Ron Silliman wrote:
> Generally, I have to agree with Pierre on this one. Although, I would be
> curious to see if there were a conservative poetry community somewhere
> that felt that the Leary sampling was nearly so well done as was
> Kelly's. With 33 years hindsight, Robert's selections were remarkably on
> target. I'm not at all clear that one would say the same for Leary's
> even if one were a fan of that sort of poem.
Yeah. That was certainly one of Robert's beefs: Leary was not very serious
about his selections, i.e. rather than trying to gather the strongest and
widest selection of work from his community, he seems to have skewed his
choices to momentary likes, dislikes, politicking & manoeuvring. Though
that could be part of the nature of the beast: when there's no clear range
of processual and/or procedural innovations and forms, i.e. when slack
confessional free verse reigns, you can interchange poems and/or poets at
whim.
> So that book seems to me
> always to have had some sort of imbalance. Although, Pierre, I will
> confess to having read every single page of it -- some of which
> dissolved from memory almost on contact, mercifully.
only way I cld read some of them is backwards; that does ever so slightly
improve the duds.
> (And yet, and
> yet...I saw a book by Melvin Walker LaFollette in a bookstore in Santa
> Cruz, CA, two weeks ago and stooped to read through it precisely to see
> what he had been up to, since I've barely heard a peep of him since that
> anthology.)
I wld do the same -- so how was the new LaFollette?
>
>
> But there were lots of kinds of American poetry left out of that book
> even then. All the modes of surrealism surrounding The Sixties and Kayak
> for example (Bly, James Wright, George Hitchcock, James Tate, Bill
> Knott, Russell Edson, et alia).
That's obviously due to the editorial binary & the book's dialectic: it is
meant to be a "controversy"-- which leaves everybody else on the
side-lines. But multi-handed books are difficult -- that first (no, second,
after Paul Buck and my attempt published in France) "new british poetry"
anthology, with its four editors for as many sections, shows this
awkwardness, no matter how important it was to get that work public at that
time.
>
>
> An even broader attempt, it seems to me, was The Voice That Is Great
> Within Us, Hayden Carruth's attempt at a 20th C. anthology of American
> verse (though only up to around 1960). It seems to me more in the line
> of some of the early anthologies done by Harriet Monroe or Alfred
> Kreymbourg in the 1920s that tried to be entirely inclusive. One of the
> problems that such a project faces, of course, is the absolute number of
> poets and the sheer diversity of it all. One would end up with a page or
> two of everything and no sense of shape.
such ragbags have their utility -- I used to use the Carruth for teaching
intro to American lit & keep a kind of fondness for the book.
>
>
> There are magazines like that, of course, usually edited by college
> students, and they prove pretty forgettable. In that sense, I much
> prefer the ardent and committed perspective of someone with a vision --
> Clayton Eshleman at Sulfur, Barrett Watten at This -- to a mishmash of
> everything.
yes indeed.
Still the question of mixed bags, readings & books, remains a difficult one
in the British context. I agree with cris in terms of the usefulness of
such readings, when set up carefully in the right context. But the matter
of books seems a different issue altogether. More useful than a mixed antho
would be the kind of project recently discussed, i.e. a collected poems of
Peter Riley, and then of about a dozen other poets of the same strength.
The problem there would be not so much production costs (though these are
clearly not negligeable), but the eternal question of distribution /
reviews, etc.
Pierre
--
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Pierre Joris
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http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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Through the living the road of the dead
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