It has been customary, in order to make way for new poets and poems, for critics and publishers to spring clean every few decades or so, and certainly the end of a century is a convenient moment to take stock, as so many anthologists like to put it. The last few years saw the publication of a dozen or so major retrospective anthologies, some spanning simply the years 1945 to the present, others the entire century. Each editor cited the lack of space as a reason so many poets, and texts, could not be included, but once the machinery of the anthology gets underway, the sound of such reservations becomes dimmer and dimmer in the general brouhaha of reputation consolidation, discovery and canonisation which naturally ensues.

For who has time, on their own, to wade through every pamphlet, broad-sheet, chapbook, little magazine, journal and book published even in the last year, let alone decade, not to mention the century?

Is it naive of me to even think it necessary to say this is impossible? Unlike science, whose reviews often build on (and reference) pioneering work, much poetry is simply discarded or set aside, in the process of trying to apply a semblance of coherent meaning to the art of poetry, as if it were, in fact, progressive. Instead of what it often is: the isolated, individual records of wildly various expressions of what it can be to create poetry. Indeed, I myself refer to poetries not Poetry, to indicate the fact that any consensus view, in the public sphere, is no longer tenable, given the sheer eclecticism of strategies involved.

What is sinister is that this is often glossed over, as simply an inconvenience, so that a history may be achieved - a history of what matters, and what does not.

This takes the form of ideological struggle, to some extent, so that, for instance, Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry (all 1247 pages of it) published by Oxford University Press in 2000 gives Robert Penn Warren (who briefly espoused segregation as a young man) three pages, and African American Melvin B. Tolson 58 (pages 412-470) - about twenty more than T.S. Eliot. Modernism is forced to confront identity poetry, the poetry of liberation, racial struggle, and so the aesthetic and political wrestle like man and angel.

Nelson rightly wishes to redress the balance, and give the troubadour of Liberia his due. But in the process, Conrad Aiken does not even get one page - is not even included (one imagines he never expected quite such a spectacular disappearance during his heyday). Heartening, though, was the inclusion of several poems by US National slam champ Patricia Smith. Among these trade offs are glimmers of new light breaking in to dark rooms.

More egregiously was the recent book edited by UK-based editor Michael Schmidt, The Harvill Book of Twentieth-century Poetry in English, which did not publish one single Canadian poet. Schmidt claimed Canada was a "short street" not worth going down, and so a monumental anthology collapses under the blindness of its own insight. But these are only a few of many examples of the stupefying problems inherent in making anthologies - in giving poets their place - in posterity, in the eye of the public, in intertextuality.

It might be possible to argue, of course, that such anthologies do not matter, that they do not frame the reception of poetry and poets, that ultimately we always have the books themselves to fall back on. But do we? Most readers of poetry do not have an encyclopaedic urge, or a biblical lifespan, in which to search out for themselves the lost slim volumes of "minor" writers. They must, for the most part, rely on what critics have culled for them, and set out as the best of the best. Major poetry prizes, like The Griffin, only build on this consensus, and deepen it.

So what?, some poets say. I do not need a large audience. I do not even need to be read. But this is a lie. No poet prefers to be unread, and which serious writer would not want her texts placed alongside those others which she herself has fond inspiring and significant in her reading life? Is there a poet alive who does not, if only secretly, harbour the fantasy of having at least one poem which "survives" - has a place in the book of life - for several hundred years? No poet sets out to be a minor, or unrecognised poet. Even Emily D. wrote letters to certain mentors, hoping for wider reception of her work.

Indeed, the very idea of being recognised, of being so placed in a public consciousness, is an ideological construct, created mainly, in the English-speaking world, by Victorian amateur critics, who developed the idea of the modern anthology, based on Greek models. The Golden Treasury by Palgrave is the classic, and it is the book that guided Robert Frost’s entire career. Schooling, which once enforced the memorisation of certain (mainly lyric) poems, at least guaranteed that some poems would remain in the imaginations, if not esteem, of a literate and educated bourgoise society. This society no longer exists.

The place of the poet seems to narrow towards that of curate’s egg, or that of political refugee, at just the moment when the first-wave media (film, radio, TV), which primarily unsettled the above-mentioned literate society’s covenant with poems, are themselves about to be flooded by digital, computer-based multimedia forms.

This double displacement of the printed text has, in fact, allowed an aporia, in which, in the '90s, stage-based (spoken word) poetry emerged to challenge the traditional written word. The next stage looks to be a fusion, using multimedia technologies, of the oral and inscribed. This seems an enlargement of the sphere - the place - of the poet.

It is one I alluded to before, and one which has not been seriously taken into account by current publishers and established literary critics. Partially it is because for this next wave of poetries to overcome the structures which currently control poetry reception, the normative categories of the moment must naturally give way. One of these categories centres around identity. The other centres around nationality. I will now address both.

A recent essay by a Montreal poet, published in The Gazette, suggested, regarding identity (or personality) that poems, not poets, are what really matters. Her ultimate example (the old debater’s trick of the recourse to Authority) was Shakespeare: barely able to determine his exact personal history, what we were left with was ultimately his poetry, not his biography. In this case, not knowing the poet’s private life was an improving condition - the squint in the face of the sun that helps to hit the target.

Unfortunately, this attack on the public role of the poet does not emerge without resentment as its guide, unconscious or not. It is the rear-guard action of those quiet, reflective and mostly book-based poets who resentfully watch as the louder, performance-based artists leap onto the stage, stereotypically semi-naked and screaming, like some barbarian raiding party. History has shown that the barbarians were in fact at the center of a different margin, and that only crumbling empires fear the rough vernacular of the new.

In fact, as I have shown in my anthology (co-edited with NY slam poet Regie Cabico) Poetry Nation, there is no essential correlation between public (spoken word) poetry and a decline in quality. Nor does knowing about Robert Lowell’s life story diminish the power of his texts. More insidiously, however, such aesthetic purism aims to bracket off the "real" poetry from the simply popular. What is personal tends to be viewed as less writerly, since it speaks of issues and themes that constitute a threat to an impersonal, Eliotic definition of what poetry should be.

However, the intersection of the personal (the human body and mind) with personal and public history (from incest to addiction, slavery to genocide) can not allow for such hermetic desires to hold ground. Bluntly stated, poetry which admits into its sphere the language of the poet’s own experience is no less valid, than that which speaks only of the paintings of Dutch Masters with removed irony.

In poets like Mark Doty, a gay American who confronts AIDS in Audenesque verse, such distinctions ultimately reveal themselves as more than inadequate. But more is at stake here. For the conflict becomes that of self-promotion (or any promotion) versus noble anonymity, as if the good poet is one who is seen but never heard, who accepts like a martyr the fate of the ages, and prays silently for, perhaps, eventual resurrection in the eye of a critic or three in another century.

The next wave of internet-based poetries, supported on a platform which allows videos, MP3 files, and hyper-text to collaborate on a unifying field of discourses, explodes the idea of private/public binary opposition. Poets will increasingly seek to gain a share of the web-based, electronic audience, through any and all means necessary. Like the plumage of a bird designed for courting, the style and substance will both be determined in part by the delivery system, which is desire and need and passion all in one.

Certainly, the need to place the poet via identity will increase (so, as editor Nelson has done, more and more the ethnic, sexual, political or religious marginality of the poet will become an address, a way of reaching out). The belief that any poem can necessarily communicate seamlessly through the ages simply on its own New Critical merits is just no longer viable. What poems are and can do has changed.

I have called this a shift, in an other essay, to lifestyle poetries, as different poets and schools focus on the needs and desires of their own backgrounds. The choice to make a traditional, Classical, backward-looking poetry, like Heaney does, and the choice to insert oneself into the spoken word discourse, half buy-me entertainment, half punk fuck-you, as Nicole Blackman does, represent valid economic responses to the limited resources of the poetry audience - the world of time and consciousness itself. Not all can or will receive the same amount of attention. Poets do what they do best to reach their intended audience, in their favoured milieu.

Some critics’ insistence on the poem, not the poet, whatever its theoretical underpinnings, flies in the face of pragmatic experience, which suggests that humans create poems, and are thus moved by the desire (suggested above) to attain a degree of public or social recognition.

Private poetry does not exist - poetry must be shared by others to fulfil its potential. As variously competing poetic lifestyles continue to consolidate their power bases (page versus stage for instance) the new canons will assume the identity of Venn diagrams, interpenetrating, no circle taking full precedent over the other. For who can say the voice and values of an urban New York poet says less than a rural Irish bard?

This leads to my final point concerning the place of poets. It has concerned me that, in the English-speaking world at least, reception of poets seems heavily determined by nationality. For instance, the dozen or so millennial anthologies I referred to earlier, all take as their scope and range the Anglo-Saxon worlds of America and Britain, with Ireland sometimes included. Often as not, poets writing in English from New Zealand, Australia, or Canada (the so-called white settler colonies) are ignored, or given mere lip service. A few Caribbean poets may find a space. In general, this reflects more than the tension between cosmopolitan and provincial/regional modernism (the split between Pound and Williams), and something akin to contemporary national hubris.

For the British, the matter is clear. Do they have a home-grown poetic tradition in the 20^th century, separate from Yeats and Pound, Eliot and Plath, none of whom was "English"? Edna Longley, an influential Northern Irish critic, fights for the line from Hardy through Edward Thomas to Larkin (to her husband Michael), in this regard. For the Americans, the issue is one of greatness. The hegemonic superpower run by the ignorant oilman needs a cultural legitimacy, now more than ever, and the identity poets, who democratically yawp their celebration and critique of America are the best bet for poetic grandeur, let alone glory (see Poe, for an earlier attempt at this sort of poetic empire building).

The Scottish and Irish, both burgeoning nations establishing difference from the once-capital London, assert their own new-found national voices. One Scottish critic/poet, Robert Crawford, has even claimed that these poets of "home" - reasserting the centrality of once marginalized smaller nations - make up the central Canon of the 20^th century. As most major publishers are based in either America, or Britain, these nationalist tendencies satisfyingly collude with the publishing industry, which of course seeks to reach the biggest market. Read the British and American.

Except for a few critical darlings, like Carson (as feted in New York as Lampman once was - a cautionary tale in itself), Canadians are mostly off the map. Simply because they are not citizens of the remaining Anglophone superpower, or its Third Way satellite, the UK. Ireland, too, enjoys a special, republican/nostalgic, relationship with American readers, and is thus exempt from the high critical tariffs. Free trade does not mean, as we know, more jobs for Canadian, let alone Mexican, poets.

This is a paradoxical issue, since poets like Walcott and Heaney are seen by some as subversives who realigned the critical eye, forcing a redress of the balance sheet that moved from London to encompass the former colonies. Crawford, too, is something of a Scottish Assembly hero. Their attempts to write of their homes, their native lands, however, has played into the jingoism of larger nations. If it is okay to make hay from nation-state history, why not celebrate the US/UK national tradition(s) of poetry, as at least the central plinth of the new Canon?

Some critics would argue that the strong Canadian poem (not poet) would reach a universal (that is, American/British) audience on its own merits. Publishing practices suggest that the anthologies and collections designed for class study in colleges across the (American or British) land will exclude those inarguably excellent poets who do not compute with their class descriptions. Gary Geddes’ Oxford anthology did a passable job of including some Canadians in the mix, but neglected most of the fine Australian and New Zealand poets.

If there is no place for poets, qua poets, to be read on their own merits, what to do? It looks like, increasingly, a split will occur, between those poets who satisfy the academic need to play a role similar to Kipling’s - to sing of empire - and those who seek to sing of their own personal sublime. The multimedia poetries emerging will counteract, to some extent, the emphasis on borders and nationalities, but, ultimately, the internet is an English-based tool of industrialised peoples.

Is the place, then, of the poet to sing for their own narrow circle of friends - a lifestyle choice like that of being a good dinner guest - or to reach beyond all national borders, even linguistic divides? Is poetry, as has been argued, a universally-travelling good, or a perishable item, like seeds not allowed into the country of arrival? Does it actually speak to one person, a people, or no one? Will the place of the poet become more polymorphous in the new media, or as marginalized as ever? Stay tuned.

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