Anthologies, I'd say, set up an agenda (ie "New American Poetry" for
the Olson-Duncan-Spicer nexus etc; in Britain the Movement, Larkin
particularly, being near enough canonized by, or at least through
anthologies in the late '50s) but, of course, can't entirely clearly
show how to plot a course creatively into the future; which was, I
think, Allen Fisher's persuasively expressed point on this list.
But then the poetic agenda as set, for readers, students etc as well
as practitioners, though retrospect might persuade to have been ill
portrayed (ie incomplete, unrepresentative, incomprehensible even)
won't go away [symptomatic of a perpetual 'misreading' of sorts], and
keeps coming back to haunt those who would prefer to think it
couldn't or shouldn't have been rendered thus for posterity - as eg
what has the Movement, through, in many respects, a relatively small
number of 'key' texts, including anthologies, done to obscure our
awareness of the New Apocalypse's shaping of, or failure to shape
British poetry since the '40s?
Larkin, consequently, seems, for better or worse, just as
indispensable to understanding contemporary poetry as Yeats, and
searching for causes and explanations, anthologies are one obvious
and necessary place to look.
Guides, manifestoes, charters to common purposes and filiations that
never quite were, in every anthology there is material that doesn't
quite seem to fit there, that might be ripe for siphoning off into
another, more productive direction (as Olson or Larkin, for instance,
could set whole agendas, if not entirely guide them, *outwith*, but
not _without_ anthologies...).
Clark Allison
Aberdeen
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