Poetry's inexorable drift toward the chatty and mundane--as well as its obsession with politicized art--is as perfectly demonstrated in this anthology as any other today. Of course, these days poetry just makes us yawn, and we pause only infrequently to waste time building up an angry head of steam. What's the point, after all? Form and elequence, understatement with a nod to anything like a universal audience is just so passé, dahling. Poets (but mostly their editors) have snarked, harangued and marginalized themselves out of a popular audience.
But still the anthologies keep coming, because nobody has the $50 to subscribe to obscure little journals anymore. Poets have to publish SOMEWHERE. And since there are so many now, unconstrained by talent or...heck, restraint, they're dressed up here, ready to be given for the holidays.
A couple of them are even good. I liked Lance Larsen's "Why Do You Keep Putting Animals In your Poems?", and if his title smacks of smug self-reference, his language doesn't. "Badgers rarely invent stories to make them / Sad about their bodies", he smiles. And he goes on, beautifully: "My happiness / Is like a flock of sparrows that scatters when a bus / Drives by, then restrings itself two blocks away". Isn't that lovely?
Denise Duhamel's "How It Will End" defies the modern trend. Its universal theme and delicious ending strike a Billy Collins delight in absurdity. Collins, too, is here (isn't he always?) and my son smiled when I read him Collins' "The Great American Poem". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe "The Lanyard" is the G.A.P. And that was years ago.
The Contributers' Comments and Notes are, predictably and tellingly, thicker than the poems. In them, poets hold forth, filling you in on that trip to Venice, or the time the cat caught a mouse and they cried. The stand-alone poem--where we possess all the societal commonality we need to relate to it, where the language, form and metaphor wrap us in the divine, and when each time in our lives we read it, we grow a little more--is, for the first time in Western history, a long-gone dream. I fear we will never see its like again.