It’s worse, too, when you’re editing a book that includes living poets: at this point you might as well consider yourself a walking bull's eye, and be prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged poets everywhere. I’ve done just enough editing myself to know that standing up and saying you’re editing an anthology is a bit like standing up and saying you’re a target-and the larger the scope of the anthology, the larger the target. That, at least, is the conclusion one might draw from Rita Dove’s new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, which bills itself as “an unparalleled survey of the best poems of the last century,” and includes none of the poets named above. Also Louis Zukofsky, and all of the other Objectivists. And Susan Howe, and Alice Notley, and James Schuyler. What’s the matter with American poetry? Apparently, the problem is Allen Ginsberg.
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