Buried Antipathies: The Dove Anthology, Second Wind

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.”


recent-meR. 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”?

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.


recent-meR. 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.