The first question to be asked about the recent Poetry issue is why so much of it is
devoted to one more commercial anthology of poetry, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems.
The stasguard response to this question is predictable: why not? The anthology will
contain unexceptionable poems, for the most part, and--celebritized--will no doubt sell
widely. Readers of Poetry surely ought to be told about it. This is crap. The anthology
will be reviewed sufficiently elsewhere, sometimes even in daily newspapers. All readers
of poetry will find out about it without the help of a magazine supposedly specializing in
poetry. Furthermore, what if they did not? What if no one found out about the anthology
and it got quickly remaindered and forgotten? What difference would it make? The same
sort of poetry gathered in Good Poems is readily available in scores of other publications,
and all over the Internet. My own guess as to why Poetry found the Keillor anthology
worth so many pages is simply because it knows no better, so distant it is from the front
lines of poetry.
A second question that the preceding provides a more than sufficient answer to is why
Poetry selected two ignorant stasguards, Dana Gioia (perhaps American's lead stasguard
in poetry at present though Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom still have a great deal of
power) and August Kleinzahler, a prize-winning conventional American poet, to review
Good Poems. Neither is capable of rising above boilerplate--long-heeded boilerplate, I
should add, as opposed to the long-disregarded boilerplate that I'm now emitting.
Gioia begins his quota of boilerplate with an entertaining sketch of his preconceptions of
Good Poems.. He thought it would contain "good poems, but probably not good enough
to make the book a necessary addition to the already crowded field of anthologies." After
reading it, though, he changed his opinion "profoundly." Why? Because the poems
selected for it from the works of dead poets and long-certified living poets whose work is
already in dozens of anthologies are often lesser known poems of theirs! Not only that,
but twenty or thirty of those with poems in the anthology are not well-known, at all. I
won't be so churlish as to say either of these two features of the anthology is of no value.
I can't say they come close to making me revise my opinion of it profoundly, though.
After all, there is little need for reprinting even lesser known poems of the greats since
anyone half-serious about poetry will know the poets involved and where to go to find all
of their unanthologized poems. As for the welcome inclusion of poems by relative
unknowns (like a favorite of mine, Robert Lax), so what? Every anthology has a few
names any reader will find unfamiliar, and--while I haven't checked--I'll wager that just
all the lesser-knowns with work in Good Poems have been been published in the
mainstream, and most of them have won prizes. And I am close to 100% certain that
there are no burstnorm poems (i.e., poems making significant use of some poetic
technique not in wide-spread use by 1950 at the latest) in Good Poems.
As for what is in Keillor's anthology, Gioia says little about it. He quotes a portion of
only one poem, one by May Swenson that he considers a "knock-out travel poem"; but the
part he quotes is just a drab comparison of herds of buffalo with herds of human
automobile-travelers. He is too little a genuine critic to tell us what specifically it is
about Swenson's or any other poet's work in Keillor's collection that makes them worth
anthologizing, and why; and he is too much a philistine to be worried by the anthology's
exclusion of whole schools of poetry.
Gioia reaches his nadir early in his piece when he remarks that "Keillor's introduction
displays more critical acumen and editorial courage than one usually finds prefacing an
anthology." I don't know about the "editorial courage" part of Gioia's description, but the
"critical acuman" part has to be wrong. Keillor displays none. He just issues dogmatic
statements of his likes and dislikes. For example, he at one point says that "in the
republic of letters, there are many more (Marianne) Moores than Millays. From Millay
it's a straight shot to Anne Sexton, a writer of profound exuberance and with and a hot
number, and her cohort, the beautiful horsekeeper, Maxine Kumin, two women who,
forgive me, make St. Sylvia look like tuna salad." I would say that there are scores of
poets not in Keillor's anthology that make Sexton and Kumin look like tuna salad without
the tuna, but I would be contemptuous of anyone who thought my verdict "critical
acuman." (Note: critical acuman requires that one support one's opinions with facts and
reasoning; at its highest level, it also requires that one at least sometime discuss
uncertified poets.)
Gioia ends his review rather absurdly commending Keillor's radio show, Writer's
Almanac, for "probably (having) done more to expand the audience for American poetry
over tha past ten years than all the learned journals of New England." I don't know of
any "learned journals of New England" that are doing anything to expand the audience for
poetry. I likewise wonder just how many listeners to Writer's Almanac who are not
already interested in poetry ever become serious partakers of it because of that show.
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