Schmidt Michael - New poetries VI an anthology

New Poetries VI Previous Carcanet anthologies include New Poetries IVTen American Poets edited by James Atlas Five American Poets edited by Michael Schmidt Benjamin Brittens Poets edited by Boris Ford Modern Canadian Poets edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift New Caribbean Poetry edited by Kei Miller The New York Poets edited by Mark Ford The New York Poets II edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield Poets on Poets edited by Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt Contemporary Russian Women Poets
edited by Daniel Weissbort and Valentina Polukhina Twenty Contemporary Poets of New Zealand
edited by Robyn Marsack and Andrew Johnson Ten South African Poets edited by Adam Schwartzman An Anthology of Urdu Literature edited by Ralph Russell

Earlier anthologies have disclosed remarkable poets: beyond those already mentioned, Sinad Morrissey, Patrick McGuinness and Matthew Welton (II); Caroline Bird, David Morley, Togara Muzanenhamo and Jane Yeh (III); Kei Miller (IV); and Tara Bergin, Oli Hazzard, Katharine Kilalea and William Letford (V) among many others. More than half of the poets included in this book write rhymed and unrhymed sonnets. Shadow sonnets, ghost sonnets, sonnet shapes recur. Is this because as editors we are sonnet-haunted, sonnet-stalked? Or is there something about the sonnet form we count thirty-three sonnets or near sonnets out of some 210 poems, and many longer and shorter poems reflect sonnet proportions, a 4/3 pattern. Sonnets ghost some of the prose poems. Were we to excavate backwards through the series we have a hunch that the sonnet has been a recurrent feature.

As editors we do not have a particular sweet tooth for sonnets, but the poets whose work attracts us are concerned with form in ways that poets have experienced that concern for seven centuries, maintaining an oblique conversation with past and future and with one another, and all of them aspiring, if not to a place in heaven, at least to a share in Canto XXIV of the Purgatorio where Dante is welcomed as fulfilling and extending the promise of earlier poetries. There the dolce stil novo comes into being; here the reader can register how it renews and evolves. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem called Un Poeta del Siglo XIII (A Poet of the Thirteenth Century). This poet looks through the drafts of a poem. It is about to be the very first sonnet. He labours on a further draft, then pauses.

Acaso le ha llegado del porvenir y de su horror sagrado un rumor de remotos ruiseores. To paraphrase, Perhaps he has sensed, radiating from the future, a rumour of far off nightingales. Of things to come, even of impending clichs. The modern poet asks in the sonnets sestet: Habr sentido que no estaba solo y que el arcno, el increible Apolo le habia revelado un arquetipo, un vido cristal que apresara cuanto la noche cierra y abre el dia: ddalo, laberinto, enigma, Edipo? (Had he detected he was not alone,that the cryptic, the inconceivable Apollohad disclosed to him an archetypal pattern,a greedy crystal that would detain,as night arrests day and then lets it go:Dedalus, labyrinth, the riddle, Laiuss son.) For Borges the future weighs on this long-ago present, much as the past will come to do: in looking back, we see something aware of our gaze, returning it. This prolepsis, this analepsis, arrests the quill of the ur-sonneteer. It is a momentous little moment, a defining one.

Its a moment many poets experience when they find a sonnet on their page. Those inherencies! Less a promise than an earnest. Once the sonnet is recognised by a labouring poet, not as a discovery but as a thing given by the inconceivable Apollo, once it is in language, as it came to be for Giacomo da Lentini in the thirteenth century Italian, it becomes part of something larger, in being successfully itself. This first sonnet, like those included in New Poetries VI, works with memory. Borgess poet, suspended between a classical then and a modern now, mediates. Our poets, too, mediate.

A poet developing received forms cannot but collaborate with the poems that came before and those that will come after. A sonnet never belongs exclusively to its author. When it has what Seamus Heaney calls wrists and ankles rather than hinges and joints, it is always new in its familiar, its familial movement. It pays its respects but has its own work to do. A headline in the Guardian on 16 March 2015 proclaimed, Poems of the Decade anthology swaps Keats for modern masters. The word masters is used loosely to describe the one hundred poets whose post-2000 poems have been commended for the Forward Prize.

Keats suggested himself to the headline writer because the anthology has been adopted as an Edexcel A-level text in 400 schools and Tim Turnbulls Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn was presented as displacing Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn in the curriculum. Hello! Whats all this here? A kitschy vase, Turnbull begins. The third of his odes four ten-line stanzas ends, Each girl is buff, each geezer toned and strong, / charged with pulsing juice which, even yet, / fills every pair of Calvins and each thong, / never to be deflated, given head / in crude games of chlamydia roulette. Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn may mark the distance between Keatss reflections and the contemporary world. Fair enough, though it devalues neither Keats nor his Ode, even in an age of compulsory relevance in school texts. Daljit Nagras Look We Have Coming to Dover! does not quite displace its equally superannuated parent poem, Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach.

The poetry in Poems of the Decade will force a change in the way pupils view poetry, says the Guardian. The subject-matter of poetry has been extended to include full-fat milk, Post-it notes, joy-riding, using guns. This will be shocking [] after dwelling on nightingales and Grecian urns. 2014 marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War and 2015 the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot.

The Guardian journalist is caught in a clich, a narrow Romantic time-warp, unaware of Whitmans Drum-Taps, Rosenbergs Dead Mans Dump, The Anathemata, The Waste Land, the work of Auden, of Larkin and Plath, Ginsberg, Harrison and much else. Triumphalist ignorance sets out to challenge easy assumptions about what is and is not literary, portrays Keats as irrelevant, classical, conservative, disposable, and with him all the elitist, irrelevant clutter of past poetry and what it gives in terms of form, ear, living semantics. At last kids have poems for pleasure, not just for homeworkbecause the last thing a reader gets from Keats is pleasure. Time for some radical cultural cleansing. Enter