In his discussion of Poet's Bookshelf, the on-going series edited by Peter Davis, Ron Silliman quotes Fanny Howe's list of books that were "most essential to [her] as a poet." Unusual for such a list (at least in my experience of them) is her mention of several anthologies. Among a wide range of authors, Howe mentions "Jerome Rothenberg’s America: A Prophecy, The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, Moving Borders, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan, and Early Celtic Poetry. "
Howe's list reminds me of the importance of anthologies to my own early development as both a writer and reader of poetry. More than any single work, or individual, a few anthologies provided me with an understanding of the poetry's history, and opened the field, as it were, to its range of possibilities. The following books, acquired at the end of my high-school years, or (relatively) early in my college days, were indispensable; they are organized, to the extent that memory is accurate, in the order I acquired them.
It is because of these books that I spent my freshman year at college identifying myself (yes, publicly) as a Dadaist, that I discovered "Language-oriented" poetry's strange and foreign-seeming surprises, that I first read Gertrude Stein. For the first time, I read poets who talked about writing in terms other than mere "personal expression," who thought poetry could, and should, do more than convey emotion. Excerpts in Messerli's anthology and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book inspired me to spend quite a bit of time seeking out Tina Darragh's on the corner to off the corner before finally finding it, what seemed an eternity later, at the Sun & Moon Press shop, where Douglas Messerli told me that it was the last copy, as he reminisced about making it. &c.
Howe's list reminds me of the importance of anthologies to my own early development as both a writer and reader of poetry. More than any single work, or individual, a few anthologies provided me with an understanding of the poetry's history, and opened the field, as it were, to its range of possibilities. The following books, acquired at the end of my high-school years, or (relatively) early in my college days, were indispensable; they are organized, to the extent that memory is accurate, in the order I acquired them.
Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover
Poems for the Millennium, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990, ed. Douglas Messerli
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium, ed. Rothenberg and Joris
It is because of these books that I spent my freshman year at college identifying myself (yes, publicly) as a Dadaist, that I discovered "Language-oriented" poetry's strange and foreign-seeming surprises, that I first read Gertrude Stein. For the first time, I read poets who talked about writing in terms other than mere "personal expression," who thought poetry could, and should, do more than convey emotion. Excerpts in Messerli's anthology and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book inspired me to spend quite a bit of time seeking out Tina Darragh's on the corner to off the corner before finally finding it, what seemed an eternity later, at the Sun & Moon Press shop, where Douglas Messerli told me that it was the last copy, as he reminisced about making it. &c.
1 comment:
Anthologies important when starting to read change from generation to generation. Although those on your list differ from what I'd put on mine, I can see how they would spark fire.
But I never have figured out why Lamantia was left out of the giant books that Rothenberg/Joris edited.
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