Ineffable Compendia

The word ‘anthology’ takes its root, according to my ancient Pocket Oxford, from the Greek, specifically ‘anthos’, meaning flower and ‘logia’ meaning collection. The word referred to an anthology of “4,500 poems, inscriptions, etc. by more than 300 writers (5th c. B.C. — 6th c. A.D.).” With that in mind, I thought I’d go for a spot of pansy-plucking among the recent spate of poetry anthologies on my desk.

More so than in other lines of poetry publishing, you can’t please everyone with a mixed selection. That’s a fundamental principle of anthology-making. Even putting a Heaney or a Harwood alongside a coterie of other poets can make some of those lesser poets look less satisfying — like decorating a wedding cake with silvered icing balls and half-melted Maltesers, though of course, that can sometimes work the other way.

Yet, despite their lack of quality assurance, anthologies of poetry are often considered better sellers than most single poets’ collections — if marketed well. Audiences get more bang for their buck and publishers — often, the publisher is also editor — get more buck from their sales. Bloodaxe, for example, have turned anthology-publishing into one of their strap lines: Staying Alive, Being Alive and The New Poetry are household names, essential course books, no matter what you think of the contents. Well-marketed leads to well-shifted, which in turn leads to growth of the press.

Bloodaxe’s most recent anthologies, at least, those that have landed on my desk, are Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century and Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets. Also on my desk are Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman), Dove Release: New Flights and Voices (Worple) and City State: New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins). Anthology publishing seems healthy enough at the moment. Or is it?

In a recent review of Voice Recognition for Stride Magazine, David Kennedy pointed to the importance of the anthology’s introduction. The opening essay often stands for the benchmark by which each ensuing poet will be measured; and this is something Kennedy takes issue with in his review. Using his article as a springboard, I found myself outlining my stance on this particular book. It’s a tall order to live up to calls of being the ‘best’ new poets in a generation, but the introduction here goes a step further: “all of these poets appear guided by a magpie-like ability to tightly grasp any number of worthy ideas for good writing... We hope this book will be seen as a collection of poems that is able to appeal to both poetry’s newcomers and its existing readers. We think there is enough of the cake for everyone.”

Perhaps if Wales was made of cake, and everyone living there didn’t mind being evicted from their homes — and maybe Royal Mail could adapt their trucks into some kind of cake-carrying fleet — then yes, everyone (in the UK) might get a piece of the pie, until Wales disappeared in a giant diabetic flurry of slate biscuit-base. But this is too much to place upon the shoulders of young poets, some of whom are not even out of their teens yet. A short while later the editors add, “These are writers we back all the way, who are capable of greatness.” Perhaps the phrase contains a deliberate ambiguity in that word “capable”, but really what’s said here is that these poets don’t just ‘show potential for’, or ‘will be capable of’, but ‘are’ right now “capable of greatness”.

And so, one turns to the first poet in the book — Good luck, Jay Bernard! — and searches for greatness. I won’t review Jay, but like all the other poets in the anthology, she’s now under pressure to live up to the claims made by the editors for her poetry in their introduction. Most readers, including this one, aren’t primed for niceness, given an inherent British scepticism.

City State, which came out at a similar time as Voice Recognition, and even features a handful of the same poets, has gentler ambitions for its young urban writers. Tom Chivers  removed the definite article from the subtitle: New London Poetry: “There is no manifesto, no flag to raise, no team to join. The The was axed.” Prudence, or a lack of confidence in the collected poets?

He indicates the latter in the ensuing argument: “What lies within represents my best subjective snap-shot of poetry as it is being practised in 2009 in London by a new generation of writers.” That word ‘best’ again, but here couched in honest territory, acknowledging the editor’s bias. Stepping into the actual poets on display, there’s a feeling you’ve just been made a cup of tea and brought a biscuit by Mr Chivers himself; and who’s the first poet? Jay — Go on Jay, give us what you’ve got. Not that I’m completely gullible, but I’m far more amenable to liking poets that are described as “snap-shots” rather than the best a country has to offer. The poetry is, of course, mixed in quality, but my instincts are less sharpened.

The connection between ‘anthology’ and flowers has always come to me via the word ‘anther’: “Part of stamen containing pollen” says my dictionary. In other words, it’s the flowers’ sex organ. This leads nicely into a classic feature of many Bloodaxe anthologies (including Voice Recognition), namely the author photographs. Think ‘dashing young poet leaning against landmark’; or ‘poet in velvet dress sprawled across grand piano’. It’s fairly common knowledge that including a mugshot is known to increase sales, so we have poets lingering by woods on a snowy evening, looking smouldering (Adam O’Riordan, Sandeep Parmar), mischievous (Annie Katchinska, Ailbhe Darcy), and vacant (Jack Underwood, Colm O’Shea).

A couple of poets subvert the tradition: Sophie Robinson wears sunglasses, which is a good reason not to trust someone at face value; Jonathan Morley features in an action shot at the microphone, blurred book in hands, mouth hooting wildly, which might be a good reason to run away screaming (though neither reaction stands in for a review of their actual poetry, which is exciting stuff). Author photos have their boons and banana skins, though I have to say I quite like them. They humanise the poetry and, while they don’t let the words speak for themselves, there’s a feeling that you’re not just reading squiggles on a white sheet. It also means you’re less likely to tear the poetry apart in review, especially if they look like the kind of person who cries at the drop of a pin (Amy Blakemore, Joe Dunthorne). The counter to this is how it objectifies the poets, which is acceptably troubling in anthologies of young poets and women. Marketing isn’t always a moral decision-making process.

So to Identity Parade, the other Bloodaxe book. True to form, author photos abound, with the usual accompanying biographical statements. The introduction is, at first glance, something different from Voice Recognition; as with City State it appears to make no definitive claims for its poets.

When we get to the meat of the argument things become hazy: “The predominate social and cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s have been diversity and information overload... Perhaps this is a contributory factor in the essential individualism which I see in this generation... this might well be the generation of poets least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing.” Lumsden leaves it to “critics and academics” to discover “traits and trends”, where other anthologists, such as Tom Chivers, set out to discover these trends for their readers.

Lumsden’s counter argument carries an old-school anti-intellectualism, pointing to an aesthetics of rampant individualism, a shift towards Conservatism. This patronising stance feels lifted from the Sean O’Brien school of critical thought, who, in ‘defining’ Michael Donaghy’s poetry in his 2008 T.S. Eliot Lecture (and also reviewing John Ashbery’s latest collection, Planisphere, for the Sunday Times), made associations with several opposing poetic traditions, creating a ‘Donaghy Monster’ as a substitute for connecting Donaghy’s work with the reactionary New Formalism that it clearly stems from.

The blurb on the book makes a second connection to Voice Recognition: “Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado.” Almost a word-for-word echo of my earlier quotation from Voice Recognition, this is an attempt to broaden poetry’s church of readers, a worthy intention. Yet, one has to ask if this approach to pluralism doesn’t clamp down on the reader’s right to read from a broad church. There’s a sense of being fed, once again, a definitive collection: ‘Sure, there’s pluralism, but there’s right and wrong pluralism and if you buy only one anthology this year, you should buy this one.’ As a reader, I get my range of reading from a range of books on my shelf. No doubt there are readers who buy only one poetry anthology per year, and that’s who Bloodaxe are aiming for. That’s commendable, as I said, but it’s not pluralist; if anything, those readers have narrower tastes than readers with more open minds.

Lumsden’s research is solid; I might even go so far as to say that the essay is so fact-laden it resembles a train timetable. He talks about the number of festivals in the UK, with a lengthy list, and there’s a solid round up of how poetry publishing has changed since the 1990s, with another long list. Lists abound, including data on the gender balance in other notable anthologies — the  women outnumber the men substantially here, for the first time in a long time (though Voice Recognition has a fair balance at ten female to eleven male poets). The essay also very carefully sets out how many poets were available to the editor for potential inclusion, and how many had to be culled; it sure reads like a lot of work and the implication is that the results will be worth it.

Coming to a different beast entirely, Worple’s recently published Dove Release, chooses a distinct path through these various aspects of anthologising. Ostensibly gathered under the auspices of celebrating “a decade of writing at the University of Warwick”, there’s a celebration of new poets, some of whom, David Morley’s introduction tells us, are in their twenties.

There are some established names, a refreshing addition to the range of new poets (listed alphabetically here to mimic the book’s “democratic” order): Jane Holland, Luke Kennard, Glyn Maxwell, Ruth Padel, George Szirtes; and various Warwick staff, including Peter Blegvad and David Morley, jostle with a host of unknowns, or barely-knowns. There’s a spate of Eric Gregory Award recipients: Zoë Brigley, James Brookes, Swithun Cooper, Luke Heeley, Liz Manuel, Michael McKimm and Jon Morley. But there’s an anti-celebrity approach; poets are not named as prize winners and biographical details are absent — even acknowledging where poems might have been published before is foregone in favour of stressing the selected poetry, above all.

It’s hard, then, to discuss this book as an anthology, when so much is geared towards making readers focus on the poems, but Morley’s introduction is an oddball. He emphasises the specific university environment and the connections each poet has with a course I myself took in 2000, taught by David Morley, called The Practice of Poetry. The recent scientific underpinning of Morley’s approach to teaching poetry is also highlighted: “Meeting scientists, and seeing live science, presented our poets with ideas, characters, and designs. It also gave us new language: the terminology of science is gravid with metaphor and is constantly inventing new terms for describing the stuff of life and the structures and shapes of the universe.”

Aware of how this might limit interest in the anthology, Morley points out that it “certainly isn’t” a book of science poems. The book’s jacket and blurb attempt to avoid easy pigeonholing, but ultimately this is held back by the context for the collection, which is a shame. The lack of pressure placed on the reader’s expectations is refreshing, the democratic structure doesn’t favour celebrity in any way and so, as a reader, I was primed to find something to enjoy — and there is plenty. But I would say that, I’m in it.

Then finally to Shearsman’s recent collection of Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. Infinite Difference comes after a fifteen year hiatus from the last ‘experimental’ women’s poetry anthology (Reality Street’s Out of Everywhere) so Carrie Etter has plenty of ground to cover in her introduction. Of all the anthologies I’ve tackled, this is the introduction I take to the most. As with Lumsden’s essay, Etter sets out the parameters for her selection boldly: “The poetries being written in Britain today might in fact be regarded as being on a spectrum holding infinite points of difference, and this anthology as bringing to a larger audience work on that spectrum that has had limited, if not quite ultraviolet, visibility.”

She goes on to refine the collection’s limitations and points to Maggie O’Sullivan and Geraldine Monk, who declined to be included out of a “desire not to be categorized.” Even as she justifies the anthology’s gendered approach — by referring to articles and internet discussions, as well as Eva Salzman’s introduction to her “comparatively normative” selection of poems (though not poets, exclusively) in Women’s Work — Etter lays out the counter argument. This is a humble decision, one might even say foolhardy, compared to the definitive approach taken by other anthologies. Doesn’t this smack of a lack of confidence, as might be thought of Chivers’ selection?

No, and resoundingly so. It smacks of intelligent, liberal thought — yes, call it academic, if you like and then go back to filing your synapses on the rock you crawled out from. There’s nothing wrong with pointing to the landscape that gave birth to your processes; nothing comes of nothing, and to deny otherwise is an attempt to rewrite history, as many totalitarian states are aware.

Etter refines her understanding of ‘Other poetries’ carefully and considerately within her introduction, opening up debate, allowing the research to speak for itself; she’s clearly done a lot of work to bring this collection together, but, unlike Lumsden, she analyses the context for the research. Like Lumsden, she points to prizes, reviewing outlets and so on, but the lists are mercifully briefer than in his introduction. My gripe mainly comes with the use of endnotes, which had me flicking back and forth, trying to keep my place in the text — a step too far in the direction of academic style.

There’s an interesting point towards the end of the introduction: “This anthology does not purport to provide a balanced representation of recent Other poetries by women born, or resident in, the UK, so much as the best such work available... This anthology does, however, provide a vibrant snapshot at a time of burgeoning poetic activity.” Here, side by side, is a claim for greatness, though contextualised slightly within the terms laid out in the rest of the anthology, side-longed by that word “snapshot” again (though Chivers hyphenated his “snap-shot”). I’m not sure what to make of this, precisely, but I’m thinking that, ultimately, I should read this anthology as ‘the best snapshot’ Etter could drum up for the anthology’s readers.

Another excellent concession to the reader is the introductions to each poets’ selection. The poets provide a page-length response to a question, unstated, along the lines of, “Why did you write these poems?” The responses are enlightening and entertaining (and I was delighted to hear Frances Kruk read her response, instead of her poetry, at the book’s launch in London). They’re a helpful window on the poems, which, frankly, are mindblowingly unconventional in places, particularly with how they colonise the white space they’re printed on. I’m hoping Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant — Radical Landscape Poetry, due from Shearsman later this year, is as inviting to read.

If by the end of this article you feel I’ve laid out my biases academically, then so be it. As a reader, I’d rather have a benchmark by which to measure what I’m reading (e.g. how poems about London measure up to what I know about London) than none at all; I’m in favour of creative reading, not being spoon-fed. And I don’t need the benchmark for an anthology to be its quality; I can decide that for myself because I’m not an idiot (I’m an opinionated, sceptical paranoiac).

Of all these books, Infinite Difference speaks to me most favourably in terms of how it presents its poets, but this survey brings me back to the need to read all of them. Taken together, recent anthologies provide a rich, exciting picture of what’s happening on all fronts across the UK and Ireland. Whatever I, or anyone else, might think of the way the poetries are presented, it’s the poems themselves that are essential to poetry’s vibrancy, which these books all celebrate.

 

For those wishing to investigate for themselves:
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, ed. James Byrne and Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe, 2009). ISBN: 9781852248383. £9.95
Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets, ed. Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe, 2010). ISBN: 9781852248390. £12
Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Shearsman, 2010). ISBN: 9781848610996. £12.95
Dove Release: New Flights and Voices, ed. David Morley (Worple, 2010). ISBN: 9781905208135. £10
City State: New London Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2009). ISBN: 9780955384684. £9.99