Just Out: Anthology Issue of The Volta

“The February issue of The Volta is up and features a special issue on poetry and poetics anthologies, with responses, essays, conversations, and interviews by the editors of  many, many poetry anthologies.”

Evening Will Come:

anthology feature:

Laynie Browne; Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, & Ravi Shankar, Joshua Corey & G.C. Waldrep; Rita Dove & Jericho Brown; Michael Dumanis & Cate Marvin; Camille Dungy; Clayton Eshleman; Forrest Gander; Arielle Greenberg; Susan Harris & Ilya Kaminsky; Cynthia Hogue & Elisabeth Frost; Pierre Joris; Brett Fletcher Lauer & Lynn Melnick; Miranda Mellis; Wayne Miller & Kevin Prufer; Aldon Lynn NIelsen; Oliver de la Paz & Stacey Lynn Brown; Jed Rasula; Jeffrey C. Robinson; Jerome Rothenberg; Abraham Smith & Shelly Taylor; Cole Swensen; TC Tolbert & Trace Peterson; and Jeffrey Yang.

from the Introduction to the issue by Joshua Marie Wilkinson:

It’s easy to slag off poetry anthologies, though I have certain questions and misgivings myself, of course. They’re too general, too selective, too cumbersome, too arcane, too misguided, too…I know, I know. But now that I’ve edited several of these things myself—and work daily with Afton and others as an editor of this journal (a kind of living anthology, as I think of it)—I wanted to overhear what went into all these books from the perspectives of the editors (and translators) themselves. So, I wrote to over fifty editors: those whose anthologies were near and dear to me and others whose projects were new and even those not quite finished, like Forrest Gander’s new one. There are many, many more editors I’d hoped to hear from, of course; and there are even more about whom I’d forgotten or remain belligerently unaware of. In fact, many did not know what to say about having edited their anthologies when they wrote back; many couldn’t make the time, as it happens; and several simply didn’t respond to my request. So it goes.

[…]

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