The Poems I Turn To Anthology

The Poem I Turn To: Actors & Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them is a new title this year by Sourcebooks. It’s edited by Jason Shinder, a poet himself of a few collections.
I suppose the book has 2 markets, those who love movies, and those who love poetry. I haven’t cultivated movie knowledge and only recognize four of the names of the actors and directors on the cover: Adam Arkin, John Landis, Holland Taylor, Peter MacNicol, Tim Blake Nelson, Lili Taylor, Stacy Keach, Michael O’Keefe, George Wendt, Bob Balaban, Peter Coyote, Swoozie Kurtz, Ken Brecher, Carrie Fisher, Walter Mosley, Brian Cox, Jane Fonda and Paul Simon. A further 2 dozen people are within including Eve Ensler.
Although it calls in names, and could work commercially from that vantage point of fan curiosity, what I like about it is the real nature. People didn’t have to participate, but some heard about it and asked to join in as well. Individuals wanted to add their voice to a project for a friend as a memorial. It doesn’t come from a place to selling a taste, selling a poet, prescribing what others should like, but more personally speaking, for myself, this matters.
The contributors have bios at the back but the primary focus isn’t the contributors but the nearly 90 poems chosen for enduring impact.
The poems are ones chosen that have been carried with these people, internalized touchstones and cover a wide range of the expected canon from Auden to Rumi and Shakespeare, Neruda to Plath and American contemporaries as well of Mark Strand, Mary Oliver and new to me, Carol Muske-Dukes who had poems that made me sit up and listen as the CD played on. She is the wife of the actor David Dukes. The project of this anthology was started in memory of him who died in his mid-fifties in 2000 and supports the theatre scholarship fund in his name.
About 1/4 of the poems are on CD and the rest, often, less touted, and more interesting ones, are in the text only. In a few sentences each poem has a sidebar of how and why it resonates, giving more depth to the poem for being explained why it matters to at least one person, in particular. For example, a poem grade 10 geometry teacher made students memorize stuck with Bob Balaban thru life – Paradox by Clarence R. Wylie Jr who wrote in part my successes are but pretty chains/linking my twin doubts […] How frail the wand, but how profound the spell or the one he recited in French, that he did so nimbly in a job interview that he faked people into thinking he could speak it and got the job. You never know when a poem will come in handy or how.
Other people describe their relationship with a poem as encapsulating, galvanizing, some era of their life, or a touchstone where, within the lines, continually “I feel like I can breathe”. The significance can be a milestone, returning to a poem much later and receiving the eureka that eluded and connection with who first tried to show the poem’s heart, or that a friend wrote it for them. The anecdotes are unexpected as the poems. Stanley Kunitz’s Touch Me is footnoted by Amix Lambert describing eating meatloaf sandwiches made by Stanley in his garden when she was a child. Others share what aspect of the poem made them fall in love with it, such as Mary-Louse Parker describing Kenneth Koch’s To You
It seems a lesson in getting poetry to people when they are young. Perhaps not necessarily by age 9 but resonance takes time and a captive school audience situation helps. Many (but perhaps even not most) people related poems that mattered they encountered in primary school, or at latest college.
The poems themselves are over a fairly broad map, not at all sedating, as some anthologies can be, in uniformity. Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse with They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to but they do to John Keats’ To Autumn and Sunny Dooley’s White Shell Ever-Changing Woman about a Navajo deity to Paul Celan on Nazi Germany. Certainly narrative. The map between the what and the why and the who is as interesting as the poems in some cases.
The text has tidy orienting bios of the poets, such as that of Ezra Pound, or of Li Yi, born in 1084 China, of which 100 of her poems remain, or of Constantine Cavafy born in Egypt 1863 who never sold a collected volume or his poetry but only privately distributed pamphlets among friends. or of Meghan O’Rourke who began her literary career a decade ago at the New Yorker and admits Inventing a Horse is not easy. /One must not only think of the horse/ One must dig fence posts around him. A lot falls away from where one begins and falls away from what one gets.
In the introduction (p. XV1) Billy Collins says what never happens, “I know how we should respond to this unprecedented cataclysmic event: we’ll go the movies.” In times of crisis, poems, not paintings or ballet, are what people habitually reach for. Um, dirty 30s = cinema popularity? Ah, no matter, small nit that. I agree with the sentiment he intends (i.e. rah rah, poetry) and when he goes on in a time when the audience for poetry seems largely composed of other poets, its is encouraging to see that poetry is alive in the lives of non-practitioners, whether they are film stars, lawyers or mechanics. At the same time I feel my back get up at the term non-practitioners. As if mechanics or lawyers could not overlap with poetry. It’s like suggesting walking is something exclusive for athletes. But maybe I’m just being bristly. Collins sermons can have that effect on me. Poetry is only communication with skill and heart, hardly something Poets have exclusive capacity for, even reading people’s anecdotes that accompany the collection show that.
It’s a pretty decent collection, worth keeping and browsing from time to time. It gives an interesting survey.