Steve Halle
What are your thoughts on the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies? As a writer, I'm not concerned with prizes because they are typically far beyond my control. In fact, if I was selected for a prize or an award, I would consider it a successful failure. On the one hand, it's good to be recognized by someone for being good at what you do, but on the other hand, my literary values are such that I hope prize-granting authorities would not embrace my work. My great hope for my work is that it has already tunneled out of the prison the prize- granting authorities are policing. There is no time off for good behavior if the guards recognize you as the most congenial prisoner of conventions.
I also no longer will send my work in for a prize, either for a book or single poem, because, as an editor or writer, I do not agree with the culture of charging to have work considered. I would rather subsidize a press or journal by purchasing the books or issues they've published to read because I like what they do, not through contest fees. By turns, I want to have editors publish my work who feel like it is their mission to publish it and believe in it that strongly, not just that it is something to do.
Poetry anthologies are becoming less necessary with the abundance of poetry that's available on the internet (including the contemporary, the classic/canonical, and everything in between). I submit my work to interesting niche anthologies that intrigue me. Dirty:Dirty from Jaded Ibis is one of those that I submitted work for and got accepted. I also am intrigued by the anthology of post-human poetry that Feng Sun Chen and Aaron Apps are putting together (Beasts, Monsters, Creatures, and Cyborgs: An Anthology of Post-Human Poetry). The taste-making or canon- forming print anthologies are becoming less relevant, although I was caught up in the implications of the debate surrounding the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, mainly because it calls into question the authority of anthology making. Dove's anthology omitted key writers like Ginsberg and Plath, purportedly because Penguin could not foot the permissions bill with HarperPerennial, and in the aftermath, Dove's choices were roundly attacked, sometimes smartly and sometimes in ways that were racially motivated, like Helen Vendler's review of the anthology. Many respected critics (Vendler, Burt, Perloff, Mark Halliday, among others) have lately complained that there's too much poetry, and I like their complaining because I like for the genre to be excessive or overwhelming, to the point where no one can "master" it via traditional means.
I also like the chaos created by idiosyncratic anthologization: every group and sub-group and sub-sub-group has an anthology, and I think this diffusion of energy, the entropy of what I call "bulk-time" poetry is a marvelous excess.
As an editor, I value participating in prize culture like Pushcart nominations if the authors I publish value it and want me to do so. I think nominating poets for the Pushcart Prize is a way to reward them for giving you their best poems to publish.
How would you describe your work? Multifaceted, dynamic, and strange.
www.poetsandartists.com
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