Do you know that I have never read The New American Poetry, 1945-1960? It seems almost impossible.

I’m not a philistine. Nor am I a traditionalist or a formalist, who has avoided this foundational document for aesthetic reasons. In fact, I am a great admirer and have been more than a little influenced by the Black Mountain and New York Schools (my father was good friends with Fielding Dawson, a writer who studied at Black Mountain) and by the San Francisco Renaissance (especially Kenneth Rexroth, who did not actually have a poem included in the collection).

The simple truth is, I have just not gotten around to it. It’s on my list though.

Another truth is that I don’t buy a lot of anthologies. Though I do make a point of picking up lit mags, when it comes to book buying, I am mistrustful of collections of different writers. After all, if I like a particularly poet – shouldn’t I just get an entire book by that poet?

The same sort of morality is at play in the classic admonition not to buy the single, but buy the entire album. If a band or musician is any good, the theory goes, then you should experience the entire work, not just the fragment of it represented by the single (not sure how that ethos is managing in the age of iTunes).

I did pick up a copy of Surrealist Love Poems, but that’s a relative exception. And picking a collection of poems by artists who have been dead long enough to be considered classics is not quite the same as picking up a collection of something more contemporary.

As a result, other anthologies which have sparked a certain interest in the poetry community – I am thinking of much talked about collections like American Hybrid – are also absent from my shelves.

Am I simply ignoring a key means of disseminating modern poetry?

Certainly, collections like The New American Poetry and the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry were vital stepping stones (or were they just markers?) in the evolution of English language poetry.

What am I missing by avoiding anthologies?