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          As inevitable as taxation—and only slightly less ominous for the serious critic—National Poetry Month is upon us again. The Academy of American Poets inaugurated the annual “celebration” a decade ago (though it seems to have been around forever), and the cause has been espoused by various corporate publishing entities in the form of now-customary marketing schemes. Whatever its merits, National Poetry Month remains, at its core, an administrators’ feast day, one that betokens a sense of special pleading or, more specifically, special interest. No other arts require ordained and extraordinary periods of lobbying. There is no “fiction month” or “sculpture month,” but it is worth acknowledging other causes championed in the month of April, as a way of saying hi to the neighbors: STD Awareness Month, Anxiety Month, Counseling Awareness Month, Garden Month, Foot Health Awareness Month, Frog Month, Guitar Month, Home Inspection Month, Alcohol Awareness Month, Kite Flying Month (this one makes sense), Occupational Therapy Month, Stress Awareness Month, and Welding Month. April also hosts special “weeks,” such as Clean Out Your Refrigerator Week, Egg Salad Week, Pet ID Week, Administrative Professionals Week, TV-Turnoff Week, and Volunteer Appreciation Week.

          The very existence of National Poetry Month raises certain questions. First, if such efforts are successful—which is to suppose that they actually do broaden public “appreciation” of poetry—then why limit ourselves to a single drizzly month? Notwithstanding the grim reality of budgetary restraints, these efforts, if worthwhile in the first place, should be perennial rather than merely annual. As advertisers know, it is difficult to sustain serious ballyhooing, which sometimes has the unintended consequence of thickening skins and plugging ears. Still, similar efforts dotted across the calendar year would be preferable. After all, E-Verse Radio, my own grassroots electronic broadside, offers a poem every weekday of the year. Second, is it a good thing to peddle poetry without regard to excellence? National Poetry Month usually becomes an affair of sheer volume over individual brilliance, quantity over the quality that ought to define indispensable poems. James Merrill once remarked that we shouldn’t dynamite the pond to catch a silver carp. We have witnessed quite a lot of dynamiting in the past few years, but, somehow, there are more fish than ever, most of them guppies, muck-feeders, or moat-variety orange carp.

          Nonetheless, popularizing efforts like National Poetry Month are to be admired, particularly if they generate the desired result of helping poetry find a larger audience. One problem with promoters of poetry is that they have a tendency to oversell as much as any “step-right-up” cure-all huckster. The bottle’s label claims it alleviates balding, hives, wind, gripe, impotence, crow’s feet, and sleeplessness, but all you’re getting is a belt of booze with some herbs. Poetry is often touted as a strong drug that can save lives and open up the world to those who have, somehow, stumbled along all their lives in a consumerist trance. It is true that books, including some with poems in them, can have an immeasurable impact on a young mind, but their effect diminishes with time, diluted by experience, age, and discretion. In fact, a poem can only hold profound meaning if it stands alone, or in small company. It’s unlikely that a hundred different poems will possess particularly potent therapeutic or quasi-religious significance for anyone.

          The most commendable aspects of the April phenomenon aim to introduce poetry to younger readers, such as the Academy’s “Poetry Read-a-Thon” and its partnership with the American Poetry and Literacy Project to create an anthology tailored to younger readers. Just as with music and other arts, it is exceedingly difficult to instill curiosity and comprehension in students after they reach a certain age with no prior exposure. For instance, you cannot expect to build a string orchestra in a high school if the lower grades have no access to violins and cellos. Groundwork is needed. Compared with efforts to promote music and visual arts, poetry appreciation seems much more affordable and manageable. Likewise, expansion of the adult audience for poetry is certainly a fine thing for the otherwise financially redlining publishers who still dabble in such rarefied fare, but does it benefit the art? It probably does in some measure, though the push for populism in any field rarely corresponds with a careful attention to durability or substance. While we will not make special provisions for the month (we’re here all year round), the staff of the Contemporary Poetry Review will tip our hats to those who strive—however Sisyphean the exertions may prove—to broaden the base for the delicate statuary of poetry.

          2006 sees the fifty-year anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, one of the most famous poems in the English language and still a run away best seller, by poetry standards. Celebrations, emanating from the legendary City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, will take place across the US and abroad. In April, the ubiquitous novelist Rick Moody will join Mark Doty to commemorate the poem at Columbia University, Ginsberg’s Alma Mater. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux recently published The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder, which contains essays on the poem by Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, and Robert Pinsky. The poem, a quasi-religious torrent of semi-private imagery phrased in long, biblical free-verse lines, is the cornerstone of poetry for the Beat movement, as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was for the Beat novel (to be fair, it shares this distinction with William Burroughs’s equally famous, but scarcely read, Naked Lunch). Owing much to the Romantic English poets and earlier poets of ecstatic vision, such as Christopher Smart and William Blake, “Howl” is something of a gateway drug for young readers (personally speaking, I thumbed my Pocket Poets edition nearly to tatters and can still quote long passages from memory). Aside from very rare occasions, which include portions of “Kaddish”, Ginsberg never again achieved the sustained intensity and originality of the first section of “Howl,” with its famous commencement, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Unfortunately, its influence on younger poets since that time has been largely deleterious. Dutifully listening to their master’s voice, they failed to find their own. By definition it is easy to parody and impossible to truly imitate memorable literature, and the thousands of scattered verse paragraphs by suburban undergraduates devoted to dark needles, flaming doorways, and mysterious machinery can mostly be attributed to a lingering buzz acquired from Ginsberg’s landmark poem. Now that the Beats (the cardinal four: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Gregory Corso) have disappeared into the machinery of night, it is easier to address the movement as an historical phenomenon without the usual meddling by zealots and old friends. Some players remain, including, miraculously, their predecessor Lawrence Ferlinghetti and contemporary David Amram, who told me one evening at Swift Hibernian Lounge on the Bowery that he felt he was the last living Beat, an honor he accepted with some hesitation (no word on what Gary Snyder would think of this arrangement). Perhaps a genuine assessment of the Beat movement, unfettered by politics, will emerge now that the half-century mark of its most important poem has passed.

          If you were to ask a random assortment of Americans to name a poetry or literary anthology, most would come up empty. Those who did arrive at an answer would overwhelmingly respond “the Norton anthology,” that old standby of classrooms across the republic since 1962. Ripples of approval and discontent have spun out from various updatings of this repository of the “canon”, but no great sum of gossip accumulated to M. H. Abrams, the unassailable editor who guided the anthology through the past four decades of political and aesthetic turmoil. Earlier this year, Abrams, a Romantic scholar, passed the editorial reins to Stephen Greenblatt, the best-selling Harvard Shakespearean. While special-interest anthologies have multiplied with extraordinary fecundity, the only real challenger the Norton faces is another educational workhorse, Houghton Mifflin’s Heath Anthology, which generally angles toward cultural studies versus traditional literary analysis. While Greenblatt is not likely to oversee any explicit radicalization of the anthology, it is equally unlikely that any of the motivated parties for revolution or preservation will be satisfied any time soon.

          This brings us to a publishing event that will certainly exert authority for years to come. In early March, Blackwell issued M. A. R. Habib’s truly magisterial History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Habib, an Oxford-educated scholar with a solid philosophy background, known for his translations of Urdu poetry into English and his book The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, has accomplished what may well be considered the achievement of a lifetime. Habib eschews the lingo-dense style of the book’s more historically recent subjects in favor of a candid, intelligent one aimed at a general readership. While the $150 price tag on the first cloth edition will no doubt cause some sticker shock and dissuade all but librarians from buying, a trade paper edition is planned, and Habib himself informed me over dinner at the Nodding Head in Philadelphia that he hopes to be able to issue a pared-down “readers’” edition. He admitted that the humanist tradition of newspaper and magazine literary criticism, as it has been practiced unabated for the past four decades, may have some merit and is perhaps overlooked by academic theorists, who generally fail to take it seriously. We suggest, with considerable respect, that the sentiment is sometimes mutual.

          David Yezzi, formerly literary director of the 92^nd Street Y, now executive editor of the culturally conservative New Criterion, took an old-fashioned switch to both the hyper-hip Manhattan Fence magazine and the controversial anthology Legitimate Dangers in a March Wall Street Journal editorial. It is rumored that he is currently in his Broadway office awaiting the thunderbolt of reproach that is expected to strike his desk at any moment. The Legitimate Dangers anthology, made up largely of avant-garde poetry by teachers under the age of 40, has been described by Claudia Rankine as a “brilliant record of what is genius in contemporary American poetry”. Do not expect any but the most enthusiastic reviews (except, possibly, in these pages), because the slightest bad cheer would be career suicide for any professional who moves and shakes in the young-educator set that dominates American poetry. In-group anthologies like Legitimate Dangers tend to instill an image of wagons circled against the “savages” who skirmish and send war parties from the hills. One response to a new anthology—one that is ever increasing in popularity—is to issue yet another anthology. It is important to remember that the very word anthology comes from the Greek anthos, flower, or collection of flowers. This can be construed as a selection of “beauties,” a once standard system in Victorian England, when Francis Turner Palgrave set out to assemble “the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language,” to which he added, “and none beside the best.” Today that sort of line would be considered imperious, arrogant, and possibly even evil, and so anthologies resemble less a selection of beauties, or even a competent survey of the field, than a collection of associated careerists or members of an exclusive group, based less on talent than on other, more easily identifiable credentials such as regional affiliation, age, or (clandestinely) alma mater.

          As Adam Kirsch (who would make a superb anthologist himself) recently commented: “A good poetry anthology is not a monumental object, but a critical act. Yet the latest generation of poetry anthologies seems determined to evade that critical responsibility.” This phenomenon is hardly limited to the US, where we have too much of everything to choose from in our glutted, glitzy aisles. Katy Evans-Bush, our glamorous London correspondent, will issue dispatches from the front lines of a similar anthology war currently raging in the UK, where the books regularly sell very well and garner substantial column inches in the papers. Poets who are accepted into a successful anthology wouldn’t dream of shedding rain on the polite, self-regarding parade they’ve been allowed to join. It’s just not done. In fact, tendentious voices can easily be silenced with an invitation to the ball. Those who fail to make the cut, or who thrive on their alleged “outsider” status (which may simply mean that they don’t know what they’re doing or aren’t any good), aim clouds of flaming arrows at what they view as the complacent, homey campfire where the young postmodernists grind out their strange, ersatz-surrealist ballads or where the aging, establishment cognoscenti continue their downward trend into exhausted free-verse musings.

          The bizarre thing about the whole arrangement is that whichever side one falls on, nearly all poets continue to be drawn to the romantic allure of being thought of as “outsider” or at least “antiestablishment” (even if the only one who buys the pose is the mug staring back in the mirror). Even those sucking lavish salaries from large educational bureaucracies enjoy imagining themselves as crusaders with mask and cape come to make trouble for the empire. Still others might even take pleasure in being described as part of the establishment (feel free to cue a Darth Vader rasp here), if only as some small signal that many years devoted to poetry, rather than a “career in poetry,” were somehow, in whatever suspicious way, finally recognized.

With all best wishes, as always, until July,

Ernest Hilbert

Editor, Contemporary Poetry Review

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