Months ago I finished The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present edited by David Lehman. I’m not going to review the book. I’m just going to post a photo of my dog-eared copy.
But this anthology did drive home to me the idea for me that anthologies are often good for surprising reasons. For example, the Seriously Funny anthology of humorous poems was full of some very unfunny poems. But there it had some of the best music poems I’d ever read in there, poems not found in the Everyman’s Library Music’s Spell anthology.
And likewise there were some surprisingly stellar love poems in the Erotic anthology. Not the same thing and I don’t know why this is that anthologies may have a kind of subconscious ordering principle.
My only complaint about Lehman’s Erotic anthology were his claims to not be able to include all the poems he wanted and then devote a third of the book to contributors’ sometimes very long comments regarding their favorite erotic texts. Although these comments led me to some interesting things, it made me question the point of even having author bios in anthologies anyway. Because like…the Internet. Save the room for more poems and if readers want to look up author bios, provide them on a link or let users do their own Google search.
Speaking of the Internet, Twitter has gone through many instabilities since I’ve been using it but I still maintain it’s the best spot to mingle with strangers. That isn’t always a pleasant adventure and there’s been a lot of melodrama on Twitter in all the usual places, but once in a while something quite amazing and miraculous happens there. Like good people sharing good poems.
Joseph Fasano has an account where he posts a thematic poem daily and people crowd-source response poems on the same theme. It can be quite moving, like today’s thread on Soulmates. Themes can be on topics like coping (a day or so ago) or joy or alienation or whatever. And it’s a brilliant way to start compiling lists of poems around topics of interest.
Many, many people post their favorite poems of the day on Twitter and once you start following a few readers, poems will start falling into your lap in the most amazing way. One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the poems people are gravitating to, collecting and sharing tend to be significantly emotional. And this makes me think that as a collective of humans who read poems, we’re ready for that again after the long trek we just made with “modernism” and “post-modernism” and the experiments of “contemporary” poems and I hope we start naming our eras with less dated word choices please.
