Anthologies

Todd Swift of Speaking of Poems has a 12-screen interview between himself, rob mclennan and Marilyn Bowering pondering The Art and the Agony of the Poetry Anthology.
There is a problem of choosing. Every choice is an omission displacing another option. It’s a kind of tyranny. You anthologize what you know about and like, therefore are caught in your own filters. If it is an anthology by committee, there’s the risk of democracy and the pieces that cause reactions, positive and negative, to cancel each other out and leave one with the solid, but unexciting choices.
Do you choose what is well-known? If everyone has internalized the items as reference points, then who would buy it and why? To keep it tidier than a shelf of sliding magazines and scrapbook clippings?
What does an anthology do? It can be a 101 survey course. It tends to pick up the most frequently read pieces to get someone up to speed fast without having to live thru the decades that shook those items loose as pivotal and resonant, transformative for more people than your average thing. If it hasn’t been tested with large number of readers then it’s more of a gamble.
One doesn’t need just more data out there that isn’t chosen as exemplar, insightful, worth repeating on some grounds. It has to be discriminating in some way. Defining terms can help. Hashing out the use of the anthology — am expanded Cole’s notes of lifetime achievement award, or examples of skillful expression, even if it was a one-hit wonder.
Still, if it is to be the best of, that’s a bit slippery. Even in cultural relativity, you need a tether to qualify it, to make the word best meaningful.
To discount the question of good or best or any relative term evades the question. To say important, or skilled or interesting, is still relative to something. What is the post?
The more specific you can be would seem to be helpful, yet the best non-linear visual poems reacting to oceans in some geographical region in some short time frame among those who heard and participated in time gets to be…more like a magazine call. How does one compare except on the subjective, “I could feel that”. I suppose sometimes I read a poem and can recognize the dexterity and skill but don’t care for the intent or message. Sometimes I can see there’s a kludge quality more than an offhanded workman style but the net effect and message perfectly is what I need at the time, or what the culture wants to hear at the time. Right time and place rather than best worker. Is that as much at home anthologized?
To bind some poems together is to say: look at these. They tend to not be like an anthology of one person’s collected. They aren’t hung in a gallery to bounce off one another. They are more hermetically sealed in drawers of different chapters.
What would distinguish a magazine call of poems from an anthology except binding and total number of poems? How is the process different, distinct, or have an advantage vantage point over a poem or book of poetry winning an award?
What is an anthology trying to direct our attention to?
Hopefully it presents context bios of who was influenced by who so you can read further and see how the collection of people filtered the world.
Maybe someone who curates an anthology would put from obscurity someone who doesn’t get as much attention, making a revisionist history choice. By choosing from anyone in the world, in theory, the national or world of poetry subset anthology, may be able to sidestep cases where in the name of fair, everyone gets an equal representation, which serves to highlight inequality of skill in some anthologies by writers circles. It might end up more even if someone impartial judges blind.
In essence it is part of consensus building of what is worth carrying forward. What concepts and styles have currency according to the set of values of one set of people who are curating? If you find a curator who matches your poetic values, it’s easier to find a passageway to a new-to-you poet that will resonate with keys for some doors that are locked.