Today I was reading the fall issue of the literary magazine Shenandoah, in which David Wojahn--an excellent poet--has written a thoughtful essay about the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, how it has a corner on the college market, what challengers are out there, what the history of anthologies in general looks like, etc. I did not realize that the anthology has gotten so large that now contemporary poets--people who wrote after WWII--have been put in a separate anthology, to distinguish them from the older canonized modern poets; of course in both anthologies they've dredged up, or restored, more of a diverse group than the standard white guys. Since I've been out of academia for the past five years, I've been evicted from the gravy train where I used to get sent these books for free.



Interestingly, Wojahn lists the omission of Larry Levis, along with my pal Rodney Jones, and many poets I admire, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly...and even me! My heart did a funny flip when I read that. Also he talks about the omission of Etheridge Knight, a so-called jailhouse poet whom I've always admired. Despite the cultural mandate for the anthology to be more inclusive, Knight has been dropped, I suspect because some of his great poems--like his ballad about a cabin boy who survives the wreckage of the Titanic by swimming to shore--wouldn't play well these days. In particular I remember the line: "Now pussy's good and that's no jive/but you got to swim not fuck if you want to stay alive" (I think the character Shine gets offered sex if he'll save a woman...) He wrote in a tremendous diversity of styles.



What I want to post (I'll find the Knight poem and post it another day) is this poem by Borges that Wojahn closes with. It's about all those of us who'll be a minor footnote in history. If we're lucky.



To a Minor Poet in The Anthology



What now is the memory of the days

that were your days on earth, that spun the thread

of luck and grief and were, for you, the world?



They were swept away in the measurable torrent

of years. You're a word in an index.



To others the gods gave everlasting laurel,

inscriptions on coins and obelisks, avid biographers;

of you, my obscure friend, we know only

that, one evening, you heard a nightingale.



Among the asphodel of the shades, your meager shade

will feel that the gods have been ungenerous.



But the days are a tangle of commonplace miseries,

and what better luck than to be the ash

of which oblivion is made?



On other heads the gods have poured

the relentless lights of glory,

that peers into the hidden and picks out flaws,

glory, that ends by ruining the rose it adores--

to you, brother, they have shown themselves more merciful.



In the ecstasy of a dusk that will never be night,

you hear the voice of Theocritus' nightingale.





Interestingly, I found a parallel in an Albert Goldbarth poem that also appears in this issue. The poem contains the tidbit that an Australian woman had her dead husband's ashes added to her breast implants. I do wonder if Goldbarth made this up.