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Missing
Pages: Admissions and Omissions A. Robert Lee
Weighing in, literally, at 3.7lb and 1132 pages, Oxford’s latest anthology of American Poetry has all the look of canon-making incarnate. Over 200 poets, a prestige imprint, and in David Lehman an editor-poet of repute. Here, surely, is the right literary heft, as seemingly definitive a roll-call of American poetic voice as might be thought reasonable. Lehman, for his part, pays generous homage to his two OUP editorial forerunners, F. O. Matthiessen (1950) and Richard Ellmann (1976), updating and adding to their choices and with 1950 as his own qualifying cut-off date of birth. Each poet wins a brief life and work head-note, deliberately succinct so as not to obtrude on the writing in view. Nor can anyone quibble about price, a virtual snip at $35 given a hardback of this size. All of this gives a look of dispatch, judicious professionalism, to the anthology, four centuries of verse from the Anglo-Puritans to the relatively contemporary. Granted any editor’s right to choose, and with allowances for a fond preference here, an idiosyncrasy there, what substantive grounds could there be for quibble, or indeed more than quibble? Well, not a few, as we shall see. “The paramount purpose of virtually any literary anthology is to distill, convey, and preserve the best writing in the field” writes Lehman in his Introduction. Lofty sentiments. But so Arnoldian a disinterestedness isn’t always convincingly mustered or defended. When, actually, do choices get contentious, one name or line left out in favor of another? Given America as proven multi-America, does not the term “representative,” alongside “best,” also confer obligations, that the anthologist aim for both best widest compass as well as best quality? Established canons, notoriously, rise and fall, ever time’s taste and creatures. Nonetheless Lehman plumps for what he calls “hierarchy.” It’s worth seeing where it takes him from the opening window of Puritans like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor through to a closing contemporary-postmodern quartet like Jorie Graham, Edward Hirsch, Rodney Jones and John Yau. In some respects the earlier “name” choices take on a necessary familiarity. Freneau, Wheatley and Barlow give you the New Republic. If you need a reminder of the Fireside crowed you have Cullen Bryant to Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Holmes, with samplings of Jones Very and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman -- not a mention, however, of George Moses Horton. Transcendentalist luminaries like Emerson and Thoreau make their due bow, but rightly enough it is Whitman and Emily Dickinson who seize center-place. For Whitman that means the 1855 “Song of Myself” in its entirety as against the usual 1892 death-bed version, a good decision as it underlines his inaugural freshness of measure. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Lilacs” and other key lyrics give accompaniment. For Dickinson it means forty or so of her best-known compositions, whether “Because I could not stop for death,” “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” or “I felt a funeral in my brain.” Poe weighs in with a set of ten to include “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” and Melville, in turn, meets his recognition in a choice of Civil War pieces and the densely erotic “After the Pleasure Party.” You get a sense of coming modernity when Emma Lazarus follows Dickinson, the onward path through Masters, Robinson and Crane to Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e.e.cummings and Robert Frost. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound make their entry alongside the previously un-included W. H Auden, a modernist trans-Atlantic in triplicate voice as it were. The Depression years and the 1940s lack none of their bequeathed torch-bearers, Olson and Zukofsky, Rexroth and Penn Warren, Jarrell and Stafford, Roethke and Kees. Early modern white-canonical female authorship is to be found in Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Elinor Wylie, HD, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Miles, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Louise Bogan, Caroline Kizer, Elizabeth Bishop and Denise Levertov. It is thereafter, however, that the going gets more arbitrary, partly the sheer expanding roster, partly Lehman’s own “best” sense of shakers and movers. Afro-America has its voice in James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Angela Weld Grinké, with from the 1920s forward Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, Stirling Brown, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and, another good choice, the Bessie Smith of “Empty Bed Blues.” But, quite egregiously, why not even one of the following -- Jones/Baraka (b. 1934), Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), Ishmael Reed (b. 1934), Audre Lorde (b.1934), Jayne Cortez (b. 1936), Clarence Major (1936), Michael Harper (b.1938), Don Lee/Madhubuti (b. 1942), Ai (b. 1947), Nathaniel Mackey (b. 1947) or, to bring in an Afro-Puerto Rican name, Victor Hernández Cruz? If the reason has to do with copyright then an explanation needs offering. If you want your Confessional names, there’s an a-plenty of Lowell, Berryman, Plath and Sexton. If it’s the Black Mountaineers then there’s a fair selection of Olson and Creeley. As to the Beats there are to hand Ginsberg and Snyder, but no Ferlinghetti, Corso, Waldman, de Prima, Ted Joans or Bob Kaufman. The New York School, O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery and Schuyler, get full billing, as do San Francisco poets like Rexroth, Spicer and Robert Duncan (but no Lamantia, Blaser or Helen Adam). Among a contemporary plethora the ranks include Robert Pinsky as ex-laureate, Billy Collins, whose late-arriving fame remains its own phenomenon, Terence Winch of Irish American tradition, Bob Dylan as the songster-lyricist of “Desolation Row, Sharon Olds as proverbial bad-girl eroticist, Ron Padgett, collaborator with Ted Berrigan, Charles Bernstein of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, and the Afro-Louisianan Yusef Komunyakaa. These, and a fellow-abundance, include hitherto yet other passed-over names like Charles Bukowski and George Oppen. Pas mal. So why any reservations? The answer lies in those truly missing in action. The dragoons of the Cultural Right might well throw up their customary whines at what they dub pc. But an anthology labeling – mis-labeling -- itself a Book of American Poetry yet which contains not a single Native American or Latino/a poet and only one Asian American contributor has some genuine answering to do. To imagine any full reckoning of American poetry without these is, it should hardly need saying at this stage in history, unimaginable. Is every multicultural anthology since the 1960s simply off-base, a home for the poetically weak and impaired? Where, in all the cultural skirmish about literary inclusion, has David Lehman been? Let me offer three lists, albeit themselves selective from Native, Latino/a and Asian American tradition, all poets born before 1950, all poets with seriously (shall we say “best”?) established claims of vision and style: a. Frank Prewett, Alexander Posey, Carter Revard, Jim Barnes, Louise Erdrich, Mary TallMountain, Peter Blue Cloud, Maurice Kenny, N. Scott Momaday, Duane Niatum, Simon J. Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Gail Tremblay, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Ray Young Bear, Diane Glancy, Roberta Hill Whiteman, Luci Tapahanso. b. Victor Hernández Cruz, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Alurista, Miguel Algarin, Tato Laviera, Bernice Zamora, Alma Luz Villanueva, Lucha Corpi, Pat Mora, Evangelina Vigil-Piñon, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tino Villanueva, Pedro Pietri. c. Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Wing Tek Lum, Cyn. Zarco, Jessica Hagedorn, Russell Leong, Arthur Sze, Nellie Wong, Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada, Mitsue Yamada, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Agha Shahid Ali. One doesn’t have to admire, even like, all of these, but not one to be allowed to enter the running? Almost careless you might say. Quite why is as much una vergüenza as a mystery. Lehman had all to command before him. In selecting his own one treasury, and no one doubts it is a treasury, he has missed quite another, not to mention the uncontested assumption that American poetry operates only in English. Truly this is an anthology marred by fault-line, lob-sidedness, the missed opportunity to embrace America-at-large’s poetry. It should simply not have been so.
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