn up on the first page of the table of contents. And I’m pleased to see that Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Spicer (!), O’Hara are likewise included. All of this fits in very much with adolescent fantasies that I once entertained about being a poet.* But there is a reason why such things are called adolescent fantasies – such dreams envision a perfect (or at least perfected) world in which access is open & inclusion is simply a register of merit. The real world, however, is far more complex, negotiated & political. Thus if you scratch at this book a little, a larger worldview starts to appear, one with which I’m certain I disagree.

 

Historical anthologies – and this volume is intended as one, organized chronologically by the birth year of the poet – most often reveal their aesthetic commitments most clearly in their most “current” inclusions. In this one, 53 of its 54 contributors were born between 1871 (James Weldon Johnson) and 1952 (Rita Dove and Alice Fulton). There is, however, a 14-year gap – the longest jump in the book** – between Dove & Fulton & the volume’s concluding essayist, Christian Wiman (b. 1966), who just happens to be the editor of Poetry & a practicing new formalist. Wiman’s inclusion is noteworthy precisely because of all the major poet-critics who are not here: not just langpos such as Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten or Robert Grenier (how can a volume of this kind not include Bernstein or Watten?), or feminists like Rachel Blau DuPlessis or Susan Griffin, but also Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Phil Levine, Robert Hass & Edward Hirsch.

 

I’ve written before that the new formalist worldview is one in which the 1930s was a particularly bad time to have been born – that’s where the break between “old” & “new” comes – and that view is visible in this volume when you look at its inclusions by decade of birth:

 

1870s (5): James Weldon Johnson, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens

1880s (5): William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot

1890s (3): Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, Allen Tate

1900s (4): Yvor Winters, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth

1910s (8): Charles Olson, J.V. Cunningham, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Randell Jarrell, William Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Duncan

1920s (11): Denise Levertov, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Jack Spicer, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich

1930s (3): Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, Charles Simic

1940s (9): Jack Foley, Robert Pinsky, Lyn Hejinian, Louise Glück, Mary Kinzie, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Marilyn Nelson, me, Timothy Steele

1950s (5): Julia Alvarez, Dana Gioia, William Logan, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton

1960s (1): Christian Wiman

Poets born in the 1930s who should be here include Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Amiri Baraka, Clayton Eshleman, Jerome Rothenberg & David Antin. Indeed, this book reverses the very same blinders that limit the second volume of the Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium – if that book presumed that the center of poetry was to be found somewhere between Fluxus and the journals Caterpillar & Sulfur, this collection acts as if that aesthetic tendency didn’t exist at all. The Iowa-centric McPoetry that once seemed so institutionally ascendant in the 1970s is likewise given short shrift, with just the token inclusion of Charles Simic.***   

 

It is worth noting, tho, that if the inclusion of poets shows the heavy hand of a single aesthetic bent, the choices of pieces by the poets who are included do not. While many of the choices for a volume like this are, frankly, obvious (Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?”), the two short essays by Robert Creeley, “To Define” & “Poems are a Complex,” are the works by him that most directly point toward the evolution of language poetry, and the ones most often read & cited by langpos a generation later. While we’ve all seen conservative poetry anthologies that treat Pound as the guy who wrote Mauberly & maybe a little more, and that fixate on Williams’ “Yachts” & Creeley’s rhymes from For Love, this particular collection strikes me as accentuating differences rather than occluding them.+

 

This anthology is clearly intended to be a text book – McGraw-Hill includes it among its Higher Education product line, and the selections come with lengthy biographical intros as well as bibliographies of the poets to the rear.++ So for political reasons, I almost always say yes to being included in a project like this.+++ It’s interesting to see Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer here, both of whom I suspect would have been even less comfortable than I with the company they’re seen keeping. But inclusions here never can fully account for, let alone counter, the fact that this collection has an agenda, one that maximizes the role of new formalism, and that this agenda is at best a dubious point of view.  

 

 

 

 

 

* Of all the adolescent fantasies I ever had about poetry, the best of the ones I’ve rather inadvertently realized occurred when I gave a reading under a full moon at a medieval chapel in the south of France, which I did with Lyn Hejinian & Tom Raworth back in 1988.

 

** The next longest gap in the volume is nine years, between T.S. Eliot & Louise Bogan.

 

*** One might counter that the McPoets were generally allergic to serious critical writing, being, as they were, at least partly a reaction formation against the New Critics who tended to dominate the English Departments into which McPoets snuck their MFA programs, but you can’t make the same claim with regards to the Eshleman-Rothenberg axis.

 

+ Tho not entirely. Rhina Espaillat is clearly included here as an instance of diversity, but she’s more pointedly on the cusp betwixt the old & new formalisms.

 

++ My own intro, cobbled heavily from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, contains a howler or two, identifying me as an editor of Computer Land, a publication that never existed. Rather, I worked in services marketing for the ComputerLand Corporation (which did, for a time, publish a ComputerLand Magazine, to which I contributed a couple of articles).

 

+++ The one volume in which I refused to participate was Doug Messerli’s Language Poetries, which I felt was a conscious attempt to depoliticize & misrepresent the work.