[New-Poetry] Oxford Book of Ballast

[David Graham]

Anyone seen David Lehman's new Oxford book of American poetry?  I  
just brought it home from the library today in my red wheelbarrow-- 
all 1132 pages of it.  This is the mother of all doorstops, friends,  
and a crime against NewPoetry, I'm sorry to say.

1132 pages of poets of many stripes and proclivities, and yet, pretty  
much a shut-out for NewPo.  No Sam Gwynn to be seen.  No Bill Knott.   
No Tad Richards.  No Finnegan, Ruggieri, Newberry, Grumman,  
Ballardini, Stroffolino, Cervantes.  There's a couple Johnsons, but  
alas, no Halvard.  One Snyder, but no Snider.  And they erroneously  
included the wrong Graham.

Who is this Lehman guy, anyway?

I haven't really done more than scan the table of contents so far,  
but it looks like it will provoke some fairly predictable sniping  
beyond its mysterious and unexplained grudge against NewPo.  For  
anyone who knows Lehman's taste, the contents won't offer much  
surprise, I don't think.  The selections up into the second half of  
the 20th century seem unexceptional and unobjectionable to me, with a  
few surprising choices scattered here and there (Ruth Herschberger,  
Jean Garrigue, David Schubert).  Nice to see both Weldon Kees and  
William Bronk included, as they often are not in American poetry  
surveys.  Nice also to see that the editor can include both Jack  
Spicer and Robert Bly, who probably haven't appeared side by side in  
a great many prior anthologies.  Nor have Dana Gioia and Charles  
Bernstein, perhaps.

When Lehman moves into more recent decades, of course, his choices  
will begin to strike more folks as controversial.  But here, too, he  
does offer a clear alternative to the previous Oxford, including (for  
example) both Lyn Hejinian and Sharon Olds, Tom Disch and Rae  
Armantrout.

==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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