Loading the Canon

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry
edited by J.D. McClatchy
Vintage, 736 pp., $17 PITY THE POOR ANTHOLOGISTS. However richly compensated--and, typically, they aren't--they remain hostages to time, never knowing if their choices will survive and justify them.

Meanwhile, every outraged reviewer gets to excoriate five or six pages of the anthology, until the entire book is covered in opprobrium: "Where's Donald Hall?" "Where's X.J. Kennedy?" "What about Dana Gioia?" "Why was Alfred Corn dropped from this new edition?" "What's wrong with Stanley Kunitz?" "Where's Billy Collins?" "Why is Audre Lorde wasting pulp in here when we could have had Maya Angelou or June Jordan?" "You call that Gary Snyder's best work?"

A thankless task, this canon-making. And, in truth, it is hard not to want to approve of J.D. McClatchy's efforts in "The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry." He was one of the few well-mannered poets during the recent tempest over Mrs. Bush's poetic teacups. As editor of the Yale Review, he once published the work of Greg Williamson, and that has to be worth something. His recent edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry for the Library of America series is to be applauded. And his other recent anthology, a complete set of translations of Horace's "Odes" by various poets, was quite good.

In short, McClatchy occupies a formidable position in the current literary establishment, and we should be grateful Vintage placed this commission where it did. One could do much, much worse for a compiler of contemporary American poetry.

But no cultural enterprise--especially not as it pertains to the poetry wars--is ever going to be an unmixed blessing. In the 1990 edition, which the publishers called a "collection of the best poems by sixty-five of America's greatest contemporary poets," about seven-and-a-half pages are given over, on average, to each of the luminaries within. But in McClatchy's new, improved edition, Adrienne Rich has been allotted fourteen pages and J.V. Cunningham two and a half--a ratio just about exactly backwards. What judicious editing once gave, the hope of having the book adopted by English departments has now taken away.

And so it goes throughout "The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry." McClatchy deserves applause for even including the unfashionable Cunningham, America's greatest epigrammatist. Given the alternatives, we should just be grateful that Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht and Gertrude Schnackenberg and Kay Ryan appear at all. But there is a high price to pay for that kind of silence: page after page of Charles Olson, for instance. Or maybe such lines from Robert Duncan as The Thundermakers descend, / damerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U night stayd. States? The heavy clod?

Then there is C.K. Williams, in a rodomontade on Three Mile Island, which proves mostly that, when it comes to settling on a gimmick, poets are not necessarily any better than the average run of hucksters. Louise Glück appears, mostly impenetrable, but occasionally lapsing into coherence long enough to favor us with things like this: It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard. / I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex.

For every marvelous Richard Wilbur poem, there is a penance to pay: the egregious Allen Ginsberg, the near-comatose A.R. Ammons, the insufferably pretentious Jory Graham. Kay Ryan's delightful "Paired Things"-- Who ever would have dreamed / the broad winged raven of despair / would quit the air and go / bandylegged upon the ground, / a common crow?--requires slogging one's way through the burnt-tongued and prosaic banality of most of the verse idols of our dreary age.

McClatchy has added a page-and-a- half note to this new edition of "The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry," in which he claims that the "dry-as-dust New Formalists" take up too many pages in anthologies nowadays. It's hard to see quite what makes him think so. You can readily find Charles Bernstein and his ilk on the shelves of Borders--along with slam poets, performance poets, post-postmodernist poets, Nuyorican poets, and on and on. Try finding a formalist like Tim Steele or Charles Martin or Alicia Stallings in anything remotely like the same numbers.

What in 1990 was sixty-five is now seventy-two: the poets who fill this anthology bravely facing the future, the representatives of what was finest in our literary culture from 1948 to 2003. I'd put my money on about eight of them, at most.

And so should you.

Len Krisak is the author of the poetry collections "Midland" and "Even as We Speak." His translation of Ovid's "Art of Love" will be published next year.