'The Whole Poem Becomes Molten with Activity'

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.”