Speaking of anthologies, Larry Ziman sent an invite to my email the other day, promoting the Great American Poetry Anthology.
What's this?
Who is Larry Ziman?
Showing posts with label anthology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthology. Show all posts
Monday, October 1, 2007
Great American Poetry Anthology
Monday, September 10, 2007
Anthology redux
Thanks to Denise at the New Pages blog for bringing up the question of anthology merit. Although I couldn't find the responses, she did post a follow-up which included a comment that covered at least one of the major issues with the glut of narrowly-focused subject matter anthologies:
From Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity :“I honestly don't know the answer, but thanks for asking all of the right questions. If an anthology ‘packager’ doesn't at least have a plan to find distribution, it seems unlikely anyone will read the book other than the authors and the authors' friends. Which begs the question: if a book falls into the forest of books, and no one hears it fall ...”
Of even more significance to me is the screening process (anyone who submits is printed versus a merit based filtering), which is inescapably linked to more issues - will the anthology weather time? are the contributions representative of the highest creative voices or simply representative? is the anthology intended for its contributors or a wider base of readers (the distribution question fits here)? is the anthology simply a revenue generating effort for the editor/publisher (something Denise brings up) or more cynically, a route to false kudos in the land of special interest publishing?
I'm leaning toward a weaning of the anthology glut. Accomplishing this in the era of electric messages is the first challenge.
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