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Or: why I love Garrison Keillor's Good Poems series.
I think the metric by which a poetry anthology should be judged can more or less be boiled down to how well it serves as a bathroom read. Or as a coffee table book. I don't use the term to refer to an oversize tome with impressive pictures, but as a book that's kept on the coffee table, or at any spot where people tend to come and sit down, and that easily be seen, reached for, and idly flipped through for a few minutes.
The poems in a good anthology should be relatively short; short enough that you can pass the book to the person sitting next to you and point out something for them to read without them feeling put upon. Good poetry deserves to be shared. A good anthology selects its contents such that it is conducive to sharing.
Long poems are best left to the single-author volumes and the academic books. Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" is a fine poem, but it takes a while to work through. It's best read on a hammock or during a long bus ride. It's a poem that most of us wouldn't read unless we put aside twenty minutes for the sole purpose of reading it. It isn't a poem you would pass to the person sitting next to you on the couch and say "hey, take a look at this." The good poetry anthology would do well to exclude Wordsworth's masterpiece.
The good poetry anthology contains the shorter poems that will entice the reader to explore Wordsworth and eventually arrive at Tintern Abbey.
In a very good anthology, the poems are arranged in terms of subject and theme. Not by forms, not by periods, not by "movements," nor by any other academic categorization. The poems are arranged in terms of what they communicate.
A good poetry collection isn't necessarily immersive. You can read a page or two, momentarily commune with the poets' art, and then put the book down and continue about your day with a measure of spiritual refreshment. If the poems are really good, you don't need to read more than one. A two-minute read can be carried around for a few hours and chewed on like a stem of grass.
Obviously the selected poems should be excellent: the reader must count on being able to find something ruminative, moving, provocative, and/or delightful on almost every page. They mustn't be too esoteric: again, leave the obscure stuff for the academics, the specialists, and the connoisseurs—the people who are out looking for that sort of thing. The good poetry anthology should be for people who aren't necessarily looking for anything, but will be glad at what they find. The great poetry anthology be filled with unfamiliar names; thousands of living people are writing poetry, and they're writing good poetry that readers will enjoy. Though the familiar poets won't be excluded, the anthology will often represent them with pieces that rarely appear in the textbooks teaching the canon, and that even the English majors and habitual readers may have missed.
Case in point: this Dickinson poem I recently happened upon in Good Poems, American Places as a friend and I were sitting around and passing the book back and forth:
To Make a Prairie
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15397#sthash.0siYhqzb.dpuf
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15397#sthash.0siYhqzb.dpuf
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15397#sthash.0siYhqzb.dpuf
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