Solitary Ducks: On The FSG Poetry Anthology

One of the wonderful—and discouraging—things about poetry anthologies is that they’re almost compulsory; they scream “required reading,” and they often are. One could imagine a compendium of great anthologies, from Tottel’s Miscellany to Pound’s collation of the Troubadours and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry. The curatorial impulse haunts poets and poetry—since more than a couple dozen poems fit in the space of a book, more and more books exist to house the memorable ones.

In their fsg Poetry Anthology, Farrar, Strauss, and (inevitably) Giroux have supplied, through editors Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, possibly the best anthology in recent memory. Not that they had much choice; fsg arrived and came to ascendancy concurrent with the professionalization of poetry during the 20th century’s fat American middle. So the first of this collection’s many names are the aging moderns Eliot and (Allen) Tate and their great students, direct or not, Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, and Robert Giroux’s Philolexian cohort John Berryman; his 22nd Dream Song, “of 1826,” in reference to the near-simultaneous deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the Fourth of July, opens this collection. More than the soft indignity of “teenage cancer” and the self-consciously suburban Hopkinsisme of “I am the auto salesman and lóve you,” this poem presents an historical imperative:

It is the Fourth of July.Collect: while the dying man,forgone by you creator, who forgives,is gasping ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’in vain, in vain, in vain.I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.

Perfectly burlesque—a poet-pussy cat on the hunt for material, but more omnivorous. Which works as a good enough substitute for this book’s mission.

But one tries, against hope, to live for the present. While our poets—new, formal, or not—have largely emerged from their little trenches to rally together against their craft’s present and for-now-ebbing obscurity, missing the dark woods for the trees. This isn’t to say there’s nothing written now worth reading; there’s enough and much of it from fsg. Ask where this hemisphere’s poetry lives today, and I’ll show you Ishion Hutchinson’s dowse and soot-haunted seascapes:

. . . drift-pocked, solitaryducks across the bay’s industrialruts, their stark white shapesmoving like phantoms in the marsh,somewhere outside New Jersey.

Or Ange Mlinko’s tin miniatures:

Rotted frames, rusted nails, show their age:the peeling backs, the glass glued now to themlike glass-topped coffins . . . the water damage (my fault)that looks like ectoplasm

which live in Karen Solie’s derelict (North) Americas:

Unequivocal through Carolinian forestswhich have not wholly disappeared,and equally among rows of wrecked carsin the junkyards, hoods open like a choir?

Or Lawrence Joseph’s metaphysical cities:

  So you will be, perhaps appropriately, dismissed for it, amorality of seeing,  laying it on. Who among the idealists won’t sit in theprivate domain,  exchange culture with the moneymakers?

Far from being comprehensive—or even much of a survey—this anthology speaks for a cosmopolitan attitude recurrent, but not predominant, in American poetry. But anthologies exist to offer the diachronic view beside the synchronic, and the best thing about this book, its real curatorial genius, is in its translations, which constitute a little under a fifth of the book’s pages. The sheer sweep of them alone, from Ashbery’s thunderous Max Jacob to Maria Dahvana Headley’s new Grendel-as-Candyman Beowulf, which is just as fun as one dares to imagine:

. . . Be it wizened vizier or beardless boy,he hunted them across foggy moors, an owlmist-diving for mice, grist-grinding their tailsin his teeth. A hellion’s home is anywheregood men fear to tread.

Remember Larkin’s admonishment about “foreign” poetry (“If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or...