(Somewhat) Against "Selected Poems"

On the Wheat and the Chaff

A volume of “Selected Poems” has its uses. It can be a good introduction to a poet’s work and, if organized chronologically, to how that work has changed over time. Even an important poet’s collections can go out of print, so a “Selected” ensures that some earlier work remains readily available. A “Selected” also gives insight into the poet’s own sense of her achievement, of the work that she sees as best or at least most interesting, of what she hopes will stand the test of time.

I readily concede all of this, but I still remain ambivalent about “Selected Poems” volumes for two reasons. For one, individual collections of any selected-worthy poet tend to have a certain coherence. The whole offers something irreducible to the parts. That coherence may be a composite narrative or an overt shared theme or setting, but it may also be formal or linguistic. It may be more loosely or subtly thematic. It may be a certain palette of tones. It may be certain presiding poetic influences. Individual poems can stand on their own. But something is gained by reading them in a thoughtful collection, even if other poems in that collection are decidedly weaker. And “Selected” volumes, made up of poems harvested over a longer time period, rarely offer that same “something.”

This brings me to the second reason why I am lukewarm about volumes of “Selected Poems.” I often disagree about what counts as a poet’s best work. When I know a poet’s collections, I am often surprised about what has made it between the covers of the “Selected.” For sure, some of this is subjective—what I prefer will not be the same as what you prefer. I grew up on a small dairy farm in Pennsylvania, so I am often drawn to poems about rural life and nature. Because of such differences in taste, you may find individual collections, or poems within collections, more to your liking than a poet’s “Selected.”

But I want to make a stronger claim, beyond individual differences of tastes. At times poets leave out some of their objectively best work in terms of thematic complexity or interest, formal accomplishment, striking imagery, or the many other aspects of poetic craft to which you can appeal in a judgment of artistic merit. (At other times, I think they include decidedly weak poems.) In this regard, I am skeptical about one major argument that is sometimes offered for “Selected” volumes—that they winnow the poetic wheat from the chaff. I suspect that some wheat is often lost and that some chaff often remains. This is also why I tend to appreciate meatier “Selected” volumes, with healthy selections from each of a poet’s earlier collections, over slimmer “Selecteds.”

A. E. Stallings’s relatively recently published This Afterlife is a good example of a meatier “Selected Poems.” It offers over twenty poems each from her first two collections, over thirty poems each from her third and fourth collections, as well as a generous “‘lagniappe’ of uncollected poems” and three uncollected translations. (You know you are dealing with a wordsmith when a word like “lagniappe” bursts into the section titles.) This Afterlife is the rare example of a “Selected” that I recommend all the time, especially to either curious non-readers of poetry or to poets or professors who are skeptical of formal poetry. The fact that This Afterlife (at least in my estimation) could dazzle both of these audiences is a testament to Stallings as a poet, for sure, but also to the merits of this particular selection. It doesn’t hurt that the volume is handsomely printed with pleasing typography and page layout.

But even here, in this best of “Selecteds,” there are poems that I miss—for instance, “Country Song,” from Stallings’s 2012 collection Olives, a sonnet about hearing a song late at night while driving in “daddy’s pickup truck.” This song, which eerily fills the cab although “the radio was set / Halfway between two stations,” gives the young driver a premonition of death. Here’s the sestet:

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          The voice came from beyond the muddy river—
          You know the one, the one that's cold as ice.
          Even then, it traveled like a shiver
          Through my tributary veins—but twice
          As melancholy to me now, because
          I’m older than Hank Williams ever was.

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A sonnet about country twang that mentions a “muddy river” brings the Mississippi to mind, but it soon becomes clear that this river is not “the one” the speaker has in mind. It is instead the river that separates life from death, the icy river Styx. And this river is not just out there somewhere, in myth or afterlife—it is flowing through the driver’s own “tributary veins.” The sonnet evokes the young driver’s first dread of death, and then the closing couplet gives a second “shiver” of dread as the speaker, reflecting on her youthful encounter with Death in the pickup truck, realizes “I’m older than Hank Williams ever was.” It’s a great poem, certainly worthy of a “Selected,” though Stallings is the rare poet who has produced enough great poems to overbrim the confines of even an ample volume. But this is also an important poem because most readers now associate Stallings with Athens, Greece (where she lives), rather than Athens, Georgia (where she attended UGA as an undergraduate). Stallings grew up in the South before she grew into a world-renowned poet and classicist. In an interview for Forbes, Stallings said of her deceased father, who was a poetry-quoting professor, “He was a brilliant man of wide-ranging interests, who could talk about Proust or deer hunting, Mozart or Hank Williams.” “Country Song,” with its pickup truck and Hank Williams song and “gut string in the key of flat regret” puts the emphasis on that southern upbringing, while also giving a nod to the classics through its allusion to Syx. If included in the “Selected,” this poem would have been the strongest nod to the deer hunting and Hank Williams side of her youth. In Olives, it is a particularly affecting poem because on the opposite it is “Sabbatical,” an elegiac poem about her father. Its presence alongside “Country Song” adds yet another layer of significance, another layer of loss, to the mention of “daddy’s pickup truck.”

This spring and summer I have been reading through Australian poet Les Murray’s massive Collected Poems (which has its own notable exclusions, despite running over 700 pages). The prolific Murray wrote many a great poem and many a good poem, but he also wrote many an unmemorable poem. He likes to experiment with surprising sounds and images. Sometimes they testify to his quirky genius. Sometimes they are strained or odd. Sometimes they confuse. In many poems, he writes in long lines, which can tend toward bagginess and indulge his hit-or-miss prolixity. I reiterate: “Selected Poems” have their uses. Les Murray’s New Selected Poems provides a helpful map through a vast poetic continent. At over 300 pages, it is still daunting. There is also a Best 100 Poems of Les Murray at 128 pages. I would readily recommend one of these two volumes to most people interested in Murray’s poetry, going with the latter if the interest is less intense.

But again, Murray’s collections, and especially his best collections, have a brilliance that a “Selected” sampling cannot convey. If I suspected someone to be a true kindred spirit of Murray’s, I would skip the New Selected and give them The Daylight Moon, Translations from the Natural World, or Subhuman Redneck Poems. (Murray’s best work may be two verse novels, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and Fredy Neptune, neither of which are excerpted in the New Selected.)

And there are many more strange choices in Murray’s New Selected than in Stallings’ This Afterlife. It includes five poems from Murray’s second collection The Weatherboard Cathedral. Two of those, “Working Men” and “Incorrigible Grace,” are slight. “Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil” is humorous, but I don’t see it as “Selected” worthy. “The Pure Food Act” is good and “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” is excellent. But “Once in a Lifetime, Snow,” a poem that arguably matches “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow,” does not show up in the New Selected.

In this poem, a hardboiled, no-nonsense farming uncle is returned to childlike wonder when he wakes to an unexpected, unprecedented snow:

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          A man of farm and fact
          he stared to see
          the facts of weather raised
          to a mystery.

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At the end of the poem, the uncle “tiptoed in / to a bedroom, smiled, / and wakened a murmuring child / and another child.” It is a charming poem, one whose premise, rhymes, and slightly exaggerated reactions (“And he stopped short, and gazed / lit from below, / and half his wrinkles vanished / murmuring Snow.”) evoke the best of children’s poetry and song, while the complexity of the imagery and lines like “that black earth dread old men / are given to” suggest that hardened adults are Murray’s main audience. He aims to bring these adults to wonder along with the uncle. “Once in a Lifetime, Snow” is also good evidence that, while he frequently wrote in a long line, Murray wrote some of his best work in shorter lines and tidier forms that disciplined his loquaciousness. Here, the quatrains are made up of alternating trimeter and dimeter lines, with an XAXA rhyme scheme. If you move those dimeter lines up to join the trimeter lines, you have heroic couplets. By organizing the lines this way, Murray gives the poem a hushed, slightly restrained excitement that fits the scene.

In The Weatherboard Cathedral, “Once in a Lifetime, Snow” appears in the same collection as a number of other poems of wonder, varying in form, language and dramatic situation. “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” is one of them. “Recourse to the Wilderness” is another very strong poem of wonder. Its final line celebrates “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things,” which is Murray’s wordplay at its best (and a good example of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ influence on him). These poems of affirmative wonder in The Weatherboard Cathedral are counterposed with unflinchingly tragic poems, such as “The Ballad of Jimmy Governor” and “Hall’s Cattle.”

I could offer similar assessments of other “Selected” volumes, many of which are less successful. (Rita Dove’s 1993 Selected Poems, on the other hand, is exactly to my taste—it includes three complete collections, including her classic narrative cycle Thomas and Beulah.) Elsewhere I have written about Donald Hall’s string of steadily-pared-down “Selecteds” and how he tinkered with earlier versions of some poems in questionable ways. Again, this-poem-rather-than-that-poem quibbling is not my main point. I am trying to show something more substantive, that a “Selected” does not simply displace or distill the earlier collections without loss. So, if you like a poet’s “Selected,” don’t assume you’ve seen all the goods. Give the collections a try. You’ll at least have the pleasure of seeing the poems you enjoyed in the “Selected” in a new, often richer, way when they appear within a thoughtfully compiled collection. And if you are really serious about a poet—and many NVR readers strike me as serious—you might skip the “Selected” altogether and go right to individual collections. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Steven Knepper is the editor of New Verse Review.