Help with The Lumpy Corral!
Call it an experiment in collective anthologizing. Bowing to popular will, we’ve started The Neglected Anthology The Lumpy Corral, a wikified collection of neglected underutilized poets, and we need your help editing it. Here’s how it works:
1/ Click the “Register” link there under “Site Admin” and get yourself a user account here at DE.
2/ Click through to the pages of individual poets and add poems and links as you see fit. Don’t add just any old thing you can find on the internet–the idea is to make a case for the authors in question. Book recommendations and illuminating critical articles are good, too.
2.5/ Be sure to add <title>…</title> tags around the titles so that they’ll show up in the Contents box.
3/ If you want to add a poet to the anthology, add his/her name to the table of comments and I’ll come through and create a page for him/her. (Only do it if you’ve got poems to add.)
4/ What about copyright, you ask? Good question, for which there’s no good answer. The principle of the exercise is to make less known poets better known, so I’m hoping the various copyright holders will take a benevolent view of the effort. But I’ll immediately accede to the desires of anyone who contacts me, so don’t tempt them by reprinting anything that might test their patience.
Have at it!
I tried putting in the Samperi poem I quoted in the original thread, but the nbsp spaces didn’t work so there are no indents. Is there a way to fix this?
Quick parameter question - do we mean this to be a collection of under-acknowledged, flourished-20th-century, deceased US-identified poets?
Hey, this is fabulous! In fact, I’ll go accurately hyperbolic: This stands as something like a major moment in poetry-internet history…
Quit patting yourself on the back, Kent, and help us figure out who the major neglected Spanish-language / Spanglish US poets of the 20th century were.
Got it, LH. I don’t know what went wrong, but it’s working now.
Thanks!
Hey, Jordan. What the heck do you mean? This was Baird’s idea, not mine!
I’m trying to track down the list Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen, and I put together years back for a projected anthology of neglected U.S. post-war poets. It was pretty long. I can’t access my old Pegasus mail files, so Dale is trying to find the stuff.
Let’s see.
Kent
Kent! I only mean that there’s work to do. Pleased to hear you and Dale are gathering the list you made with Hoa.
Do we have consensus that we will count no poet neglected who can sing along with “Help, I’m Alive”?
It would be nice if when you go to the Anthology page you could see beneath each author’s name the poems (if any) that have been added.
(I mean, of course, the titles of the poems.)
LH: Patience, patience. Very little actual text there yet. And I wonder how we’ll slog through group editing — I do not want to read the collected works of every neglected 20th century poet online. Not yet, anyway.
I am holding my tongue re the title, which I think would hurt my feelings if I were family of any of the poets mentioned. I haven’t yet come up with anything I’d call better.
Davis for co-Editor of this, with Baird.
Seriously. I really think this could turn out to be one of the most unusual projects in poetry in long time.
@LH: If you (et al.) want, you can edit the TOC page to reflect how many poems have been added, e.g. “Frank Samperi (1).” Just change the number when you add more. If/when we get to a critical mass we can figure out how to make it better.
@JD: Good call. I’ve been burning all my brain cells (and what little free time I’ve got at the moment) on the technical problems, but feel free to suggest alternatives for a title. And yes, I think it’s fair to keep the project to the illustrious but maligned-by-history deceased. As for group editing: I’m glad to open up comments on the individual pages, which could give a rough semblance of Wiki talk pages.
I really don’t have any sense of what ‘neglected’ means here. Neglected in the context of whom/what? For example, compared to his friends, like WCW, Reznikoff is neglected. But is he ‘neglected’ enough for this anthology? I would add him to the list, but, I repeat, I don’t know what neglected means here. Reznikoff seems pretty neglected to me; I mean, in my opinion, a lot of people don’t seem to read him enough– but his collected was recently re-released by Black Sparrow/David Godine, so maybe that somehow excludes him. Or do we want to operate here without definitions, because that’s what’s so great about the internet? [I am seconding Jordan's parameter-related questions, that is, basically.]
‘maligned by history’
for example– I don’t really know what that means.
Yeah, let’s keep this to the dead.
Maybe someone should look over Silliman’s similar entries on “neglectorinos” or whatever he calls them to see if there’s actually any good ideas in there.
I’ll try to get to work on a few entries soon. But I agree with JD that we should consider limiting each poet to a small number of well-chosen entries, then closing his or her page to further editing.
Joshua - good questions. I am guessing that we are not going to find a convincing grounding for our neglect threshold beyond “sez us.”
I was just going to mention the Neglectorino List here; although the term “neglectorino” is one I dislike intently.
A lot of living poets on that Phillysound list; of the no-longer-with-us we’ve already got Rae’s pick, Darrell Gray. I’ll comb through.
@JB: No easy answers there. But some questions to ask yourself before adding a poet: is their work in print? is it easy to find (in anthologies, etc.)? is the poet someone that three people in the context of your choice (reading/bookstore/seminar room) could identify as a poet?
I’d say we should set the bar higher than “less read than I could wish,” since that includes, with maybe three exceptions, just about everyone.
Good idea from Robbins on the dead.
Joshua, wouldn’t that openness of category be partly the point of a “Wiki” project like this? That the notion of “neglected” is fluid, that the project enable debate on what we mean by it, what counts, etc?
Thomas Meyer’s essay “On Being Neglected” makes some interesting points about the idea of “neglect”.
The well-meant designation “neglected” is kind of a poison gift, even for those no longer with us. Especially if said sad cases are lumped into a neglected corral.
I know cavils about others’ choices are unhelpful, but . . . Countee Cullen? Who’s next, E. E. Cummings?
I like the idea of “cases” being “lumped” into a “corral.” There’s our title, I think: The Lumped Corral.
Quick change in protocol: the way to get a poem title in the Contents box on any page is to add <title> before it and </title> after it. Please don’t put any other tags around the titles!
There’s no Contents box on most pages because there’s no poems there yet, and the thing will break if it goes looking for nonexistent text. I’ll come through and add them when necessary…
The Lumpy Corral sounds a lot like The Stuffed Owl, which I reread a good chunk of this summer. Aside from “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, into the tomb the great Queen dashes,” which is hilarious, I didn’t get the haughty opprobrium.
Haughty Opprobrium, the selected essays of ___________.
Some methodology problems are surfacing. For starters, this discussion is almost entirely xy. Secondly, we may be relying too heavily on the recommendations of a few readers — John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, present company, Ron Silliman… again, all boys. Is this project too boy?
I love The Stuffed Owl, especially the index. I could do without Billy Collins’s intro to the reissue.
Bobby, change the name to The Lumpy Corral! I think ’tis perfect.
I’ll change the title as soon as the motion is seconded and thirded.
A suggestion re: methodology. (Though, yes: too boy.) How about turning some of the name-gathering energy/attention towards actually putting things (poems, links) in the anthology?
> > Lumpy Corral
> as soon as the motion
I duly second the motion that we title this anthology of underacknowledged deceased US-identified flourished-in-the-20th century poets,
The Lumpy Corral.
Damn it, Baird, we can’t get anywhere with “actually putting things” until we have the right title. I also am still somewhat befuddled about how the wiki works, since I tried several times to click on Darrell Gray to add some stuff, only to be told each time that I don’t have permission to access the page.
Thirded.
“Limpid Corral” sounds much more poetic.
Kidding.
You could subtitle it : “Neglected Dead 20th-Century Cowboy Poets, selected by Neglected living 21st-Century Cowboys”
Kidding.
Hm, that’s strange. If an author’s linked, that means that a page exists for him/her, so if you can’t get to it by clicking from the anthology–a problem I’ll try to figure out soon–you can get to it via URLs like this (substitute first name/last name where appropriate): http://www.digitalemunction.com/the-neglected-anthology/darrell-gray.
Okay. Changing the name is probably going to break everything, but at least now we have three folks to pin the blame on. Heh.
Phew, I think that worked. Let me know if you find any hitches.
(Hitches, get it? Ha.)
So I just clicked on the Lumpy Corral link in the post, all prepared to be completely intimidated by the technical fangle-dango no doubt beyond the capacities of someone like me, and I got a “Sorry!” notice that the page is not available.
Try it again, Kent. I think I just fixed that problem.
Works for me.
I wonder whether this exercise will turn up a deliberately minor quality that inheres in the work. I am laughing inside, where it counts, as I type this.
Anybody have access to a new copy of Granger’s? That’s my best bet for one-stop shopping on once-known now-neglected figures.
Poetry’s historical index ought to be worth some clicks.
Yes, it works now, and what I see is what I did fear. I have no idea about this html stuff.
Will DE Big Boss post names and links if people like me send along?
Added a Susan Cataldo poem. Looking at Steve Carey, Jim Gustafson, Darrell Gray, Joe Ceravolo; I’ve asked around for advice re Dan Davidson, and plan to get to the NYPL this week to start reading around in some of the others.
Added a Jim Gustafson poem.
Added a Darrell Gray poem, and asked after permission for Steve Carey’s poem “Fever.”
I added a gadget in the middle sidebar that shows the most recently updated pages. Still working my way down the alphabet, but most poets through ‘M’ have pages now.
Nice widget!
Uh, did the widget break the site?
Yikes, no. Errant tag in AN’s post. Fixed now, though.
Could we put Carl Thayler in, please?
revised Samuel Greenberg, added link
added poem for Janet Sullivan. But html seems to need some work, I’m not sure how to do it. The even-numbered lines in the original are indented 3 spaces.
OK, fixed it.
ok ok Ivor Gurney was English. But the US was part of England once upon a time, no, so does that count?
anyway, I will pay better attention next time
Logged in, but I’m told I don’t have permission to post in Lumpy Corral…
Strange, it works for me, but I’ve got administrator privileges. Does it work for anyone else?
How the hell is the corral going to get lumpier if nobody responds to questions about how it works?
GOT LUMPS HERE