December 2011 – Snopes

Buried Antipathies: The Dove Anthology, Second Wind

R.T. Smith

In her introduction to The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry Rita Dove cites exorbitant reprint costs as the reason for omitting work by Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. In her rebuke to Helen Vendler she suggests that her selections from Wallace Stevens and other unspecified omissions were also a matter of financial exigency. In that same document Dove asserts that “buried antipathies” may provide the motives for omissions of other authors. As one of the readers who is having difficulty understanding the full aesthetic agenda behind her choices, I can imagine an Editor’s Afterward which could clear the air.

The decision to include so many writers who were hardly peaking in the twentieth century remains mysterious to me, but I suspect that any venture by various editors in that direction would produce heated disagreement about the most promising candidates. In fact, I don’t want to consider erasing any of the poets she includes; since we’re in virtual space, for now, hurrah for abundance. Let them stay; we can simply agree to disagree about who the rising stars might be. I think Dove should, however, come clean about two categories she refers to – the too-expensive poems and the buried antipathies. It would be valuable for me to know exactly what poems and poets were disqualified for economic reasons. It must have been frustrating to know that, although she was engaged to render a personal, rather than a consensus, anthology, she would be constrained by inadequate funds. If she would reveal those expensive works, we could see more clearly what her ideal anthology would have looked like. I would really love to see her ideal Table of Contents.

Secondly, it would be useful to know which poets were excluded (or limited) due to “buried antipathies.” I don’t even want to know what those antipathies are; that an editor employs them in her selection is probably TMI, but now that we have this shadowy category, might as well name the names.

Just as Dove includes many poems which are skillful and widely appreciated but just don’t rank as indispensible to me, she also omits some poets whose work seems to me seminal, not just in my private court of taste, but (if Pulitzers and other acclaim really mean anything) in the court of public opinion. Some of these poets, like Marie Howe and Charles Bernstein are not part of my private anthology-of-the-mind, not on my bookshelves, but I am convinced of their accomplishments and influence. Clearly Dove has done some of the same wincing while selecting.

The following list, I am convinced, belong in such a garden at least as much as more than half of those in the book. Maybe someday a Walrus or Caribou Press will invite me to muster an anthology, and then I’ll explain my quirks, some of which hinge on subject matter, others on prosody, narrative force, cultural position, God-knows-what.

Robert Penn Warren and these other poets from the past: John Crowe Ransom, Donald Justice, Kenneth Rexroth, as well as these established contemporaries, many of them winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Bollingens and so on: Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dave Smith, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Claudia Emerson, Where there’s a pattern, there’s an agenda, and you can likely get a fix on mine. But also: Tim Siebles, Bob Hicok, Charles Bernstein, Marie Howe, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Wendell Berry, Brendan Galvin, Linda Hogan, Robert Wrigley, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregerson, Lyrae Van Clief Stefanon and Louise Glück.

And there’s one significant demographic of consequence that I’d especially like to see represented in such an anthology, whether through Lynn Powell or Kay Byer, Byron Herbert Reese, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan – the rising tide of Appalachian writers. Dove gives us Charles Wright, but the early poems she selected (reprint costs could have played a role here) for Wright camouflage his Tennessee mountain roots fairly well. This community of writers are not provincial nor isolated and should not be invisible.

It’s hard to ignore the absence of so many Southern poets of serious accomplishment without concluding that they are the casualties of a corrective impulse running through the anthology, a desire to counterbalance previous anthologies which may be tied to the buried antipathies and which I can’t much fault Dove for, knowing I would be inclined to do something similar on behalf of a group of poets I value and believe have been given the sharp end of the stick. Showing all the cards face up would help readers along, allow them to look straight into the light of the featured work and the omissions, instead of guessing at “buried antipathies,” and more easily understand how Dove sees this anthology fitting in with others – the Norton and Vendler’s The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry for instance.

If controversy sells books and sales yield readers, this Penguin may open doors for some potential readers who previously saw walls, and bravo to that. It does not seem to have been constructed as a textbook, though it can certainly be used as one, with some provisos, and it will surely be handy to many for honey dipping and savoring. And it has put the bees in the bonnet and left many of us asking with renewed urgency, “Just what does make a poem a wonder?” There’s an old joke: “What do you get when you cross a Mafia don with a modern poet?” Pause, pause: “Somebody who makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Some days I hear the truth behind that and don’t want to see any more products of a guild that has become to some degree and industry, but other days I read Komunyakaa or Justice, Kumin or Henry Taylor, Warren or Kizer or Mark Doty and say “amen” and “encore.” Like Stafford’s justly famous narrator, I am “listen[ing] hard for all of us,” and whatever’s out there rattling the saplings and trampling the brush, extending the range of that great song roared by Whitman and whispered by Dickinson, it’s moving along various paths, and it’s not all manufactured or conjured from stagnant air, as many non-poets are quick to say about modern verse. Truth is, it’s alive, and who’s surprised that many scholars and poets are willing to scrap over questions of quality and ownership? Maybe a dispute that’s already giving off plenty of heat will also grant Goethe’s dying request for “more light, more light.”

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

How Many Are “Too Menny”?

R.T. Smith

Rita Dove’s anthology (The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry) is like all other anthologies in that it has good, bad and indifferent features. Two questions raised in Helen Vendler’s now-notorious review in The New York Review of Books and Dove’s even more notorious rebuttal have been on my mind today. The first, the definition of “American,” I have a strong opinion about; the other, which is a question of quantity, leads to more shadowy questions.

Three included poets whose work I greatly admire – Paul Muldoon, Derek Walcott and W. H. Auden – seem clearly ineligible for a book with this title. Yes, they all moved to North America and [have] spent many years here, but moving a kangaroo over here doesn’t make it American. More to the point, every poem, every line, every phrase from the minds of these poets bears the indelible stamp of their upbringing and education. Muldoon does a better job at disguising himself in winking erudition, but the spark of mockery, his deployment of the American idiom is uaually arch, skewed, thrawn, to borrow an Irish word. And if the argument of “location, location, location” carries great force and indicates transformation, then why is the same not true for Eavan Boland or John Montague, both major poets, wherever you corner them? But if the goal of the anthology is to display the landscape of poets who are primarily American for readers who are trying to understand a nation’s poetry, then these poets belong in some secondary volume, along with other notable transplants. An anthology, perhaps, of 2oth Century Poetry in America.

Vendler questions the abundance of poets in the collection: “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading. . . .” Lest we forget, the world population in the 20th century is much larger than in any previous century, and the number of literate, even educated Americans in that century is a factor. But I’d rather focus on that “worth reading,” which seems ill chosen. In a year’s issues of The New Yorker, I find about a dozen and a half poems (usually by several different poets) that satisfy many aspects of my appetite for poetry. More than that in a year’s Georgia Review, and so on. How many in a hundred years? Probably Vendler is referring to the entire body of a poet’s work, but I’m not sure that will fly, either. I’m willing to suffer the almost to find the good poems.

Although I think there are double or triple that number of poets from the century whose work I’m delighted to have read, I wish there were fewer in the anthology, as Dove’s inclusion of many younger poets whose substantial work will surely come in the twenty-first century throws the survey off balance. So I want to have it both ways, I guess, to agree with HV that the anthology contains more poets than I need to believe the mission implied in the title has been fulfilled, but I want to celebrate the profusion of poets and poems from the 20th.

This does, however, bring up an age-old question. When asked to say something about the Irish poets of his generation, a young Yeats remarked, “The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.” So many poets, so little time, competition and networking and multiple submitting, “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere,” as Delmore Schwartz put it. With MFA programs certifying hundreds of poets a year, how’s a single voice to make itself heard? On a bad day, you’d almost want to stampede them and drive them over a jump as Plains tribes did with bison herds before they had horses, but then that would be the end of your readers, as well as many fine poems lost. The comment by Yeats reminds me of Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure. Putting his own spin on the hardships that beset a poor family of five, he hangs himself and his siblings, leaving behind a note: “Because we are too menny.” I read somewhere that James McPherson said his idea of heaven was (and I’m probably paraphrasing) “maximum access to stories unfolding.” Stories, songs, poems – I want a vast buffet, many and “menny,” and I’m happy to have the 175 that Dove offers up, but the meal is still unsatisfying in the absence of 25 or 30 whose work is at least as original and influential as half those in the anthology. I’m thinking of Warren, Gluck, Chappell, Siebles and so on, but that’s for another post, after further pondering.

Some thoughts on being somewhat educated

Isabella Martin

As the semester, and the Shenandoah Internship, concluded this week, I prepared to return home to Southside Virginia, where I will spend some of the break working at the local library. Yesterday was my first day back at the library, and as I was wandering among the bookcases, trying to force books onto overcrowded shelves, the authors’ names and book titles jumped out at me as I passed, just like they always have. It’s almost like playing a word association game. As soon as I’ve seen an author’s name, certain thoughts spring to mind. Charles Dickens – orphans. David Foster Wallace – footnotes. Dixie Cash – seriously? I realized yesterday that many names and titles I had hardly known before this past semester had taken on different meanings. Umberto Eco now makes me ponder innocence and sincerity in a postmodern age. When the biography Papa Hemingway catches my eye, I remember that the author, A. E. Hotchner, was Hemingway’s friend and is said to have suggested the title of A Moveable Feast.

In the midst of this reflection, my own thoughts begin to sound pretentious to me. Highfalutin, as people around here might be expected to say, although I’ve never heard it said.

In “Two Ways of Seeing a River,” from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Twain, now that he has learned to see the river as a steamboat pilot, reflects “No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.” He suggests a comparison between himself and a doctor who can no longer see the beauty in a woman because he is instead looking for the signs of disease in the color of her cheek. I don’t mean to say that when I became an English major, all the mystery went out of books. But I do think that my humility, my sense of the vastness of literary knowledge and my own inability to begin to understand even a significant portion of it, has been reduced somewhat by the new sense of knowingness that studying English intently has given me.

I don’t mean to say that getting an education is in any way a negative thing, but for writers, I know there is some debate over who is, well, cooler: the academic/career writer or the “real person” with a “real job” who writes based on their “real” experiences. To offer an example of the value of experience, I would put forth the Shenandoah Internship. I personally believe I have learned more than I likely ever would have known otherwise about publishing and literary journals without writing a single academic paper, but instead being occupied with the blog and other tasks–all part of the modern literary journal trade. Yet, all the pretentious thoughts I was thinking at the library I learned in a pretty intense, research-filled English course, and I derive a great deal of satisfaction from having taken it and I know I will write better for it. Both have been equally valuable to me. For writers and readers, is anything lost in becoming immersed academically in literature and writing as opposed to learning about literature through other experiences? Obviously an immeasurable amount of knowledge (and experience) is gained, but is there a hidden cost to becoming an academic (besides tuition)?

So long, farewell

fraziera13

Auf wiedersehen, good night. In what’s been something of a whirlwind semester for me personally, the Shenandoah office has offered a brief respite from the maelstrom of extracurriculars, coursework that fulfills the English department’s torturous early British lit requirement (if there is such a thing as an afterlife, I’m going to find Samuel Richardson and sucker him a good thwack over the nose), weekend social events, and a hundred and two other obligations that come along with being a junior at Washington and Lee. For two or three hours a week, I read fiction for no other reason than to gauge its ability to provoke visceral, vicarious sensation. I’m not meant to analyze every word or close read every syllable (although there’s certainly an element of academic evaluation involved in reading short story submissions), but decide merely whether or not I think a story is good. In the process, I think I’ve learned more about what constitutes good writing than I have perhaps in any traditional English class.

Reading Shenandoah submissions has been hugely instructive for me, especially as a creative writing minor. I’ve never before had the opportunity to rip a story apart at its seams, to see where the weave of a plot doesn’t quite overlap the way it ought to or where the stitching goes a little crooked. In a run of the mill 300-level English course, students are presented with exemplary pieces of fiction that have already survived decades, if not centuries, of literary criticism. Most of the stories we read are immaculately polished—there are no holes in the plot, pieces of dialogue that feel forced, no rushed endings or inconsistent details of setting. We see all of that in Shenandoah submissions. It’s those little differences that separate great from good, good from not quite good enough. And there are a lot of “not quite good enough”s that come through our office. I’ve read so many stories this term that have had a sparkle of something special—if only the author would have pushed his characters a little harder or developed his writing a little further, those pieces could have been brilliant. And I’d like to think we publish only the brilliant ones, the ones that provoke the animal reaction, that make us sit back and think, “Wow.” Or better yet, “I wish I could write like that.”

I Swan

R.T. Smith

“I swan.” I’ve heard it all my life, so far. My father still says it from time to time, and on occasion I catch myself using it in polite company, substituting the benign phrase for something less delicate. And yet, every now and then when someone says, “I swan,” I get this vivid image of the bird, elegant in the water, from a distance its feathers fresh-snow pristine. I may even think of Yeats, the swans at Coole, the one with Leda in its rough embrace. Well, maybe not that far.
But I know the phrase has nothing to do with birds or even much to do with the word “swan,” which can be backtracked to Swedish, Saxon, German. The Indo-European root means “to sing,” which the birds do, as well as whistle, whoop and all sorts of other discord. Pens and cobs and cygnets. All beside the point, as “I swan” is a mild oath, sometimes rendered as “I swanee,” but nothing to do with the river or the college of the literary journal. It’s a way of saying “I swear” without sounding crude. “Dodging the curse,” they call it in Ireland, as when an old landlady of mine in Gort emphasized statements by adding “be jay,” which was nothing to do with the blue bird but a way of not quite saying “By Jesus” while still exclaiming, still hitting the bold case exclamation mark.

So we say “I swan” either because we learned it early or to escape any penalties the Almighty has in store for those who use foul language. We seek refuge in fowl language, instead, but when someone says it, catches me off guard, I see a graceful thing gliding, and it lifts me, as if I had caught a little thermal and rose.
Does anyone use it a different way?

Fiction or Poetry

kingp12

As I filed through papers twice, sometimes thrice, weekly, I noticed that the number of fiction submissions, for the most part, dwarfed the poetry submissions. Not having any standard of comparison, I figured this was pretty much normal and, for the first few weeks, went about my paper clipping, labeling, and enveloping duties without much regard for the inconsistency. It was not until a few weeks in, however, that Professor Smith corroborated what I had not long since pushed in the back of my mind, that volume of fiction submissions, more than ever before, is beginning to surpass that of poetry. As a part of a generation that, I perceive, is not especially fond of poetry unless it is set to music, this is not an especial shock to me, but I must note, however, that such a shift does have greater implications for the character of a generation, particularly with respect to the literature it might be expected to churn out. While the literary complexion of our generation of authors is yet undiscovered, I think, with the aforementioned fiction-poetry discrepancy in mind, that we will see a few things. That fiction greatly outnumbers poetry is, I think, an effect of the proverbial helicopter parent. We have all grown up believing that we have a story to tell, and while that is not necessarily untrue, we’ve grown up believing that it is the only story worth being told. So, by my estimations, not only will fiction continue to outpace poetry, but fiction will continue to take a nonfiction bent, with the lead character based almost exclusively on the author’s image of him- or herself, or the image of the person whom the author would like to be or to avoid becoming. Research for stories will take the form, more and more, of simple introspection. This, to me, is the great irony of literature born of the Information Age.

The Dark Sublime

Jack B.

I recently wrote a term paper on the poetic and philosophic conception of the sublime. It was an examination of Wordsworth’s poetry in light of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the subject. Burke believed that the sublime, far from being an experience purely of pleasure and enlightenment, was essentially an incarnation of terror in the face of the incomprehensible. In order for an observation to trigger the sublime, the vision at hand had to be, beyond any other characteristic, obscure. When faced with the obscure, the imagination is given free range to grow beyond the realms of the senses and rationality, and conceive of something otherwise bound by physical reality as infinite.

Some have termed this as the ‘oceanic sense’, so I find it only natural to use the ocean as an example. Objects of great proportions have always been a source of the sublime for poets. What makes the ocean such an excellent source of the sublime is that we can perceive no limitations to its scope. Facing out over the water, once can almost feel the curvature of the earth, and since the opposite shore is beyond our ability to see, our imagination fills the blank space with endless blue. This solved for me a riddle I had encountered in Wordsworth: his preferential fascination with what he could not see over what he could. Wordsworth idolized the imagination, and coupled with Burke’s philosophy it is apparent that the obscure, the dark, and the abyss provide the imagination with its most powerful ability. Seeking to grasp the infinite, it was such obscure images as chasms in a sea of mist, or mountains larger than any mind can logically cogitate, that brought Wordsworth closest to extrasensory experience.

Poetry has always been preoccupied with the sublime, and it seems to me, preoccupied also with those forms and presences that our senses fail to reveal. The Romantics wanted to believe the boundlessness their imaginations conjured from the obscure and the vast was reality—that they were imagining something that is there. But extending this principle to its extreme indicates a dangerous leaning towards solipsism. I now see this struggle in every fragment of great literature I come across: a conflict between the collective, rational reality and the individual, imaginative surreality.

Then again, it’s an acute possibility that I am simply imagining this conflict into the obscurity of artistic language.

About us Interns

salmj13

Since September, Shenandoah has enjoyed the help of ten interns – and we have been lucky enough to help. This internship has been incredibly interesting and rewarding for me personally, and I think the majority of my classmates would agree. While the details of our work might not be obvious to Shenandoah’s readers, I wanted to take a moment and break down exactly what we have done this year. For a more general overview of the internship, please see this link.

The Shenandoah internship is split into three distinct sections – the class itself, out of class office hours, and our personal projects.

We began the semester by presenting about two literary journals each. Each student was assigned one physical journal and one online journal. This gave us an opportunity to not only explore the wide variety of literary journals available, but to see both sides of Shenandoah’s transition from a physical journal to a web journal. We researched and reported on everything from the physical journal’s font and layout to their web presence and editorial views. I was assigned The Kenyon Review and storySouth. I found the differences between these journals incredibly compelling just because of how different they are. The former is a storied and well-endowed heavyweight in the literary world while the latter is hip, imaginative, and entirely online.

In addition to our presentation on literary journals, we spent class time discussing nearly every issue associated with publishing a journal. These ranged from ethical issues to the type of stories Shenandoah accepts to the language we are willing to publish. Class discussions also included our opinions about the Shenandoah website and ways we think it can be improved (Whether they’ll make the cut or not is yet to be seen).

Our out of class office hours are relatively easy to explain – we were expected to spend two hours a week in the Shenandoah office reading fiction manuscripts and commenting on them. While tedious at times, I found reading submissions was almost always relaxing and fascinating. It was very exciting to be reading what could be Shenandoah’s next great story. In an hour-long span I could usually read and comment on anywhere from three to five different stories. On a few occasions, the entire class read a story and debated its merits and faults.

In addition to our class discussions and our office hours, each intern was assigned an individual project. These projects included managing our Facebook page, promoting the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, working on the Poem of the Week, and networking within the literary community. While each intern was assigned to an individual task, we would often work with and contribute to each other’s project. For example, we were all asked to “like” Shenandoah on Facebook, follow it on Twitter and contribute one poem and analysis for the Poem of the Week. At the end of the semester, we wrapped up the class by presenting about what we accomplished since January.

Judge By the Words and the Cover

sadlert12

As Professor Smith commented I had the opportunity to see The Book of Kells this summer while studying abroad and it is a sight one should see. After taking History of the Book as a spring course I had a new found appreciation and knowledge that I did not have previously. The ornamentation and the gilded pages make the words seem just part of a whole. Seeing all of those beautiful books on display at Trinity Colleges Library was a magnificent sight. The architecture of the building itself is exquisite, the ceiling looks like a hand carved boat turned upside down. The books call for acknowledgement and importance as their pages crave to be turned. It is the content, the meaning in the words not only the ornamentation that should be valued in these works.

An Update On Contests

hornea13

Today (December 9th), we mailed notices of selection to the finalists of the 2011 Graybeal-Gowen Prize! We’ll be posting more specifics on the finalists later; while the USPS delivers whether snow or rain or gloom of night, they are not so speedy as the internet, and it’s only fair the finalists be the first to know. Hopefully, the postman is quick and we can make a more detailed announcement very soon.

For those that don’t know, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize is an annual contest hosted by Shenandoah through the generous gift of Mr. James Graybeal W&L ’49 and his wife Mrs. Priscilla Gowen Graybeal. The contest focuses upon Virginian poets and poetry- entrants must either have been born in Virginia or have established Virginia residency. In 2011, Shenandoah was very pleased to have received approximately 300 submissions. While submissions for the 2011 prize have closed, there’s always 2012! If you’re a Virginia poet, think of it as ten months to prepare a great poem for us to consider! For full details on the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, please visit the prize’s page here.

The contests don’t stop with the Graybeal-Gowen, either. Shenandoah is also preparing to announce the 2011 winners of our annual prizes in Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry. We have just a little more to do, and hope to have the announcement available soon. These awards are selected from work published in Shenandoah in the last year. More information on these awards can be found on our prizes page.

For any reviewers out there, Shenandoah will be inaugurating an annual prize for reviews in 2012. The prize will operate in the same fashion as the previously mentioned ones for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry, i.e., selected from material published in Shenandoah. The current issue of Shenandoah contains five reviews; to see the sort of piece we’re looking to publish (and therefore considering for the prize), please visit the current issue.

Happy Holidays!