Customer Reviews

Anthology of Modern American Poetry

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Anthologies are tough things to edit, I'm sure. After all, any anthology of literature printed by, say, Oxford, or Norton especially, has the kind of power necessary to grant its contents canonical status in literary study. Furthermore, the Norton anthologies tend to have immediate canonical status themselves.

Perhaps this is why Nelson takes so many chances with this anthology, some for better, and some for worse. I did not want to stick him with a 2 star rating, so I gave him a 3, but whereas I normally consider a 3-star rating as a kind of "yes, I liked it while I was reading it," this time I give it because I'm trying to average the times he made excellent choices with the times he seems to miss the mark.

The most questionable of Nelson's decisions? Easy. His decision to publish Japanese haiku from World War 2. No, that's not the questionable part. But he edits them all together to form one long poem. He takes haiku from many different authors and turns it into a Harmonium-era Stevens poem. This move defies all sense.

However, it also illustrates what is great in Nelson's anthology: inclusiveness. He goes to great lengths to include authors you might not find in other anthologies; and if you would find them, chances are you will find more poems by these poets in Nelson's anthology, or at least different poems. It bests the Norton Anthology in the Harlem Renaissance department, that's for sure. I'd never heard of Angelina Welde Grimke, for instance, who's just an amazing poet who was writing Plath well before Plath.

It is indeed irksome that this inclusiveness is sometimes at the expense of the "major" poets in the American canon: poets like Stevens get ridiculously short treatment, and half of the time, their most important or recognizeable poems are left out entirely. While I appreciate that Nelson wants to open up the canon a little bit (okay, a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that), his anthology feels a little incomplete in a field in which the Norton still casts the tallest shadow. Meaning that, while no anthology can stand alone and requires supplementation, Nelson's requires much more supplementation merely because his exclusions fly in the face of what is, for better or worse, required reading by current canonical standards.

So, if you plan to use this anthology in a class, you will probably need to supplement many of the authors with photocopies. But chances are you were going to do that anyway.

Editor Cary Nelson grappled with many questions when compiling this anthology. He was determined to include some of our 'fierce but forgotten political poets.' But beyond that he decided to urge a major reassessment of the canon, including giving major coverage to Langston Hughes, for example. And to provide significant space for long poems and sequences and poems about race relations. Many of the poets were gay and many were socialists, or blacklisted. Many are Latino and Native American and African American. This is no lily white, square anthology.

The printed book is accompanied by an online journal and multimedia site, called MAPS. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/

Cary Nelson teaches modern poetry and literary theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This is an important anthology because it questions assumptions about taste as being standard and unchanging. Nelson invites the reader to try to use a historical imagination as well as to step outside of traditional biases, because over time poetry (even American poetry) has served different purposes for different communities as lively explosions of language and not simply as academic pretensions. While some poetry may seem just plain bad, Nelson's anthology shows us the number of ways that poetry was alive and exciting during the twentieth century. And even today poetry is not dead, exactly...it just smells funny.

I decided to change up my anthology for Poetry Workshop this semester. Usually I use the Norton Modern Contemporary, but I hate that it's split into two volumes. Nelson's anthology is important, and the selections offer another vision of what poetry is or can be, which is great, however, I think that for new poets this volume may be too concerned with political representation rather than in development of the art of poetry. Granted, all canons are constructs, and constructs of paternalistic culture dominating taste to boot, but the Norton gives a clearer picture of the main trends in poetry, whatever that anthology's shortcomings. The business of Anthology assembling is both a political and financial endeavor, expressing the need of the editors to redress the egregious imbalances of history, something all anthologies do now, and in my humble opinion, to expense of their effectiveness, and assembling their poems according to a budget. If the heirs of T.S. Eliot price the Wasteland too high, well, there it goes. So Nelson's anthology has a lot of the former, and some of the latter.

I love this anthology, don't get me wrong. But I don't know if I will use it again to teach with.

Using this book for a grad class on American Poetry. The selections of Whitman are questionable, especially considering that there are no portions of "Song of Myself" included. Its length would warrant truncation for such a collection (as Nelson did with Pound's "Cantos," Eliot's "The Wasteland," and other long works). I also disagree with the absence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the collection. His importance is not limited to the City Lights bookshop and the printing of "HOWL." Five to seven pages would have sufficed, especially considering that that many pages went to poorly selected Whitman poetry alone.

A lot of the less familiar poetry in this collection is just plain terrible. The baby boomer poets are the worst of all. It's depressing. You're better off with a Norton anthology.