It’s Easier to Talk About Sex

than money, but in honor of National Poetry Month, I’m going to do it: let’s talk about money.
For the past month or so I have spent almost every free hour writing emails and letters asking for permission to reprint poems in an anthology I am co-editing with Arielle Greenberg. In his post on this blog, “Book Talking,” Kwame Dawes writes, “Poets may not know this, but the anthology is not our friend.” Because I’ve been so busy doing the permissions work on this (my first) anthology, I haven’t had time to take issue with Kwame on this matter. I will now.

I agree that poems are best read in the context of a single volume by one author. Because of my penchant for the long poem and for book-length series, I probably feel this more than most poets. I always assign my students to buy and read at least one volume of poetry by a contemporary author each semester.
Still, I think anthologies are often useful to have both in and out of the classroom. I’m thinking less of anthologies like the massive Norton (although many people who do not otherwise read poems like to read here and there in the Norton), than of thematic or specialized varieties of anthologies. Just a few examples of anthologies that have been important to me:
No More Masks! edited by Florence Howe, originally published in 1973 by Perennial. An important feminist anthology.
In the American Tree edited by Ron Silliman, National Poetry Foundation 1986. My introduction to Language Poetry.
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1985. Assigned to me in a high school independent study; this blew my mind.
The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women edited by Susan Aizenberg and Erin Belieu, Columbia University Press, 2001. Helped me fill in gaps in my knowledge.
The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood edited by Patricia Dienstfry and Brenda Hillman, Wesleyan University Pres, 2003 Important essays on motherhood by many of my favorite poets.
The New Young American Poets edited by Kevin Prufer, Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. This is a smart, useful anthology that led me to buy several single volumes by poets I hadn’t heard of before. It is very useful for students with no background at all in contemporary poetry or for students wanting to find new voices.
Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century edited by Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin, Sarabande Books, 2006. I used this anthology (along with volumes by a singe author) twice in beginning writing workshops with good success. I also frequently use this anthology to help students find a poet whose book they will buy and read and present to the rest of the class. (Full disclosure: I am one of the poets in the anthology.)
In less than a month Not For Mothers Only, an anthology edited by Cathy Wagner and Rebecca Wolff, will be published by Fence books. I am looking forward to that anthology. I am honored to be included in it and a little jealous not to have edited such a book myself (so much of my work in the past few years has been about motherhood).
And, the anthology I am most pleased to be a part of is not a poetry anthology but an anthology of essays called About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing and Hope, edited by Jessica Berger Gross, Plume, 2006. This book deals head-on with a topic that affects a great many people and that hardly anyone likes to talk about. I wish I’d had this book when I had my miscarriage; I’m so glad it exists.
The best anthologies are not simply a bag of shiny pennies but create, in their arrangement, something new and useful—perhaps a mosaic is a good analogy for the well-made anthology. The pieces themselves are interesting and the collection creates a picture (or an idea) that could only exist by putting these pieces together.
So, say for a moment, you buy my argument that while anthologies should not be read instead of books, that they are valuable. Let’s go back, then, to talking about money. As poets we probably accepted, long ago, that poems and books of poetry are valuable even though they offer almost no actual monetary return. But perhaps you imagine that a poetry anthology, unlike a single volume, might have intellectual, creative and financial value? After all, as Kwame writes, “people buy anthologies, people even read anthologies”—does that mean that there is money to be made in making anthologies?
The simple answer is: no. But what I will discuss in part two of this post are some of the many vexed and maddening questions I’ve encountered in the course of editing an anthology of essays and poems—what is a poem worth? who makes money in the publishing industry? what are the ethics of reprinting published work? if you can’t pay everyone who should you pay first? what happens when money becomes a symbol of respect rather than a currency of real exchange?
The role of money in publishing is inextricably linked to the larger question of whether or not writing is work as the larger culture understands it.
Stay tuned…