A Couple Approaches

[& SORRY THIS POST IS SO HUGE!]



Hello Joel and others. And thanks for inviting me to participate in your blog. (And it’s very cool to see so much lively thinking about this project! The book was such an enormous task for Wayne and me and the many regional editors--so it’s especially gratifying to see it making its way in the world.)

Joel: I’m probably not the best person to answer your second question, which seems specific to translating. I’ve published only a few translations myself and, while I find the kinds of cultural questions you raise interesting, I’ll leave the answers to those who have spent more time wrestling with them.

But you also asked about how important it was that the selected poets be “representative of the current poetry scene” in each country vs. the value of including only poets we thought “most important.” That’s an interesting question—and it’s one I’ve wrestled with not only in this book, but in two other anthologies I’ve edited, as well. And recently, I had to write up some notes and ideas on this very subject for one of those AWP talks, so maybe I’ll flesh those out a bit here. [And looking back over it, I can't help thinking I've added maybe more flesh than you want!]

It seems to me that it might be useful to think about a couple approaches to editing any anthology that attempts to represent a large population of writers in a limited space.

The first approach might overtly acknowledge that any such project necessarily involves an imposition of strong editorial authority. The editor’s role here is to ask what the best of such-and-such poetry—younger poets, Latvian poets, etc.—might look like, to overlay one aesthetic, the editor’s, onto a multitude of poetries. This kind of activist approach, therefore, might imagine an idealized sort of canon within the limits of the anthology and advocate for it, the editor more-or-less explicitly saying, “here I am, the editorial ego. Hello!” This anthology sets forth a kind of editorial argument for one kind of poetry, or one so-called “important” poetry, against the mass of other poetry.

The second approach might also acknowledge this imposition, but then attempt, as much as possible, to subvert it. The second kind of anthologist sees editing as an active subversion of editorial ego in the service of a kind of generalized representation. I imagine this sort of anthologist suggests to the reader, “Here I am, but pay no attention to me,” as it tries to represent (albeit imperfectly) the writing of a population of writers. What are the many modes of writing that seem to be of interest to Lithuanian poets today? It asks not what, for instance, Irish poetry might ideally look like, but rather seeks to represent the many strands of what Irish poetry appears to be.

Of course, both approaches are troubling, and steering a middle course more often than not merely clouds the issue.

I’ve been both kinds of editor and made choices I regret. I’ve also seen anthologies that do the same kinds of work better than I have done.

About ten years ago, I edited a book called THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS—an anthology of poets in their twenties and thirties, actively writing in the United States in the late 1990s. I had a general sense of the kind of poetry I was going to select and, pretty self-consciously, decided to take the first approach—that is, to see in this anthology an early attempt to define for readers not just what poets of a certain age were writing—of course, there were thousands and thousands of them, and I could only include about 40—but also to suggest in my selection what I hoped American poetry might look like in years to come, what it might, in my fantasyland, become. At the time, I thought I’d favor a kind of poetry that was both formally innovative and, at the same time, suggestive of narrative. I was not that interested in Language poetry, poetry that owed too overt a debt to certain theoretical ideas I’d studied in school. I was not, I told myself, interested in winking irony. Nor was I terribly interested in poetry that seemed merely confessional. I imagined formal innovation with overt subject matter, poetry that, were it clearly about the self of the poet, challenged those notions at the same time. In short, I didn’t really know what I wanted, and this was the problem. I was young and I had not read enough in my life to be making the kinds of arguments I was trying to make. Also, I thought that, since I was OF that generation, I was in a kind of unique position to edit such a book. That’s a dangerous assumption.

The result, THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS, has some terrific poems in it, poems I return to with admiration. Other writers and readers have told me it was important to them, and I still think it’s an OK book. But it is a flawed book. The reason is that, while I imagined a ground breaking book, a sort of touchstone that would actively help define and influence American poetry, I had never really sat down and asked myself, what, exactly, am I trying to define here? What kinds of arguments is this book making? (And I recall that even as I edited the book, I imagined my editorial vision would be broad; nevertheless, the book, I’d hoped, would make a sort of implicit argument—though, in the final peer-review run, that argument got almost completely wiped out of the introduction. So I had a kind of problematic combination of both approaches, I suppose – editorial authority and editorial invisibility, never really doing a great job at either. )

(FYI: my late friend Reginald Shepherd put together a similar anthology in a more mature way. Not that I like his individual selections more; rather I think his overall project is more mature.)

Later, Wayne and I took what I think of as the other approach in NEW EUROPEAN POETS. We realized, first of all, that there was no editor alive capable of attempting to represent all of European poetry with any authority. To do so would require speaking every European language, being familiar with every European poetry, the history and nuances of language in every region of Europe….that is, the editor for such a book would have to be God. And even then, I wasn’t sure it could be done.

Wayne and I, therefore, decided that such a book, at least on our parts, would have to involve something closer to an exercise of editorial modesty. We’d see the project as more of an escape from the editorial self than an embracing of it. And, as you know, Wayne and I really selected almost none of the contents of the book (well, Wayne, a translator of Albanian, selected Albanian language poetry; my work with the tiny Icelandic section is more complicated. Glad to explain it, but not in print).

Instead, we brought into the fold those regional editors who have been commenting on your blog now and then. Our idea was that these would be people who would, first of all, have a deep interest in the poetry of their particular regions. And their project would be impossible; their allotment of the book’s total pages would be necessarily ridiculously small. Therefore, Alissa Valles would have 14 pages to represent all of Spanish poetry. Portugal would get 7 pages. And we’d instructed the editors to approach this impossible task with as little of their own baggage as possible. Represent not your own interests, we suggested; be as invisible as possible. Try to paint as quick a sketch of the poetry of your region, accepting all the while that the total project would suggest to readers the clamor of European poetry, the multitude of voices and, behind them, visions, histories, ethnicities, worldviews.

The readership, we figured, would be American, the reader an American who would smartly understand the impossibility of the project and, at the same time, appreciate the peek into the writing of other lands and languages, who might, afterwards, be inspired to read further, in other translated or untranslated works.

Of course, editorial invisibility was every bit as problematic as stated editorial/aesthetic authority, though it was, finally, a far more appealing approach to me. (And, of course, it was easier to accomplish when working on a book on a community of poets I wasn’t part of; what right had I, after all, to impose a vision for how I thought European poetry OUGHT to look.) And, since the project was flawed from the start, the acknowledgement of that flaw made the project exciting and strange, trusting both the knowledge of regional editors and the luck of what they’d haul in in their nets.

I’m not sure one approach is actually better than the other and, as I suggested, steering a middle course is difficult. One can’t both try to paint a picture of what you THINK poetry OUGHT TO BE and, at the same time, represent EVERYBODY, the total diversity of a population’s poetry.

The result of my approaches has been two anthologies that are flawed in every way that any anthology is flawed. What I learned, however, from doing this, is the importance of spelling out these problems ahead of time, of thinking about them and, better still, planning for them. If editorial invisibility is, somehow, the ideal, of knowing and stating clearly in the introduction that this is both the goal and, at the same time, impossible. There can be no perfect representation of any group but that the noise and orchestrated clamor of the anthology is as close as one can get.

(Or—and had I more foresight—in the case of the first anthology, spelling out exactly what my editorial intentions were, coming to a clear definition of them for myself before I imposed them on readers. Had I spelled those out, the discussion of the anthology might have had less to do with who was included and who, damn him, was cut, and more to do with the problems and viability of what the anthology was, overall, arguing for. Of course, this kind of anthology must exclude plenty of good writers, writers that don’t fit the argument. Mere “goodness,” whatever that is, is not, alone, enough.)

I guess in an abstract way, I’m suggesting that your question comes right to the heart of the problems I’ve always worried about when I’m editing a book. Obviously, there’s more at stake in this kind of project than an editor’s selecting 50 or 200 poems he likes, typing them up, and putting them between two covers. To do that is to either, 1) assume that people really care who Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are (as if editing were like making the ultimate mix-tape) or 2) to think that Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are in any way representative of the larger community outside Kevin’s imagination.

Strangely, last year the NEA asked me to put together a book called CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY to be published in Pakistan, in Urdu. Here, a whole new set of problems was raised: Upon completing a first draft—and I’d taken the approach of maximum editorial invisibility, an attempt to give Pakistani readers a sense of the many modes, styles, and aesthetics of contemporary American poetry—the book had to be vetted by a panel of government readers, many of whom were obviously must more sensitive to the expectations of the publishers and readers in Pakistan. When the manuscript was returned to me for a second draft, I learned that many of the poems I’d considered rather benign were much more complicated than I’d thought. The advance readers were nervous about what I’d considered mild profanity or sexual explicitness, arguing that these would be not translate well for their desired readers and would misrepresent, if not the literal words of American poetry, the experience of American poetry, or, more specifically, an American poetry not necessarily MEANT to shock or even disturb that, nevertheless, was overshadowed by those traits in translation. But that’s another story—one that, strangely, gets at the heart of the question I started this blog thinking I’d avoid.