Some (quick) thoughts on curating publication

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Curating I suppose is another way of saying editing but also something else on top of editing? I am thinking about Silliman’s post on annuals, journals, and anthologies, and whether/how we can differentiate between them. His post caught my eye because of his lukewarm thoughts on Zoland Poetry, which is one of the annuals/anthologies in which some of my work is included. So I don’t mean to come to Zoland’s defense, as much as to say that I believe the intent of an “annual” is similar to the intent of an “anthology,” in providing something of a snapshot of literary scene or even a community.

Silliman brings up the now defunct New Directions Annual, and this reminds me that City Lights Books once had, along the same vein as the NDA, the City Lights Review, which I remember seeing in the bookstore back in the day. Dig this list of contributors for Ends and Beginnings: CLR #6, edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and published in 1994:

Robert Anbian, Amiri Baraka, Alberto Blanco, William S. Burroughs, Andrei Codrescu, Susan Etlinger, Dario Fo, Barry Gifford, J.T. Gillett, Allen Ginsberg, Howard Hart, Elaine Katzenberger, Phillip M. Klasky, Steve Kowit, James Laughlin, D.H. Lawrence, Subcomandante Marcos, Kaye McDonough, Daniel Moore, Norman Nawrocki, Mimmo Paladino, Julian Palley, Pier Paolo Pasolni, Nancy J. Peters, Mark Petrie, Pina Piccolo, Ezra Pound, Jeremy Reed, Arthur Rimbaud, Ed Sanders, Alberto Savinio, Andrew Schelling, Laura Stortoni, Mark Terrill, Ingeborg Teuffenbach, Allen Tobias, Nanos Valaoritis, Georgii Vlasenko, Ron Vroon, Anne Waldman.

In my world, a contributors’ list looking like this is pretty hot (i.e. far surpassing lukewarm), much like the list of contributors to NDA a partial list of which Silliman includes in his blog post. And what this contributors’ list tells me is simply the selectiveness of City Lights Books Publishing. Not a bad thing, this selectiveness; Ferlinghetti is being discerning.

I think also of the Kearny Street Workshop anthology Without Names, edited by Shirley Ancheta, Jaime Jacinto, and Jeff Tagami, and published in 1985. Clocking in at a rather slim 64 pages, it’s a precise picture of a scene in a time and place — the poems of West Coast/California Flips, circa 1970’s-1980’s, who were members of the now defunct organization called the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (BAPAW). It’s pretty unheard of nowadays, a Filipino American poetry/literary anthology that is markedly less than 300 pages; this can be seen as a positive, that there are so many Filipino American writers out there writing what editors believe to be publication worthy work. Or that there are editors open and willing to give many writers a publication opportunity.

As a general rule (i.e. not specific to Filipino Americans), I believe that editors can be said to be visionaries in casting a wide net when curating (organizing and overseeing) publication, when including more obscure names of emerging or up-and-comer writers who end up considerably well-known or even (inter)nationally recognized, or unpopular work that turns out to be “before its time.” I believe that editors can also be said to be insufficiently discerning, even overly democratic, in such wide net castings, when including obscure names and unpopular work that end up remaining obscure and unpopular.

Additionally, a “snapshot” of contemporary Poetry (capital P poetry) is invariably wide net casting, and this is where the skill in curating comes in if editors insist on that wide nest casting, creating a print body that is cohesive or consistent, where common or similar themes, threads, subject matter, aesthetics, politics, poetic concerns emerge, and as curator, you come to identify these things and place each work within the larger print body accordingly.

All this to say, perhaps sometimes such wide net casting is not the wisest strategy when handling an already large and non-cohesive thing called Poetry. Still, while the wide net can serve to produce disjunctive or “disorganized” bodies, I happen to think that seeing these kinds of snapshots aid in understanding the poetry industry/poetry industrial complex, its many many different constituents and their positions within and without, its many many differing and conflicting viewpoints. Hence furthering that there is no such unified larger Poetry body.

OK what am I getting at here? While perhaps more lukewarm than hot in content, the above type of anthology has some kind of historical value. As well, this goes back to something else that’s been a subject of discussion lately, on “major” and “minor” poets. And whether it’s such a “bad” thing to be “big” in specific poetry communities while obscure in or marginal to the larger world of Poetry. Knowing full well that there are so many markers of “success” in our poetry careers, what happens to us if we never end up in Best American Poetry or the Norton? What survives time, and should that matter to us? Or how do we create books, anthologies, and annuals that remain on our bookshelves and passed on to subsequent generations of readers (I think of my Manong Gene coming to California and gifting me with the first edition of José Garcia Villa’s Volume Two, the 1949 New Directions hardcover with original dust cover), when the alternative is to end up in some box among many boxes stacked in someone’s basement?