Surely the anthology is an art unto itself. Listed are anthologies published in the 21st century, which doesn't necessarily mean they are comprised of 21st century poets and writers. However, they do tell stories about the aesthetic values of 21st century anthologists.
by Heather Pyrcz. “Caveat: A short history of Canadian poetry will not please everyone. Poets are left out, lacunae that some will think unforgivable. Frye suggested that anthologies ought to have blank pages at the end on which the reader may enter his own neglected favorites. I have used a 1945 birth date as my end point, although there are a few exceptions for reasons of inclusion. I have clustered the poets in unfamiliar groupings. There are many constellations we could form, each one revealing something different and important about the poets. This digital history page, I hope, will be thought of as a reference point, one of many in an ongoing conversation about the rich meaning of Canadian poetry.”
This awesome resource can be found at youngpoets.ca.
“Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s new selection of Canada’s finest young poets.”
“Edited by rob mclennan with Stephen Brockwell, Michelle Desbarats, Anita Dolman, Anne Le Dressay, Karen Massey, Una McDonnell, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Monty Reid and Shane Rhodes.”
Date: launch December 14, 2006 7pm Ottawa Art Gallery
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada
http://www.chaudierebooks.com/decalogue.html
“A surreal array of beautiful anomalies, Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada’s best fiction…. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood’s. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bök to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.”
“Introductions is a unique undertaking in the world of Canadian poetry. This exciting anthology brings together 15 of this country’s most honoured and influential poets whose goal is to introduce this generation’s finest—yet lesser known—poets. Each “introducer” provides an insight into the life and work of the poet of their choice, which is followed by a selection of some of the poet’s most engaging work. The result is a powerful yet eclectic selection of unheralded verse, and a rare glimpse into the way poets see themselves and the world around us.” Edited by Evan Jones with an introduction by David Staines.
“Edited by Jeannette Armstrong & Lally Grauer. Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology is the only collection of its kind. It brings together the poetry of many authors whose work has not previously been published in book form alongside that of critically-acclaimed poets, thus offering a record of Native cultural revival as it emerged through poetry from the 1960s to the present. The poets included here adapt English oratory and, above all, a sense of play. Native Poetry in Canad suggests both a history of struggle to be heard and the wealth of Native cultures in Canada today. |
“…these poets have been carefully chosen to convey the exhilarating commotion and diversity of Canadian verse. For native readers, Open Field, represents a handy selection of the country’s most vibrant writers, both established and emergent; for readers in the United States and elsewhere, it is the perfect introduction to the skill and daring ubiquitous in Canadian poetry today.” Edited and with an introduction by Sina Queyras.
“Founded to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, ‘ottawater,’ and its chemical formula/logo ‘02(H20),’ is a poetry annual produced exclusively on-line, in both readable and printable pdf formats. An anthology focusing on Ottawa poets and poetics, its first issue appeared in January 2005, 150 years after old Bytown became the City of Ottawa.”
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada
http://www.ottawater.com/
“This cheeky little anthology is 40 pages long from title page to colophon, and has been stapled and bound into printed folded wrappers, which are, of course, yellow. It contains work by 20 poets that either weren’t ‘good’ enough to have their poems displayed in other anthologies designed to catapult the careers of poets into the mainstream logjam of Canadian literary publishing, or who have been generally overlooked for reasons unknown to the editors: Elizabeth Bachinsky, Derek Beaulieu, Daniel f. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Stephen Cain, Jason Christie, Jason Dickson, Paul Hegedus, Jesse Huisken, Jake Kennedy, Jeremy McLeod, Gustave Morin, Alessandro Porco, Angela Rawlings, Rob Read, Jenny Ryan, Nathalie Stephens, Mark Truscott, Andy Weaver, and Mike Woods.”
Canada
http://www.bookthug.ca/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=apollinaire&Product_Code=830
“Poets Against War Canada seeks to engage poets and readers of all kinds in creating a unified public voice against war, tyranny and oppression.”
Post poems in English or French online and participate in online forum.
List to audio-file of interview between poets Jeffrey Mackie (100 Poets against War) and Sandra Stephenson (poetsagainstwar.ca).
Date: ongoing Peace Poetry Jams in various location in Canada and around the world
Canada
http://www.poetsagainstwar.ca/
“Many of Canada’s most renowned poets salute a national treasure in this poetic tribute to bill bissett. bissett has been a landmark on the Canadian literary scene since the 1960s, renowned as much for his fascinating life as for his poetics. He is best known for his anti-conventional poetry, which makes use of phonetic spelling and visual elements, and for his performances of concrete sound, chanting, and dancing during poetry readings. bissett is also the founder of blewointment press (now Nightwood Editions).”
Canada
http://www.nightwoodeditions.com/title/RadiantDanseUvBeing
“Every ten years or so, someone in Ottawa feels the need to produce a variation on the same theme—a collection of Ottawa-specific poets. The purpose of Shadowy Technicians is different; less a representation of the city as a whole, than a group of some of the newer poets that are currently [2000] living & working in the capital area. Comparable to Brad Cran’s Vancouver Hammer & Tongs or Michael Redhill’s Blues & True Concussions: Six Toronto Poets, this group have been working here for the last few years, refining their voices & reading their work at open stages & bookstores. Ottawa has always been called a city of poets. Poets don’t seem to mind working in silence or small groups. This is the result.” —rob mclennan, editor.
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada
http://www.brokenjaw.com/catalog/pg32.htm
“Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry is edited by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie & Angela Rawlings. Canada’s cutting-edge authors have been acclaimed internationally as some of the most important innovators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Avant-garde poets challenge the reading and writing status quo, and question what a poem may be. Where conventional collections emphasize traditional and lyric poetry, Shift & Switch offers a unique and highly anticipated alternative: radicality, innovation, and experimentation with sound, visual elements, mathematics, surrealism, and ’pataphysics.”
An antholgoy edited by Stuart Ross. “Surrealism may be a dirty secret these days, unmentionable on the backs of poetry books. But there are more than a handful of poets in North America who have been heavily influenced by surrealism. Some of them even consider themselves surrealists…. This anthology brings together 13 Canadian poets under the influence of surrealism…. There are imagist poems here, and language poems. Prose poems and manifestos. Things that could be called haiku.”
Canada
http://www.themercurypress.ca/poetry/SurrealEstate.html
“The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry offers readers a reliable, if often risk-taking, guide to the last two decades of contemporary Canadian poetry. In the first book to survey the territory since Dennis Lee’s landmark The New Canadian Poets was published in 1985, critic and poet Carmine Starnino has collected fifty of the most interesting Canadian poets born between 1955 and 1975, many of whom have never made an appearance in a major anthology.”
Not exactly a poetry anthology, this unique collection edited by Will Garrett-Petts does feature writing by a number of Western Canadian poets. “In these twenty-five essays, poems, stories, and visual pieces, the authors of The Small Cities Book explore what it means to live in a smaller community during the era of global megacities…. Using the central British Columbia city of Kamloops as their example, the authors explore notions of social capital and community asset building, especially as they relate to the politics and aesthetics of self-representation, to notions of home and homelessness, to ideas of space and a local sense of place.”
Kamloops,
British Columbia,
Canada
http://newstarbooks.com/view-book.asp?id=19&c=Social%20Science
Edited and published by Karl Young. “This site includes a federation of genre, subject, and author home page, as well as smaller surveys and individual poems. It should give a rough sketch of some of the possibilities of late 20th - early 21st Century poetry from a number of different points of view and means of presentation. This is an anthology rather than a zine, and an anthology dedicated to alternative means of presentation as well as pluralistic forms and subjects. It includes over 60 complete books, new and reprinted…”
And on the topic of anthologies themselves, see Karl Young’s essay/manifesto: Toward an Ideal Anthology.
International
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm
“Luminarium is the labor of love of Anniina Jokinen.” She first created the site 1996 “to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature.”
It now has over 3300 pages, covering Middle English Literature (1350-1485), Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603), Early 17th Century English Literature (1603-1660), Restoration and 18th Century English Literature (1660-1785). And a Margaret Atwood bibilography to boot.
International
http://www.luminarium.org/
Edited by Todd Swift and Val Stevenson, who are also editors of nthposition, the award winning online magazine.
New Writing 14. “This website is a companion and key to New Writing, the British Council’s annual anthology of the most exciting contemporary writing, and is for readers and teachers all over the world. It features selected texts grouped into 12 themed sections for_New Writing 12_ and New Writing 13; a new theme is being added every month for New Writing 14.”
“duration press publishes a print chapbook series, & three e-book series:”
The “duration series of international poetry, one of the few of its kind, is dedicated primarily to poetry in translation.”
Also, “duration : poetics: our e-anthology series of poetics / criticism, with each title dedicated to a single issue or concern.”
United States
http://durationpress.com/
“This site has been created by the students of Introduction to Literature: Poetry (English 210) at Goshen College in the fall of 2004 and 2005. The poets indexed on this page are writers from the United States and Canada whose work appears in A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, edited by Ann Hostetler (University of Iowa Press 2003). Eventually other poets from Mennonite contexts will be listed on this page.”
Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana,
United States
http://www.goshen.edu/mennonitepoetry/Home
p..”The Great American Poetry Show (www.tgaps.net) is a hardcover serial poetry anthology open year-round to submissions of poems in English on any subject and in any style, length and number.” Volume 1 is also available as an ebook.
West Hollywood, California,
United States
http://www.tgaps.com/
“But what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”—Craig Douglas Dworkin, from his introduction to the online anthology
United States
http://www.ubu.com/concept/
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