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The anthology is the enemy of the poet.
Poets war against the anthology, but it always wins.
The excerpt defeats the complete. X's poems in the anthology outweigh X's Collected Poems.
That is the rule but there are some exceptions, conditionally:
If a poet wants to be read in her entirety, if she is sincere in that desire, she will limit her output. Elizabeth Bishop.
Mallarme's ninetysome pages can yield to a read, but Ashbery's ninetynine hundred?
(Androids can cyber-ingest the latter in 0.1 seconds. Humans unfortunately . . . )
Thus Bishop is closer to Larkin than Lowell. Unlike them, Lowell did not circumscribe. Hold his Collected in one hand and their two Collecteds in the other, and feel the scale of the choices.
The writer of poems (Bishop, Larkin) versus the writer of poetry. Or to use the current cant phrase the writer of poetries.
Product (poem) versus process (poetry). Doubt versus trust.
The poet is always up against it. The choice. Do you believe? Ashbery has faith compared to Bishop's atheism.
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Ancillary question (or is it?) is whether to specialize, to develop a personal unique trademark limited demarcatory style.
In other words you can't be Picasso, but maybe you can be a Serge Poliakoff, a Bernard Buffet, a Pierre Soulages.
You can be your own brand. Do you have a choice not to?
At one glance it's an Elizabeth Murray. You can tell it's a Susan Rothenberg from across the room.
Read one Follain poem and you've read them all and why not you say okay that's the way to do it, sticklerism rules.
And besides the marketplace demands it.
Because you don't want the fifth can in your sixpack of Coke to have Pepsi in it, do you—
And you don't want page 42 in your Michael Palmer poetry book to suddenly out of nowhere (hey stop him!) he's trying to write a Sharon Olds-type autobio Confessional poem with a four stress line, you don't want that do you.
You want consistency in the poets you buy, just like the softdrink of your choice; you want Palmer to provide the trademark poems you paid for.
And if you favor Olds, similarly you don't want her in the middle of her book deciding to try some Palmeresque metapoetic nouvelle vagues spaced out double entr'actes.
You want what you bought. You want the brandname poet, not the generic.
You want the Real Thing, Coke after Coke, poem after poem. That's capitalism, and you don't want it any other way.
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I'm trying to think of a generic poet. A nonspecialist poet, a non-individualistic, non-capitalist poet. A "Libertine" poet. Brecht? Ashbery?
Michael Drayton, in the introductory sonnet to his sequence Ideas Mirrour. Amours in quatorzains (first edition, 1594; revised in subsequent editions of 1599, 1600, 1602, 1605 and 1619) . . .
("Drayton was an inveterate reviser . . . . He was also extremely sensitive to criticism and to changes in poetic fashion." —Roy Booth, notes to "Elizabethan Sonnets," 1994)
Drayton:
A Libertine, fantastickly I sing:
My Verse is the true image of my Mind,
Ever in motion, still desiring change;
And as thus to Varietie inclin'd,
So in all Humours sportively I range:
My Muse is rightly of the English straine,
That cannot long one Fashion entertaine.
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(What a slut.)
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But Drayton may be right, at least where contemporary Britpo contrasts with our USApo—
Brit poets have more freedom than USApo's, they can write "in all humours"—
compare for example Duffy vs. Gluck: the former can (and does) write both 'serious' and 'comic' verse, but the latter?— Huh.
USApo's like Gluck (and the others mentioned above) must stick to their patented trademark modes,
whereas Britpo's can range "ever in motion," to whatever "Varietie" they find themselves "inclin'd"—
USApo's are more professional, more disciplined, than Britpo's—
we don't "sportively" stray—we don't venture out of our lanes.
It's the USA Constrain
vs. the British Straine.
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