Rock(as)sa(u)lt

There's an incisively critical review of the Rocksalt anthology up at The Danforth Review (which, sadly, will be closing shop indefinitely). The review's by Catherine Owen and is written from the perspective of someone arbitrarily excluded from the book because she'd moved to Alberta from her home province of BC a couple of years previously. She mentions me as a contributor who benefitted from the eligibility criteria, since I'd moved to BC shortly after she'd moved away. The argument is, and I think it's totally legitimate, that she has more business being in the book than I do. She does go on to say that my poem is one of the strongest in the anthology, and I'm one of the 33 contributors--by her count--whose poem is squarely located in a specific BC locale. Catherine thinks this is how the book should be oriented, but I'm not so sure. Tilting an anthology towards site-specific poems usually results in a) a lot of second-rate poems being included because they're thematically appropriate (tho, as she points out, insisting on new, unpublished poems is at least as likely to dilute the brew) and b) an overall picture of the culture of a place that is misleadingly provincial because it excludes poets who don't give a hoot about birds, bears, mountains or forests.

Speaking from the anthologist's side of the fence, I sympathise with the editors because some kind of arbitrary criteria simply have to imposed if you're going to make your job a manageable one. Figuring out what those criteria are--and how flexible you're going to be about them--is a crucial task, on which the aesthetic success or failure of the anthology depends. My anthology had one very obvious pre-set limit: each poem had to be a sonnet. This is trickier than it might seem at a glance, since the sonnet in the 21st century is not necessarily a 14-line poem in a set rhyme scheme (nor has it been in past centuries, but the exceptions to the rule are far more normal now than when Milton was caudating or Hopkins was curtailing). A second limit I set myself was that all the poems had to have been published in book form--essentially the opposite of the Rocksalt rule. Rhenisch and Fertig didn't want to deal with permissions, I didn't want to deal with an open call; in retrospect, sifting thru a pile of submissions would have been much easier than the countless hours I spent spelunking in the Special Collections at the Killam Library, but I highly doubt I'd have received many, if any, poems to supercede those I'd found in my digs. So the work would have been easier, but the yield much lower; I think Catherine's right to criticize the Rocksalt editors on that score.

I did exercise my judgment in making a few exceptions to the book-published rule, pace the criticism of Sarah Neville that I ignored literary journals; for example, I included Catherine Owen's collaboration with Joe Rosenblatt, which I first encountered in an issue of Prairie Fire, before they had secured a deal for the book in which it now appears. As far as nationality goes, a number of the poets in the book are ambiguously--or perhaps amphibiously--Canadian. My rule on this was to err on the side of inclusiveness, which Owen is--correctly, I think--arguing Rhenisch and Fertig should have. As readers of Jailbreaks are aware, I was frustrated by the close-minded refusal of Elizabeth Bishop's publisher to let me consider her as a Canadian poet.

It's hard to imagine editors of a PEI anthology excluding me or, say, Steve McOrmond or David Hickey on the basis of present-day non-residence; this would be no more reasonable than excluding Richard Lemm for being born in the US or John Smith, PEI's former laureate, because he's from Ontario. I think maybe British Columbians take it more for granted that if someone has defected from their most sublime of provinces, it's because they don't want to be there--instead of because it's a prohibitively expensive place to live, especially if you prefer the sort of lifestyle most writers do.