Eyewear has been looking at (even reading) The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), edited by poet and editor-extraordinaire David Lehman of NYC (and creator of The Best American Poetry series, that essential thing) which The Economist (which tends to be economical with its praise of new poetry books) has recently recommended. With a few reservations, Eyewear is able to second The Economist - it is certainly a bang for the buck, at over 1,000 pages.First, the bad news (there is much good to follow, fear not and read on): Lehman has chosen not to include Vachel Lindsay, pictured, one of the great pioneers of spoken word poetry, an inspired sometimes surreal poet, as well as being the first poet to ever write intelligently about cinema; he has also not included some first-rate contemporary poets, (perhaps some of these too young?); the only Canadian included is Anne Carson (unless one considers the little-known Joan Murray), though he mentions the idea of a "North American poetry" - Klein could have figured here, as well as Layton.
The editor has also seriously under-represented Stanley Kunitz (one poem), Archibald MacLeish (whose great "You, Andrew Marvell" should be there, as well as the one about the end of the world, ending with - I recall - "nothing, nothing, nothing at all..."), Bob Dylan (one poem and not his best - "Desolation Row" - "Tangled Up in Blue" would have been better even - and none by Cohen, I think the better poet), Amy Clampitt, and Millay without her wonderful poem about being merry, on the ferry.
While Auden is included (in spades) as a Brit who went Yankee, Gunn is left out, though no poet was more American during the AIDS-tormented-80's than Mr. Gunn. Also in the MIA category must be almost all the poets one associates with "multicultural" or "identity" poetry - including those whose work usually resists such limiting categories, like Rita Dove, Maya Angelou or Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka (no doubt disgraced for his astounding 9/11 views - like father, like Gibson?) - and so are most of the key performance poets simply not present or accounted for, from Bob Holman through to Marc Smith - perhaps, again, all born after 1950 (though Patti Smith makes an appearance - if her, why not Iggy Pop, let alone Lou Reed, Mr. Hell, Ms. Anderson or a dozen other underground artists of similar weight and quality). Lehman has also given just a few too many pages to his New contemporaries, (and much too much to Bukowski) against the claims of poetry written before 1900 - half the book and more is really a modern/ postmodern anthology of post-Pounders.
The good news is better - this is, despite these concerns, a major new revisioning of the American Poetry canon, and Lehman should be congratulated for seriously revising the outdated and slightly moribund anthologies he inherited, from F.O. Mathiessen and Richard Ellman. Lehman contains multitudes, and while he admits to avoiding the word "poetries", admits too that there are at least polarities, in American poetry (broadly-speaking, mainstream formalist and innovative alternative) - and represents each side widely, if rarely deeply - so, a number of significant avant-garde poets (the cut-off date is the curiously succesful 1950, which ropes in many of the big guns) get a look in: Jorie Graham, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, Aaron Fogel, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, as well as lucid mainstreamers like Billy Collins and Dana Gioia, to balance the accounts.
Lehman has also done justice to The Objectivist (Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky - but no Rakosi) and New York School, even so far as including Edwin Denby, and other poets that Ashbery has long championed, like vehicular homicide victim and eccentric John Wheelwright. On a side note, Lehman's brief, witty, sometimes rather catty, and often informative bio notes about the poets reveal an astounding sense that about a quarter of American poets either saw one or more of their parents kill themselves (or their partners) or killed themselves, or both.
Actually, like a missing persons bureau gone supernova, Lehman has done much to rescue the lost also-rans of US Poetry and return them to their deserved status: David Schubert, Trumbull Stickney, Stein, Joseph Ceravolo, Samuel Greenberg (Crane's friend), H. Phelps Putnam, Kenneth Fearing, Yvor Winters, Karl Shapiro and Weldon Kees are all restored to the canon - in some cases with thrilling results (all the more sad then to see Lindsay out). And Lehman admits this is a canon - after all, revisionist that he is, the Introduction starts with Eliot, and Eliot swans through most of it, with most of his grand ideas intact. Aiken is back, a little, in the process, but not much.
Other poets are lifted higher in status than before - so Ammons and O'Hara and James Merill and Donald Hall (a fine poet of wit, order and humanity) have nearly as many pages as Eliot or Auden - and some are lowered - Lowell has far fewer than might have been expected. More tellingly, the poetry before the Whitman-Dickinson moment is sidelined - basically, only one hundred pages are reserved (that is, roughly 10%) for poets (other than the two Major figures just mentioned above) writing from the time of Bradstreet to that of Julia Ward Howe - that is, 90% is poetry written in the last 110 years or so, or clearly modern in scope and manner.
Thoreau and Melville scrape by with a few poems each; Poe does well, thank goodness, as does Emerson, who reads very well. Longfellow's work seems musty and there for sentimental reasons, like "Casey At The Bat". Had Lehman been as equally sparing with the poems of the last decade or so (the 1990's and beyond) and given us a collection of, say 900 pages, I think this would have been the clearing of the air that has long been needed - and been more austere than Astaire; I don't mean cutting poets, just poems.
As is, this new book is almost as top heavy as one of those Florida oceanliners, and could tilt on the cruise (sans Crane) into the deeper waters of the 21st century ahead. But it does say something about what American poets and critics think are their tradition's strengths, and weaknesses - as always, with America - the strength is the idea of the future... which is always the newly-presented present.
British readers of this new Lehman classic (no Edsel-Lemon this) will be able to see for themselves that having C. Bernstein and B. Collins (CB and BC let us call them) under the same roof doesn't blow the house down - just the opposite - divided, the house of poetry falls.
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To this end, let me propose very briefly a thumbnail sketch of an Integrative Approach to Practical Poetics (practical, as in relating to editing, reviewing, and adjudicating); it would have two simple procedures: a) bracket all first-level issues and inquiry relating to the philosophy of language, and purpose of poetry (these can be discussed, and should be, often, but not with regards to particular poems or poets); and b) all particular poets and poems should be evaluated and appreciated (both enjoyment and judgement are required by a good or great poem) on their own terms - terms which are usually present and determinable from a reading of the text itself - so, do much as Lehman does: search for what is strange and interesting in writing, whether it be from the Language, The Beat, The Black Mountain, The Confessional, or the Transcendental school. - or a school yet to be devised, by some eccentric soul, mind and/or body yet to be born.
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