Somebody awhile back suggested that, since I had been thinking out loud about what a selected Zukofsky might include, and had noted the problems that greeted Grenier’s Selected Creeley, that I might turn my attention to a larger scale & imagine what a Selected 20^th Century American Poetry anthology might look like. It’s an intriguing question. Having worked on one anthology, plus three mini-anthology-like features for journals as different at the Chicago Review, Alcheringa & Ironwood, I have some idea just how complex & difficult the process itself can be. One’s awe – I really can’t think of any other word – at Jerome Rothenberg’s ability to produce so many interesting & valuable anthologies over his career – some of them paradigm shifting in their impact – deepens dramatically when one realizes just how much like scaling Mt. Everest in t-shirt, shorts & flip-flops editing even a single anthology is. In the American Tree, focusing on writing that I already knew really well & aided by the fact that so many of its contributors were dear friends, presented almost limitless difficulties. Just U.S. writers or beyond? Just those who fit the somewhat sociological definitions of appearing multiple times in “language poetry” venues or a broader definition? What about those poets, such as Bev Dahlen, Jerry Estrin or Leslie Scalapino, who more accurately could be described as intimate critics of langpo? What about those, such as Larry Eigner or Bill Berkson, who fit my appearances criterion but already had firm public identities antecedent to language writing? Because I wanted to give writers room enough to show some of their range as poets, I ended making almost every decision on the side of a narrower book. As it happened, there were just three U.S. poets who fit all my formal criteria, but who for various reasons I left out: Abigail Child (on the grounds that she was a film-maker first – this was my largest single mistake), David Gitin & Curtis Faville (on the grounds that both had stepped back from publishing altogether during the early 1980s). And I wish I had a dollar for each time I’ve been told that leaving out Canadians, such as Steve McCaffery, or British poets, such as Tom Raworth, was not the most brilliant strategy. Countering that it wasn’t just Steve or Tom, but the next dozen perfectly wonderful poets one immediately had to consider the instant one made the first such exception is an answer that is reasonable, but always disappointing. And none of this touches on the questions of friendships that get strained (or worse) in such a process because X doesn’t have as many pages as Y, or isn’t the first person on the first page, or whatever, the dark side of editing. One contributor to the Tree once wrote to me a few years after it was published to accuse me in the harshest terms of deliberately picking works intended on discrediting her as a poet – only when I sent her a photocopy of her original correspondence years earlier, which spelled out just what I could use and in what order (to which I’d adhered), did she back off.

So the idea of submitting myself to the same degree of torture over a field so broad as “20^th Century American Poetry” is enough to fill me with literal physical nausea. You’d have to lock me up it Gitmo (but with a really good library) to try it.

There is one book that did attempt this level of a project with some serious integrity – Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That Is Great Within Us, first published as a mass market paperback original in 1970 & republished a few times since then – it’s still listed as in print. Subtitled American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, the 722-page volume contains 135 poets beginning with Robert Frost & continuing through to Joel Sloman, one of only two poets included born as late as the 1940s. Although the volume includes only 21 poets born in 1930 or later, Carruth is quite meticulous about including not only lots of the New American poets but also writers around such journals as Coyote’s Journal & Caterpillar, such as Ronald Johnson, Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly & Diane Wakoski. This is a book that puts Bob Kaufman between Donald Justice & Carolyn Kizer, and that puts Archie Ammons between Jack Spicer & Paul Blackburn. It’s not that Carruth’s editorial eye is perfect by any means – Rakosi & Oppen are missing among the Objectivists, the writers around Caterpillar excludes Rothenberg & David Antin, all of the 2^nd generation New York School is absent, the Spicer circle is reduced to just Spicer – but, overall, this remains the most successful attempt anyone has made of this kind of project. Three & one-half decades since its publication, Voice remains an eminently useable & teachable book. Indeed, its largest constraint is that Voice affords contributors an average of just five pages apiece, hardly enough to get much sense of a poet’s worth.

But the deeper problem in trying to replicate something akin to Voice for the whole of the 20^th century is that the number of active practitioners – accomplished, publishing, having some degree of impact – has tended to rise exponentially with each new generation. The sum of post-avant poets visible in the 1950s & ‘60s, while sizeable when contrasted with the handful of Imagists or Objectivists in earlier decades, was relatively small compared with the number of poets active in the 1970s & ‘80s – indeed, some of what the poetry wars around 1980 must have been about (tho no one I knew at the time seemed to recognize this, myself included) was the serious discomfort involved adjusting expectations as the next generation of poets (my own) gradually realized that the resources available for publishing, jobs, recognition, was not going to expand to meet the larger number of poets then competing for such rewards. If one were simply to take the Carruth anthology, correct a few of its omissions, bringing the number of contributors up, say, to 150, one would still have to then add another 150 poets just to comparably represent the poetry of the seventies & eighties. Like Moore’s Law, this problem only repeats itself – one would have to add close to another 300 poets to represent all the comparably accomplished (an important qualification) poets practicing now, two decades hence.

Thus, simply attempting to extend Carruth’s project out through the end of the 20^th century would require an anthology containing something like 600 poets. Even at the same impoverished five-pages-to-a-poet allotment (& in practice Carruth shows his own taste in letting some writers, like Frost, go up to 20 pages, leaving others with only a page or two – biographical note included), such a book would entail 3,000 pages. This book would be three times the size of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, four times the size of the existing Carruth (or, if printed instead as a trade paperback, Pound’s Cantos), closer ultimately to the old Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, a seven-pound behemoth of a book that appears to have finally defeated even its publisher.

Certainly one could be “more selective” than Carruth, whose 135 poets includes David Lawson, Patricia Low, William Anderson (a brilliant but little published African-American poet heavily influenced by his friendship with Jack Gilbert), Hy Sobiloff, Hyam Plutzik, Winfield Townley Scott & others whom one could argue about easily enough.¹ That of course is the logic that ultimately lets an anthologist represent the 18^th century with just Alexander Pope – the 20^th century reduced just to Gertrude Stein – but it’s a logic that ultimately leaves out too much of value for me to imagine pursuing. My first question whenever I open an anthology, really the first critical question that has to be asked, is invariably Who’s missing? And anything under 3,000 pages for the 20^th century United States would get to embarrassing exclusions pretty damn fast.

So, like the Baseball Encyclopedia & its competitors (Total Baseball) that were driven out simply by the scale of what had to be done, a decent anthology of 20^th century American poetry is the sort of thing that maybe can happen only on the web. If then.

 

¹ Carruth also noted that he was unable to get permission to use the work of Laura (Riding) Jackson.