What a delight it is to find the forum being conversational again!
Re Mark's latest:
>How about mapping the field rather than canon formation? There's a difference. I'd imagine that all anthologists are aware from the outset that they can't include everyone who fits their criteria, but the regrets will be of a different kind. I've done two anthologies, both geographically and temporally limited, in which I attempted a mapping that approached replicating the field. This meant that if I included poet x of tendency x' there mightn't be room for any poets from y'. So poet x, whose work I love, is missing. But the hope is that the anthology will get readers interested in the field and the map will be good enough that the place of x will be apparent. As opposed to canon formation, which is usually a combination of covering one's arse (note concession to British spelling) by including whatever notable whose absence would set off howling, and one's personal top 50. Outside of these two types of anthology there's always the "me and my friends" variety, which has no value beyond the individual poems--no added value created by the assembling.
The point about mapping the field is a good one --- though introducing the field would probably be a more realistic target in most cases. Don't anthologies become more essential, indeed often the only guide, when it comes to writing that's more inaccessible to us? There's no academic work that is more straightforwardly valuable.
There are also anthologies that pursue a line of thought that brings poems together, even well-known ones, in what seems to be an illuminating way. I still remember with gratitude Peter Levi's anthology of Christian verse, which included Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. These things are naturally hit and miss but, at the time I read it (thirty years ago -ish), I felt I learnt something.
"Canon-formation", i.e. for audiences who aren't disposed to seek out poetry for themselves so borrow their conceptions of value or significance from the anthology itself, seems to me now a matter of little interest. I'm unconvinced that such supine audiences still exist. Most people, if they like modern poetry at all, tend to be pretty passionate about it, and not likely to take anthologies as authoritative.
|