ON THE ANTHOLOGY

A few weeks back, when the arguments about Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20^th Century American Poetry were cresting, another poet asked a group of friends, “Would you do it, if they asked you?”

Her own answer was, “Not me.” The sense was, with all the controversy, it might not be worth the trouble, let alone the time.

I, on the other hand, relished the thought. The dozens and dozens of discussions about the choices, and the omissions, in the Penguin, gives a fairly clear graph of the kinds of trouble any anthologist invites. On the other hand, the idea of organizing the constellations of practice, brilliance, thought, is exciting—in the way the idea of putting together a syllabus, or revising a syllabus, for a survey is genuinely exciting. Each time I think about the shape of my American Poetry course or the course in History of Poetry in English I teach every few years, I’m grateful for the call to reconsider the choices I’ve made.

Each time I teach such a course, I offer the following excerpt from A. R. Ammons’s Sphere (1974), which nicely states the complex vicissitudes of reading and evaluation that go into any single decision to discuss a poem or a poet, and which might be both a guide and a caution to the anthologist.

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in the generations and becomings of our minds, anthologies,
good sayings are genes, the images, poems, stories
chromosomes and the interminglings of these furnish beginnings

within continuinties, continuities within trials, mischances,
fortunate forwardings: gene pool, word hoard: the critic
samples the new thing, he turns it over in his consideration,

he checks alignments, proportions, he looks into the body of
the anthology to see if the new thing hooks in, distorts, to raise
or ruin: he considers the weight, clarity, viability of

the new thing and reconsiders the whole body of the anthology:
if the new thing finds no attachment, if energy, cementing,
does not flow back and forth between it and the anthology,

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it dies, withered away from the configuration of the people:
but if it lives, critic and teacher show it to the
young, unfold its meaning, fix its roots and extend it reach:

the anthology is the moving, changing definition of the
imaginative life of the people, the repository and source,
genetic: the critic and teacher protect and reveal the source

and watch over the freedom of becomings there: the artist
stands freely into advancings: critic and teacher choose, shape,
and transmit: all three need the widest opening to chance

and possibility, so perceptions that might grow into currents
of mind can find their way: all three are complete men,
centralists and peripheralists who, making, move and stay:

Ammons’s explanation of the anthology suggest both the complexity of the work of choice and ideals of procedure and reception: Ammons’s anthologist searches for the “cementing” energy that will choose the poem and make its inclusion and its place transparently inevitable.

Having worked on literary journals for almost twenty years and having every few months confronted the shape of courses charged with communicating historical structures and trends in poetry’s history (or histories), I can appreciate this moment Ammons describes, the charge, the illumination in the moment that such energy can be found, seen, and described, even as such description might seem redundant. I love that moment when a poem seems to ask and answer a question.

Just the same, though, many poems that mean a great deal to me now were those poems that were opaque to me on first read, poems that were opaque to me, and which no amount of smart argument would have rendered legible. Finding these poems in anthologies and on syllabi, finding them within these structures or gestures of authority, prompted me to read them again and more seriously.

I came this way to Melvin Tolson, and once I finally saw the energy that cements his work to the Harlem Renaissance and, as well, to the Modernist moment, and to poets like Robert Hayden and Nathaniel Mackey, poets whose practice and achievement refracts the geometries of the movements which dominate the historian’s description of their times. And I continue to believe that Tolson is criminally under-read and under-appreciated. I’m glad to see him included in Dove’s anthology, and I’m sad to read others almost dismissing the choice as an indication of a personal or demographic predilection. Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry also includes a generous presentation of Tolson’s work—a choice that didn’t seem to raise the same hackles, so I wonder about the number of times Tolson is mentioned in a complaint against Dove’s choices.

A good anthology, I believe, doesn’t, shouldn’t merely repeat a configuration of accepted judgments. It should, in some cases, challenge such a configurations and, in other cases, refine it. Interesting, intriguing, even puzzling inclusions—these choices to include something others haven’t—these are the places where the anthologist puts forth her vision most clearly, and they’re worth considering more fully, I think, apart from other complaints.

What an anthology leaves out may be just as interesting, just as troubling, just as necessary. What’s omitted may demonstrate, just as clearly, the anthologist’s vision—though, at the same time, certain omissions may call the anthologist’s vision, or understanding, into question, insofar as the selection does not at least temporarily confirm the prevailing trends, does not fully engage a community of consensus in order to reorganize it. The discussions about what the Penguin omits seem to me to be testing the selection in this way, by trying to determine the logic in exclusion as well as inclusion.

It’s unfortunate that Dove’s logic may not present itself as clearly as possible because of permissions difficulties, which seem to have occasioned certain omissions that cloud or confuse a reader’s sense of the book’s authority and, thereby, invite doubt to considerations of the book’s inclusions. It’s even more unfortunate that the book—whether considered as a finite number of pages or as a budget, what is affordable to the publisher—seems to have created an arena in which the choice to include one thing appears as a choice to exclude something, as if choosing and not choosing were the same act.

For this reason, I’m interested in R. T. Smith’s wish to see Dove’s ideal table of contents.

But I’d also like to see this call go further.

As a response to, as an extension of this conversation, might we ask for dozens of tables of contents? Might we imagine an anthology that gathers not the poems themselves but the tables of contents both poets and critics might offer in their own ideal gatherings?

I feel that my syllabi, my course design and my management of discussion in my classes, represent attempts at such selection, that I’ve been working on this project for many years. Perhaps, over the coming year, I’ll be able to make my own selection and put it forth as an engagement.

I hope, over the coming months, over the coming year, others will do so as well, so we can move beyond a set of questions about a particular selection to the thing we all seem to be interested in—the shape, or shapes, of a poetry many of us love dearly.