I don't remember when I started reading poetry,
but by the time I was 11, when I wrote my first
poem, I was deeply involved in my parents'
Untermeyer Modern British and American Poetry. My
parents weren't particularly interested in
poetry, but it was a book that most educated
USians had in the house, not as a college
leftover, but because as adults they were
supposed to have it. The reading of poetry for
their generation was an accomplishment to be
aspired to. It was from an anthology that my
mother read to me, one very early morning when I
woke her up--I couldn't have been more than
five--the whole of The Ancient Mariner. And there
was an enormous red anthology of British poetry
and prose from Caedmon to the early 20th century
(I still have it, but the details are in storage
with the book) that I read in High School--huge
selections of Thomas Browne, whole books of
Paradise Lost, enormously useful introductory
essays. Those anthologies helped form my
vocation. As an adult or simulacrum thereof the
New American Poetry was useful for me as a filler
of gaps, as was Paul Auster's 20th Century French
anthology (out of print, but readily available
used, and much recommended). Now if I buy
anthologies it will be likely something
specialized, like the Auster, or country
anthologies. It's not bad, as an adult, beyond
the danger of noxious influences, to learn what
other people think of as the canon of a field they're deeply invested in.
Every anthology has its failings in the minds of
every one of its well-informed readers. A young
Cuban scholar who had seen the Virgilio Piņera
selection for my Cuban anthology asked me angrily
why I hadn't included (among the selection of 14
poems) his favorite poem. Some (me among them)
have taken Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris to
task for omissions from Poems for the Millenium,
but it's an enormously useful pair of books,
giving access to poetry by dozens of poets I'd
never heard of, and also positing another way to
draw the boundaries, across political and linguistic frontiers.
The better alternative for class use isn't
necessarily a teaher-selected anthology--most
teachers of English have very limited knowledge of or interest in poetry.
It's occurred to me that the way to improve
literacy in this country would be to give each
bookless family a couple of hundred used books.
They could be selected at random from donated
piles in a warehouse. It almost doesn't matter
what they are--for the pre-literate child any
book is a source of wonder, even moreso if their
adults are occasionally seen opening one. It was
my great good fortune that my upwardly-aspiring
parents, and my self-taught maternal granparents,
were readers and were incapable of throwing books away.
Mark
At 08:59 AM 4/29/2008, you wrote:
>This is sort of a Romantics versus Classicists debate, ain't it? The
>Romantics believe in the infallibility of the individual Soul & the
>Classicists believe in the infallibility of Reason, or Ideas, or
>Intellectual structures of some sort. What seems "destructive" to me is to
>insist on one without the other. Anyway, different anthologies have
>different purposes and are produced for different audiences, including
>college students. Everyman's has a series of theme anthologies -- dogs,
>jazz, flowers, what have you -- that might introduce someone to a poem or
>poet who otherwise might not find it. Other examples abound, such as Mark's,
>of poems from another language.
>
>jd
>
>On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > I went to a Secondary Modern. We were meant to be good with our hands.
> > No anthologies for us. No, I'm not kidding. Hence the mimeographs. I
> > also only had two English teachers the whole of my early academic
> > life.
> >
> > I think there's a mismatch of experience here. I've never taken an
> > English degree, I have no idea what Anthologies EngLit students read.
> > I did plough my way through Norton Post Modern American Poetry book
> > which is a mandated book? Or the nearest I could get to it. The poems
> > therein occasionally seemed to have no interest in being part of their
> > gathering. Was the Norton book "destructive"? Not for me. I picked up
> > things I would not have done elsewhere.
> >
> > I guess the books I dislike are the ones I used to see in Browns of
> > Cambridge, the ones for students, the ones that used to scream: "Read
> > this book, and you'll understand POETRY." One such book was coloured
> > red, it had a nice heft, the sort you could use for a door-stopper. I
> > guess for some, for those who had to take a liberal arts module, it
> > was fine. Get in, write an essay, get out again. It's OK if you want
> > that sort of thing. I think they verged on the edge of destructiveness
> > for those who wanted a more rounded experience.
> >
> > Roger
> > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 11:51 AM, judy prince <[log in to unmask]>
> > wrote:
> > > Wonderful, Roger, that you've chosen to embrace this issue---and from
> > your
> > > own poetry-awakenings---rather than peck at a convenient stiff edge or
> > two.
> > > My first knowing of poems was from my sis's (me 11, she 16) homemade
> > 3-ring
> > > binder filled with carefully-typewritten poems. She'd, as had your
> > English
> > > teacher, and then you, given herself the luxury of Her Own Collection,
> > > culled from those at school and on our regular visits to the library.
> > For
> > > quite awhile I assumed they were her own poems! <g> Later, I just
> > enjoyed
> > > flipping thru the binder and memorizing bits, comforted by their
> > > familiarity.
> > >
> > > Again I say that my prob is less (if at all) with the Selecting than it
> > is
> > > with the imposing and sanctioning of "standards" for poetry, as
> > presented in
> > > the Perfect Wholes of edu-anthologies. For me, my sister's collection
> > meant
> > > I could do the same: I could (at most) write my own collection, or (at
> > > least) choose poems I preferred. But the glossy, fat, annotated,
> > annointed
> > > school anthologies made me doubtful, glaze-eyed, and suspicious. I'd
> > been
> > > +distanced+ from poems, poets, and the possibility of my own creatings.
> > My
> > > model had been my sister. Now it was Somebody/ies that I never was and
> > > never could be. "Models" are profoundly important, esp for females and
> > > "minorities"---as well as many males and most of the "majority" who feel
> > > weirdly outside the mainframe.
> > >
> > > And to the lesser prob of Selection. Though it seems the obvious
> > problem,
> > > I think it's largely a false issue. Rather, anthologies conveniently,
> > and I
> > > think, disastrously, preclude the ways folk can know poetry. Let's
> > just
> > > take one way as an example---the one that most affected you. If each of
> > > your teachers, eschewing anthologies, had mimeo-ed poems they admired &
> > > loved---and from that private-made-public joy had lit debates in class
> > (the
> > > inimitable "stick" of peer opinions goaded to gather
> > resources)-----would
> > > you, honestly, have suffered the lack of anthologies? You mite've had a
> > > different patchwork of poems, but would it have been an "inferior",
> > > less-igniting collection? I suspect, from your telling, that it would
> > have
> > > opened more of the poetry world as well as your confident participation
> > in
> > > it.
> > >
> > > It may turn on WHO does the selecting, the evaluating, the
> > default-deciding
> > > of what is ("good") poetry.
> > >
> > > Judy
> >
> >
> > --
> > My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> > "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
> > She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
> > The Go-Betweens
> >
>
>
>
>--
>Joseph Duemer
>Professor of Humanities
>Clarkson University
>Weblog: sharpsand.net
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