Have I ever read anything with pleasure that was actually an "assigned reading"? Probably not. The obligation to read, the foundation of any literary pedagogy, made any text suspect for me. Any author that was marginal, not part of the canon, was always much more attractive. I could enjoy Henry Green because he was so much in the shadows. I could never read Pynchon because he was the canonical "postmodernist." Is this a form of snobbishness: not wanting to read what everyone else is reading? Undoubtedly!! That's what I loved about Asbhery's "Other Traditions." He wasn't going to write about Wallace Stevens or Ralph W. Emerson, but about supposedly "minor authors." This suggest an interesting game, which we might call "Roussel v. Proust." Take a canonical writer and offer an eccentric contemporary whom you prefer. I was happy to see at the poetry project website that Elmore Leonard was a financial sponsor. It made perfect sense to me.

When someone like Cary Nelson does an anthology, he keeps the basic canonical writers, and adds African-Americans and members of others underrepresented groups. There seems to be a weird logic at work here, an underlying conservatism. How do you attack this without seeming to attack the inclusion of the black poets? The problem is that the criterion for selection is incoherent. You're in the anthology because you're a canonical poet, or because of some other agenda, and its obvious which poets are in for which reason. But what is an anthology anyway except the taking of an ideological position? The only anthology of any interest would be one made according to one's purely personal judgment. Not someone's judgment about what someone ELSE ought to be reading. And why do they always choose the same damn poems of the same poets?

I read Henry Green first because John Ashbery had written an M.A. thesis about him. Could we get the microfilm from DAI? Your favorite poet's favorite authors will always be the ones you need to read.