Entry 234 — Thoughts on Anthologizing
Another year’s anthology of “the best American Poetry” is about to hit the market. A brief discussion at New-Poetry about it got me thinking once again about the proper way to edit such a book. The groundwork, which should have been laid long ago, would be to list all the schools of contemporary American Poetry (and Canadian, since I consider American and Canadian culture one), as I’ve been trying to do for years–without great success because just about no one in poetry is willing to help me. Hence, if I were asked to oversee such an anthology, I would turn down the job unless I were chosen two years in advance. And given a good deal of money to hire researchers, as well as to support me for two years (which would only cost a few thousand a year).
I’d hire a few young researchers (with no background in poetry to confuse them), spend a week with them telling them how to recognize poetry and what characteristics to look for in distinguishing one kind from another. Then I’d set them loose. Their specific job would be first to list the poetry magazines published during the previous twelve months. The anthology would consist of poems from periodicals only, as I forgot to mention–and as, I believe, the current “best” anthologies do. Including those published on the Internet.
Job number two would be to sort the magazines into the eleven main categories of poetry my taxonomy presently recognizes (and which should not be controversial–conventional free verse, visual poetry, surrealistic poetry, etc.). Magazines with more than one kind of poetry would go into more than one slot. Magazines containing poetry whose classification my researchers were not able with confidence to determine would go into a twelfth category. These I would examine, and discuss with my work crew.
Meanwhile I would issue announcements everywhere I could think of but principally the Internet calling for the names and descriptions of schools of poetry, offering a monetary award for any new one I was unaware of. I would be generous, and pay for any obviously good attempt whether I accepted the group of poets involved a school of poetry or not. I’d try to generate discussions, writing provocative posts about the project under many names.
I feel 99.99% sure I could, within a year, have a list of every school of contemporary North American poetry, which I would define as any group of two or more poets doing similar work that I judged significantly unlike poetry outside the group. Some schools I’d have to divide into sub-schools. I’m thinking of the language poetry school, which consists, it seems to me, of three or more such sub-schools, each considerably different from the others. Ditto the visual poetry school. I’d rather have too many schools on my list than miss one.
My guess would be that I and my helpers would find about fifty schools. I would place them in my taxonomy. (Just the thought of doing that excites me, as I suspect it would excite almost on one else in poetry.) Then I’d try to combine similar schools, my goal being to work with just twenty or fewer poetry groups.
All the research done would enable me readily to find one or two editors who were expert in the school or schools of poetry their magazines preferred. I’d hire them to supply me with every poem in a magazine from the year the anthology would cover that they thought as good as any poems being published. With an asterisk next to any they thought genuinely belonged in the anthology. I would hope to be able to skim all the magazine, myself. In any case, I would add all the poems that jumped out at me. The only egalitarian rule I’d follow would be to make sure to have at least one poem from each of my twenty or fewer groups. Finally, I would cut my selections down to a hundred or so, perhaps asking for the opinion or others on the few I wasn’t sure of.
That would be it except for an introduction explaining and defending my procedure, and making the usually declaimer about the choices being, in the final analysis, subjective–but meaning it.