Aside from getting their summers off, English professors don’t receive many perks. Drug companies aren’t deluging you with samples and sending you to Bali to persuade you to prescribe their new arthritis medication or cure for erectile dysfunction, and no senior partner is dangling from his hands the keys to a new BMW convertible as a means of persuading you to sign with his firm.
Instead you get free textbooks, not a very sexy form of lagniappe. Most of them are anthologies of poetry and fiction that publishers hope you will adopt for your classes. Each year I get a couple dozen, and they tend to be interchangeable. W.W. Norton is the Microsoft of such textbook publishers, and Norton itself markets various almost-interchangeable titles, such as “The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry,” “The Norton Anthology of Poetry,” “The Norton Introduction to Poetry,” “The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry” and “The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Edition.”
There’s big money to be made from these books, and Norton’s anthologies sell in the millions. When other publishers offer similar anthologies, they are for the most part Norton knock-offs. This makes for a strange state of affairs, but also a sadly familiar one.
But my purpose is not to complain about Norton, nor to express consternation about the economics of the textbook publishing industry. I’m not interested in who publishes these books, but in who compiles them. Editors of anthologies have been around since Hellenic times, but they always have struck me as writerly jackalopes, practicing a discipline that isn’t exactly scholarship, isn’t precisely criticism and certainly isn’t creative writing.
So what do anthologists want, and what do their productions stand to give us? It is surprising that these questions are not often asked. Surprising especially because, for the last 150 years, ever since the days when every Victorian household kept a copy of Palgrave’s “The Golden Treasury” on the same shelf as the Bible, anthologies have been the principal “delivery system” of poetry for the general reader.
I suspect that we refrain from asking these questions because their answers are apt to make us uncomfortable. The motives for editing a poetry anthology are often rather base: Whether you are a scholar cooking up a period edition for Norton or a poet selecting work by your contemporaries, visions of dollar signs will dance in your head. Scholars and poets rarely make much money, but classroom adoptions of a widely used anthology surely do, and can keep on making money for decades. A. Poulin Jr. is a case in point. By the time of Poulin’s death a few years ago, his “Contemporary American Poetry” did well for its editor and for Houghton Mifflin, its publisher. Six editions of the book have been published, and it has now taught a couple of generations of English majors to recognize contemporary poetry–or at least to recognize American poets through their mug shots. The selection of poet photos that headed their selections seemed to have demanded more time from Poulin than did his choices of the poetry itself. It took him three editions to decide to include Elizabeth Bishop, but photos of the poets seemed to change with every edition. W.D. Snodgrass, for example, grew a longer and longer beard with each successive version of the book: In the first couple of them he’s photographed with a pair of Borzois, looking as though he had stepped out of an issue of Town and Country. By the time of the most recent edition, he has turned into Santa Claus. But I digress.
Textbook-ready anthologies such as Poulin’s are not the only moneymakers for publishers, as evidenced by the plethora of gimmick-oriented anthologies that glut the shelves of Barnes and Noble and Borders. The era of empowerment anthologies–which began with various collections of black poetry in the ’60s and Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert’s “Norton Anthology of Literature by Women” in the ’70s–has devolved into the weird frivolity of what might be called boutique poetry: anthologies of poems on–among other things–hotels and motels, cars, alcoholism, Boomer-era girl hoods, insomnia, rock ‘n’ roll, sacred poetry, “poetry of witness,” condoms, trains and railroads, depression, jazz, and one with 50-odd dramatic monologues spoken in the voices of various poets’ dogs. (The title of the latter book is, alas, “Unleashed.”) A former student of mine came up with the idea for the condom anthology, which is titled–What else?–“Getting It On.” Though he has yet to publish a book of his own poems, he is now represented by an agent.
It is hard to say who buys the boutique anthologies, but someone does, and these someones far outnumber the typical buyers of individual collections of poetry. It’s interesting, too, that this type of anthology divides almost equally between subjects that seem designed to bring forth rhapsodic celebration of the American Experience–jazz, cars, trains, etc.–and subjects that suggest abjection: alcoholism, insomnia, depression. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess that I wrote the foreword to the anthology of poems on depression, but the book’s editor–who had solicited my foreword and accepted it enthusiastically–later rejected poems of mine he’d also solicited for the anthology. They were apparently not depressing enough, or depressing in the wrong way.)
It should go without saying that one of the most invigorating reasons for editing an anthology, beyond its financial attractions, is the opportunity it offers an editor to exercise his/her tastes and convictions. As an editor, you can luxuriate in your privilege to decide that Poem A is depressing in the right way while Poem B is not, or that sections from Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowles” might be right for previous editions of your Norton, but not for the one you are preparing.
Good anthologies are the thoughtful product of many such decisions; bad ones tend to result when matters of thoughtful taste become afflicted with the various forms of hubris to which anthologists are especially susceptible. Anthologists, like English professors, are often failed writers. Yet editing an anthology can allow you to postpone the admission of such failure. By basking in the reflected light of those poets you admire, and by selecting the work from them that you regard as best, you have found a way to crash the poets’ party. If your anthology includes poems by your contemporaries, you can exercise the time-honored tradition of including some of your own work in the book. In fact, you can select a lot of it. Oscar Williams, perhaps the most prolific and successful anthologist of the last century, was by no means a similarly successful poet. Randall Jarrell famously remarked that Williams’ poems looked as though they’d “been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.” Worse yet, Williams tended to include large chunks of his own product in his anthologies. Here is Jarrell again, on Williams’ “A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry”:
“(T)he book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’ poems than I have ever seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems–and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.”
Williams had been an early champion of Jarrell and his friend Robert Lowell, but after these remarks, and a similar putdown in a review by Lowell, neither poet was ever included in a Williams anthology again.
In discussing the complicated and often dismal politics and economics of anthology-making, I have refrained from addressing one of the more controversial questions concerning them. I speak, of course, of how anthologies help to define and shape the literary canon. How can the canon be expanded to include writers formerly marginalized because of their race, class, ethnicity or sex? This question has occupied English departments for three decades, and the issues it entails are considerably more complex than whether Oscar Williams’ typewriter can write twice as well as Thomas Hardy. Literary canons are fluid, and poets’ literary stock can fluctuate wildly over the centuries: Donne was forgotten for almost 300 years before the Modernists took him up again. The Modernist canon is also being realigned. In Cary Nelson’s recently published “Anthology of Modern American Poetry,” Langston Hughes commands a larger selection than Dickinson, Whitman, Frost or Stevens, and Nelson includes a lot of interesting material that has never been found in a major anthology before: There’s Gertrude Stein in abundance, the Objectivist poets are at last given their rightful place, and there is even a selection of haiku by Japanese-American concentration-camp survivors.
But Nelson’s canon-busting has its downside as well. Amy Lowell hasn’t been in an anthology for a long time, but Nelson finds room for 10 pages of her “Amygist” twaddle. Because one of Nelson’s scholarly interests is the Marxist and proletariat poetry of the ’20s and ’30s, he dusts off some old lefties who are hardly in need of reappraisal. Edwin Rolfe, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, is represented by a big selection. His, “Elegia” begins with the lines, “Madrid Madrid Madrid Madrid / I call your name endlessly, savor it like a lover,” and goes on in a similar vein for four densely footnoted pages. It takes a lot of courage to print a poem as static as this. Jarrell, by the way, is included with a selection half the length of Rolfe’s. It takes a lot of courage to think that Edwin Rolfe is twice as good as Randall Jarrell.
Of course, Nelson and others in my profession might counter by saying that to print what is “good” is not the point; that the new breed of anthology is designed to be representative and comprehensive rather than good; that the new breed of anthology should instead reflect the totality of literary history and culture, should expand the canon, or, as Nelson states in his study “Repression and Recovery,” bring the very notion of “canonicity,” into question. This sounds good to me, too, but Randall Jarrell is still better than Edwin Rolfe, and so, perhaps, is Oscar Williams. Anthology-making has become a mysterious business, and it becomes curiouser and curiouser with each new anthology and each passing year.
But the question of how literature transforms our lives has always been a mysterious business, and I count my first reading of two poetry anthologies in summer 1972 as among the most transformative experiences of my youth, far more transformative, in fact, than attending Woodstock or marching on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War.
One of the anthologies was Willis Barnstone’s magisterial “Modern European Poetry,” which introduced me to figures such as Rilke, Neruda, Montale, Mandalstam and Celan. For nearly 30 years, that book has never been far from my side, and though it is no longer in print, I maintain a stockpile of six extra copies–a good thing, too, since I’ve worn out three.
The other anthology is a little New American Library paperback published in 1969. “The Contemporary American Poets,” edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and University of Chicago professor Mark Strand, is still in print, and is still being used as a textbook. I didn’t first read the book in a classroom, but during my breaks in my first post-high school job. I was a night watchman in a large office building, and it was in many ways an ideal position–nothing much to do but check the doors a couple of times a night and try to stay awake until morning. And it was here, sitting on a stool that I had brought into the elevator that became my de facto office and library carrel, that in the course of two mesmerizing nights I read “The Contemporary American Poets” from cover to cover, and then on the third night began it again. This was my first encounter with the exactitude of Elizabeth Bishop’s images, the troubled mixture of public and private speech of Robert Lowell, and the agonized gallows humor of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs.” I experienced my own version of the astonishment and wonder at discovering great literature that Keats describes in his famous sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”
After my third reading of the anthology, it occurred to me that I could also pass the time by memorizing some of its poems. I began with a poem by Richard Hugo, “Degrees of Gray at Philipsburg.” It was, admittedly, an odd choice for a 19-year-old in the throes of Keatsian ecstasies and hormonal overload. It is a poem about depression, both personal and economic, in which the speaker projects his own mid-life crisis upon a dying Montana mining town, and does so in decidedly morose terms: Call it the pathetic fallacy at its most pathetic. But the poem is also a small masterpiece, and thanks to the ways Hugo evokes the majesty of the iambic pentameter line while at the same time drawing from it a particularly jagged and discordant music, it is an ideal poem to memorize. Here’s the first stanza:
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned seventy this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
Not much more happens in the poem; it gets bleaker and bleaker as the conceit is developed. The final passage, which describes a red-haired waitress bringing lunch to the poem’s protagonist, isn’t exactly the sort of epiphanic gesture Hugo seems to have intended it to be. Yet in some inexplicable way, every poem I have written in the ensuing years, and every thought I have had about poetry in that time, derives from that night in the elevator, as I sat under its buzzing fluorescent lights and took in every word of Hugo’s poem. By the time I punched out at 6 the next morning, I knew “Degrees of Gray at Philipsburg” by heart, and I think it was the first time I understood what it meant to truly hear and feel a poem, to get under the poem’s skin and engage it with the intellect and the body.
Some 10 years later, Richard Hugo selected my first book of poetry for publication. A year after that, he was dead of cancer, and I regret that we were never able to meet, for in many ways I owe my identity as a poet to him, not because he chose my book for a literary competition, but because–without his ever knowing it–his lines, printed on cheap paper in a pocket anthology taught me what it meant to read a poem. It is easy to be cynical about poetry anthologies, but not about experiences such as this.
