Anthology

Dictionary.com's definition of anthology:

1630s, from L. anthologia, from Gk. anthologia "flower-gathering," from anthos "a flower" (anther) + logia "collection, collecting," from legein "gather". Modern sense (which emerged in Late Gk.) is metaphoric, "flowers" of verse, small poems by various writers gathered together.

Students often get confused by the difference between single-author poetry collections and often more substantial anthologies of contemporary poetry.  But 'small poems by various writers gathered together' has a certain resonance to it. It reminds me, in its cadence and final word, of Johnson's definition of metaphysical poetry as 'heterogenous ideas...yoked by violence together'. One expects both variety and a certain amount of surprise and discovery. Why small poems though? I suppose the dominance of the lyric poem is still an established fact in contemporary English language poetry, and has been for the last hundred years or so (still there are plenty of long poems and sequences to challenge this generalisation). Look through the Norton Anthology of Poetry to find plenty of long poems by the many poets writing pre-twentieth century. 

A reader new to poetry might think that there will automatically be a good variety in anthologies. But it's been interesting reviewing US and UK twentieth century 'gatherings', which is when the importance of the anthology really took precedent. No anthology is without its bias, even if it's the general lyric outlook of Palgrave's Golden Treasury which arguably started the vogue for anthologies towards the end of the nineteenth century.  On into the twentieth century traditional Georgian and modernist Imagist anthologies vied for supremacy, with (as far as I know) only D. H. Lawrence getting published in both camps. After the Second World War Robert Conquest's  edited New Lines, presenting the 'Movement' poets with their formal conservatism and deliberate turning away from visionary oratory (that was the realm of the 'New Apocalypse' of the forties, inspired by Dylan Thomas and others). Then A. Alvarez published The New Poetry twice - the second time foregrounding Plath, who had recently committed suicide. Alvarez was much more interested in potential, innovation, and the influence of the US poets. And so the story goes.

Peter Childs has quite a useful summary (more detailed than the above) in his introductory section of The Twentieth Century in Poetry. He goes up to the Bloodaxe volume also named The New Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley and claims it to be 'curiously homogenising in its introductory remarks, claiming a new cohesiveness and the end of 'British poetry's tribal divisions'. I remember this anthology's publication; I guess it was the first one I bought as a 'gathering' of 'contemporary poetry'; for interest and creative investment rather than study. I remember sitting  reading it in a Cambridge cafe and being quite excited to witness what felt like a poetic 'moment' of significance. I suppose that's what the publication of a substantial anthology does feel like. 

Childs concludes his survey by remarking that 'the clearest message...should be that anthologists have reacted against each other - that each widely accepted and adopted collection...has sought to challenge the view of poetry advocated by a previous editor.' Interestingly,  'New' remains the most common adjective in poetry anthologies, while 'influential twentieth-century anthologies have generally been those that choose a small selection of emergent poets and argue that they constitute a new generation or a shift in poetic sensibility' .

Perhaps two shifts could be noted in the early anthologies of the twenty-first century. But perhaps not - it's too early to tell, really. But it seems that the interest in and usefulness of the focused anthology is still strong: I'm interested in women poets so it's been great to have Deryn Rees-Jones' Bloodaxe anthology Modern Women Poets and even more interesting to have the contemporary take on modern experimental women writers in Carrie Etter's Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. In fact I'm really looking forward to the discussion at the South Bank Centre on women's poetry anthologies on September 1st next week.

But secondly, heralded possibly by the 1993 New Poetry claim to an end to tribal division, there is an interest less in spearheading a new movement or poetic grouping, more a sense of connections to be made within diversity. I know I'm hopping continents here, but I picked up a new Norton anthology in City Lights when we were in San Francisco last month: American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry where, as well as some lengthy representations of fantastic poets, there is a great emphasis on connection and (of course) hybridity rather than division, particularly the old binary division between traditional and experimental. Cole Swenson defines this new connectivity between old divisions as 'lines of pursuit that operate in a rhizomatic rather than arboreal fashion, leading ever outward':

'The rhizome is an appropriate model, not only for new Internet publications but for the current world of contemporary poetry as a whole. The two-camp model, with its parallel hierarchies, is increasingly giving way to a more laterally ordered network composed of nodes that branch outward toward smaller nodes, which themselves branch outward in an intricate and ever-changing structure of exchange and influence. Some nodes may be extremely experimental, and some extremely conservative, but many of them are true intersections of these extremes, so that the previous adjectives - well-made, decorous, traditional, formal, and refined, as well as spontaneous, immediate, bardic, irrational, translogical, open-ended, and ambiguous - all still apply, but in new combinations.' (Cole Swenson's introduction)

This sounds rather wonderful. Swenson cites multiculturalism, gender equality, and new technologies as all helping to develop this new sort of poetic connection. Again I think it is too early to tell whether this really is a shift towards generosity of readership and poetic community or some kind of new grouping, after all. 

Back in the UK, Identity Parade is a substantial anthology published by Bloodaxe this year. It really is substantial: 84 poets, and 'probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured'. I'm in it and absolutely delighted to be so. Of course many good poets who could be in it aren't, and there have been points of contention over some of the stipulated 'criteria'; but, ultimately editor Roddy Lumsden had to make his choices. His lucid and practical introduction (he discusses his own processes of choosing poets for the anthology) is quite humble in comparison with other anthology intros which serve more manifesto-like purposes. Lumsden presents 'the pluralist now' and is less concerned than Swenson to find optimistic lateral connections in the contemporary media age. Indeed, he is disinclined to find connections: 

'The predominant social and cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s have been diversity and information overload. We no longer watch the same handful of television channels, hear the same limited news, listen to the same clutch of bands, visit predictable tourist destinations; in our trouser pockets, most of us carry the colossal almanac that is the internet... though critics and academics will seek - and find - traits and trends in the larger bodies of work represented here, this might well be the generation of poets least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing.' (Lumsden's introduction to Identity Parade)

Time will tell; a combination of both Swenson and Lumsden might be the best way to preface the contemporary poetry world. Is it a world, a forest, a matrix (a hall of mirrors?) : impossible to be honestly definitive of one's own time, but very much possible to engage with and enjoy it, however necessarily incomplete that engagement might be, however much of a work in progress.