Interested to come across the snippet below over at poetry etc.

I've been through a lot of consideration and decision making on all this lately, inevitably - 'value' versus 'special interests'. I'm not sure I feel like taking advice from Perloff who can afford to be idealistic due to not actually editing an anthology!

There's a fine line between consensus and personal taste and we've all seen anthologists take a great fall on either side of that wall. What would you do (see second question below), given the opportunity?

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DC: Perhaps what is lacking in most journals and anthologies is an inclusionary approach to poetry and not one dependent upon being a card-carrying member of a particular poetic group. Such a criticism could be leveled against some of the experimentalists as well as the mainstream.

Marjorie Perloff: Yes, but anthologies are, by definition, problematic today because no gathering can be definitive and perhaps it's best to make up one's own for teaching purposes.

DC: If you were to edit a poetry anthology and the publisher has given you total control over the anthology from inception to publication, how would you choose what would be included? What would be the governing principle that would hold the anthology together?

MP: Well, I've never wanted to edit an anthology because I'm not sure there's a good way of doing it at the moment: there are too many schools, factions, movements, interests. But if I did, my criterion would be VALUE. I would want to include only those poets whose work is distinctive, original, really interesting, regardless of male/female ratios, identity politics, and so on. So that's why I don't edit an anthology. These days one must be sensitive to all the special interests.

I find it odd that Marjorie Perloff talks of "value" as it were some neutral thing that covers everything; as if it were always going to be obvious what the "good" poems are.

Personally, I like to think I have a wide and catholic taste; but like everyone else I have prejudices. A rhyming poem has to work at something other than its form really hard to please me, for instance, so I'm probably missing out on good rhyming poems because I don't much like them.

Similarly with a lot of the different kinds of poetry out there. If you don't really respond to post-avant lang-po linguistically innovative poetry very easily, how are you to decide if the innovative poem in front of you is a good one?

I think that's why the single anthologist is always facing an uphill task: how does one person decide which is best or most valuable among all the different poetries competing for our attention?

I don't envy you.

Well, just quickly - no big fan of Perloff anyway, but there are certainly different kinds of value! How can she talk as if it's one thing? And these special interest groups - I think that's more advanced in the USA, for sure, the "identity politics". But for British you'd want a good mix of Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish etc - yes.

It's a big misconception that you used to be able to talk about the trends, and some agreed definition of value, whereas now you can't. Bollocks. Steven, a rhyming poem that hasn't "worked hard" on anything except its form is simply verse, written by a poetaster. Remember that good old word? It's drivel. No good book should include bad poetry just to get the numbers up in one corner or another. I'd say, though, that if you aim to give readers a fair taste of what's happening in each corner, you include the work from that corner that you think has value. Of whichever kind, be it documentary, purely poetic, or even expositional. I think an anthology where every poem was known to be a GOOD poem would sell like hot cakes. People want something they can trust.

I'd hate to think we end up in a situation like North America, where "no child left behind" has meant not what it set out to mean, but that the whole wagon train slows down to make each child think he's going faster than he really is. Bloody hell. This whole "nothing's better than anything else because everything is itself" malarkey drives me nuts.

Roddy, you just go for it. I suggest a complicated chart, where you overlay the best of each special interest group - women, GLBTG, Celts, Catholics, Caribbeans, under-30s and over-70s - over the best overall, on a vector, and only use the stuff that still looks good. One test of "good" is that you don't have to belong to the special interest group to like it.

You are not going to escape censure, so there's little point in aiming to do so.

My view is that, since writing within a particular 'poetry' is presumably intended to have as its outcome a Good Poem, select what has succeeded in this aim. And since what has succeeded is down to you - you're the anthologist, you have been liberated to make these choices - don't trouble yourself about whether you're right in anyone else's terms.

We'll tell you what you've done once you've done it...

...and with that, he swirled his cape about him and was gone into the giant shadows looming on the high stone wall...

Thanks folks, always good to hear advice on the anthologist's lot...

I'm also interested in your more general answers to the question above:

If you were to edit a poetry anthology and the publisher has given you total control over the anthology from inception to publication, how would you choose what would be included?

I mean, what sort of anthology would you put together given the chance?

Personally, I'd love to do a few - one being an anthology of list / parataxis poems, another an anthology of really good food poems, while another would be an anthology of associative / elliptical / 'gurlesque' American female poets for the UK market.

I hate the idea of having to choose poems according to a particular brief. If I was given complete freedom, I'd want to be totally self-centred and simply choose poems I enjoy myself, and hope other people enjoyed them too.

I suppose, reluctantly, that wouldn't work very well though. Theme is everything! <_<

I seem to recall that Carcanet let Elizabeth Jennings put together exactly such an anthology way back when - was it called Jennings' Choice or something?

Here we go - lucky for some:

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?...t=9781857542622

(Also very interesting to read all those tributes on that page to a poet who, only a few years after her death, goes largely unmentioned and I can't see that changing - and to note that many of her supporters there fit into the same category)

Also interesting to see the spelling mistakes in those comments on the Carcanet site: Alan Bramjohn and Kingsiey Amis. I googled Bramjohn, just in case there really is a literary critic of that name, but this was the only attribution I could find, so I think we're fairly safe in assuming it should actually be Brownjohn.

Maybe the person typing was eating some apple pie at the time. :lol:

Especially, on that note, `She is one of the few living poets we could not do without' (Peter Levi).

It is very sad. Well, at least soemone said that of her when she was alive. It won't be said of many of us, living or dead.

I'd only buy an anthology these days if it was really good, full of distinctive, interesting work. I guess there have to be compromises, but these are best kept to a minimum. You also need to generate a little controversy. What would an anthology be without controversy? I'm sure arguments and accusations are good for sales.

I seem able to do that simply by walking into a room.

I've got a few general anthologies - Rattle Bag, Staying Alive and the Norton being most well-thumbed - but most of my favourite anthologies are themed - Scottish (natch), children's verse, garden verse and American. I've still got the copy of Donald Allen's New American Poetry I bought in 1961, and I still enjoy it.
Colin

I want to know how you become "one of contemporary English poetry's major sublunary assets" (Will Eaves). I'd also like to know what it actually means, too... :unsure:

If I don't get to be one of poetry's superlunary assets, I'll be sick as a parrot.

Parrots aside, most of us end up as supernumerary asses. ;-)

There was also The Colour of Saying: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas. I think I've mentioned before that I have this - it was a form prize at school around 40 years ago. My copy is paperback, very well thumbed and held together with tape. I recently picked up a couple of boxes of poetry books from freecycle and was astonished and delighted to find a hardback 1963 copy of this in the box.

The anthology consists of poetry chosen by DT and read by him on the BBC. In the introduction he is quoted as saying this about his choices: