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3 July 2005: While considering the way Enemies of Poetry like Kooser act, and how I, in their position would act, I've thought a bit about what I'd do as an high-powered influential anthologist. I'd do the standard thing: something along the lines of the Palgrave, containing 400 great American Poems. Not the best American poems, because I'd have to be familiar with every poem ever composed by an American to do that, and I'm not--nor would I be that confident that I could even if I did know all the poems I needed to. I'm sure I'd do a far better job than the dits who have edited the yearly collections of "best" American poetry that David Lehman presides over, though.
One question occurred to me that I thought interesting enough to write about here. I was concerned that my anthology might be too long. One solution to that would be to make a two volumme set of it. But: where to divide the poetry--that was the question. Where would a good chronological middle to American Poetry be, a point at which to split the best American poetry more or less in half? It used to be 1900. 1950 has since been used, but not--I don't think--as such a marker.
This is surely an open question. My present thought is 1960. By then, the last of the canonical modernists were gone or almost gone. Stasguards, of course, would deny that many great American poems have been composed since then. However, it is probable that as many serious American poets composed after that date as before it, due to our humungous population growth, so it would seem foolish to reject out of hand the possibility that a lot of superior poetry got created after it. Anyway, that's the date I'm going with at the moment.
So, if I gave the modernists 180 poems, and the nineteenth-century American poets another twenty (sorry, I don't think many great American poems were composed before 1900--or 1910), I'd give Wilshberia thirty or forty, the language poets thirty or forty (Silliman, Bernstein and others would have to help me out there) and the rest to my crowd--visual poets, infra-verbal poets, contra-genteel poets (which would include rap and slam poets), sound and performance poets, and--yes--mathematical poets. I would hope people would direct me to the poetry of schools I'm ignorant of, as well.
Wilshberia would be the hardest to deal with because it's turned out a vast number of very good poems but, in my opinion, almost no great poems. No doubt I'd have a bias toward the work of the poets I am friends with--and against the work of poets I don't know well, or fail to understand. Certainly, my anthology would be controversial--and flawed, but no one would be able reasonably to accuse it of not covering the full range of our country's poetry.
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