10 nov 2004

A colleague lent me an examination copy of Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 edited by Jon Cook. (Blackwell, 2004). It sports a blurb by Terry Eagleton and contains more than 600 pages of text. Aimed obviously at the textbook morket, I can imagine it will be adopted by some instructors. It is resolutely Anglo-centric, with only token representation of anything outside the English Language. It contains only one text originally written in Spanish: predictably enough, Lorca's duende essay! So Borges, Lezama, Paz, have no place here. Of course, there are a few French poets and theorists (Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, etc...), slightly fewer Germans, and a handful of Russians. So the poetic map constructed is US + England at the center, the major nations of Western Europe (France + Germany) at the periphery, and the rest of the world represented by "tokens" (Lorca, Césaire). Since this is pretty much the way the English professor sees the world, these choices make a lot of sense in market terms.

Celan does not appear in the index. No mention of Rothenberg or ethnopoetics either. But hey, you couldn't leave out Edward Thomas and Randall Jarrell, figures of no international trascendence at all.

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