I’m in debt to anthologies for much of my education. When you’re young and hungry and everything is new, such collections are like well-stocked cafeterias. You push your tray down the line and sample what looks good. Once seated, if a friend recommends a dish you avoided, you can always get back in line. Thom Gunn in a review of three poetry anthologies also uses a food metaphor:
“For someone
who professes to despise anthologies as much as I do, I certainly stick my nose
into a lot of them. What I have against them is that they are the mere hors d’oeuvres which many readers fill
up on, thus losing their appetites for the main dish -- the collection by a single poet, of which only
the accumulation tells you the full story.”
Young,
enthusiastic readers aren’t likely to stuff themselves on an entrée and never try
it again. If Housman and Cunningham taste good, they'll have a permanent place on the menu. That’s
how I sifted through the Oscar Williams anthologies back in the Sixties. I wish
I still had those paperbacks published by Washington Square Press. On the covers were galleries of poets in small, oval-shaped cameos. Those little books
introduced me to dozens of poets from Richard Lovelace to Karl Shapiro.
Gunn’s
review of three anthologies, “The Postmodernism You Deserve,” was published in
the Spring 1994 issue of The Threepenny
Review. He’s more indulgent than I could ever be with dozens of poets, such
Olson and Creeley. Gunn’s strategy is to not merely review the anthologies but
to examine individual poems chosen by the editors and draw conclusions about
the selection process. Gunn may say he despises anthologies but he certainly
acknowledges their worth, regardless of the reader’s own judgments. He
concludes his generous review with these words, which wittily describe his own
work:
“What is intensity but that single-minded driving force which gets the poet to that place where the whole poem becomes molten with activity and where both poet and reader begin to have the surprises of their lives? It is no longer the Trojan Plain, I think, but Parnassus.”
1 comment:
I remember a book that my mother had, The Best Loved Poems of the American People. She only had a depression-era Texas public school education, but she was always restless for more, and our house was full of books (and some records, too) that were perhaps not typical for a working class household. (How many of us owe our love of literature to our ambitious mothers?) Anyway, the American people love some pretty awful poems - but they love some good ones too. That book was the beginning for me.
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