Paul Kane

‘To choose the best, among many good,’ says Dr Johnson in his ‘Life of Cowley’, ‘is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism.’ The truth of this maxim is borne out nicely in the controversy surrounding – or perhaps emanating from – Rita Dove’s new selection of twentieth-century American poetry. That The Weekend Australian should have felt moved to comment on the situation (Frank Furedi, ‘Culture War Highlights the Banal Message of Politically Sanctioned Art’, 7–8 January 2012) is a good indicator of just how hot the issue has become. As a result, it is no longer possible simply to review the book; you have to review the controversy as well. The literary world is always set a-twitter by dust-ups between luminaries, and this one is a doozy: it features the former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, defending herself against the redoubtable literary scholar and critic Helen Vendler. Vendler attacked Dove’s anthology (and Dove herself) in the New York Review of Books of 24 November 2011, and Dove returned the favour in the 22 December issue. Thereafter, the controversy spread like algae bloom in the press and blogosphere.

‘Posterity is so dainty,’ complained the American essayist John Jay Chapman, ‘that it lives on nothing but choice morsels.’ Chapman was writing about Browning, whose work for his contemporaries meant life, not art. But, Chapman predicts, ‘Posterity will want only art’. It is a nice distinction when considering our penchant for anthologies. This daintiness goes all the way back to the first anthology, Meleager’s in ancient Greece, as the word itself means ‘flower gathering’, or simply a ‘garland’ or ‘bouquet’. We pick poems like flowers and arrange them in a book. The suggestion, of course, is that certain kinds of poems tend to get left out in favour of those that work best as stand-alone ornaments, giving us an unnatural notion of what’s actually out there growing in the fields.

Anthony Lynch, enterprising editor of the notable but short-lived Space magazine, also produces signed, limited-edition chapbooks under the moniker of Whitmore Press. Paul Kane’s A Slant of Light and Brendan Ryan’s A Tight Circle join a list that features Maria Takolander’s Narcissism and Cameron Lowe’s Throwing Stones at the Sun (both 2005).

This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

Although the World Wide Web was begun in 1990, it didn’t really get going in a big way until 1994, with the First International World Wide Web conference held at CERN in Switzerland. That was less than a decade ago. And that should give us pause. Think how important the Web has become in those few years. Consider, too, what sort of computer you were using in 1994 and compare it to what you deploy now (assuming you’re not a holdout). No pause there. It’s been an ongoing vertical projection that is no doubt just the beginning of an enormous change that will affect almost every aspect of our lives. Of course, we’ve heard this technological refrain over and over (with various apocalyptic shadings), and we probably believe it to be true. Still, we’re not likely to get excited about it. We’ll deal with it when it comes. In many instances, it’s already here, but we haven’t fully noticed. In part we’ve simply accustomed ourselves to some of the demands of a ubiquitous silicon-based technology, and in part we’ve remained unaware of what’s headed our way in the form of a techno-savvy younger generation. We seldom see into the future because we usually look in the wrong direction: the future’s not ahead, it’s behind us, and it’s coming up fast.