I used to collect poetry anthologies
I used to collect poetry anthologies.
My father was an English teacher, so this was a particularly easy task for me. Any time his syllabus phased out a poem or three (but never John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" nor W.B. Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole", which I am convinced live on in the Grade 10 syllabus to date), the little pile of books in my "secret" window alcove behind the spare mattress would gain a new fellow.
One of my favourite anthologies of all time is The Wild Wave (and I am forever indebted to H.S. Houghton Hawksley and A.B.S. Eaton for compiling it). It is from here that I discovered the treasures of Ogden Nash's "Very Like A Whale", the very spirited recital of which gained me confidence and a sense of wonder at my own capacity for boldness. There was also a black-and-red-cover anthology whose name I have left behind me, but it gave me T.S. Eliot's "Macavity: The Mystery Cat", whose daring spirit I channelled into my next, equally startling recital in English class.
Before I go further, I must make mention of an "anthology" that stands out in my memory, even though, in reality, it was to literature what a gumguard is to fashion. It was — and laugh if you must — the Facebook "bathroom wall" app of 2007, on which I discovered much thought-provoking (if not precisely artistic) work. One piece that utterly arrested me and subsequently took over my whole life is the "Llama Song". (Such is the power of poetry, to invest the concept of animals you've never seen personally into the core of your adolescent personality.)
Another delightful anthology was the Treasury of Year-Round Poems, compiled by Patricia S. Klein. It was my very first first-hand anthology, which I won as a prize for writing a poem about a forest walk. (This poem was a moment of triumph in my young life. Perhaps I'll tell you about it some time.) I already loved the little green book for what it meant to me, but I loved it even more when I found it contained a longer excerpt of a beloved verse from the end of the first Anne of Green Gables novel — Robert Browning's "Pippa Passes". The lines from the novel gave me great comfort in my childhood, and they read thus:
God's in his heaven
All's right with the world!
A few years (and many more anthologies) later found me examining "Death Be Not Proud" and "The Wild Swans At Coole" during my own Grade 10 English classes. It was around this time I discovered a gem that would spark my creativity further. Poetry already had me hooked by the rhyme, but comedy was what took me line and sinker. So it is with a pang that must I tell you I cannot remember the name of the limerick anthology I was obsessed with for a solid two weeks. However, one more thing I can tell you is that I learnt a great many things about ladies from Venice and doctors from Gloucester in that time.
Incidentally, my best friend and I would later succumb to co-writing limericks during Physics lessons. It is without any bias whatsoever that I declare our first full limerick, written in 2009, to be a masterpiece:
There once was a guy called Fred
Who decided to stand on his head
He was with his mate
Who predicted his fate
Saying, "One day, you will be dead."
Remarkable.
A notable series of anthologies I still have in my possession is English Alive, compiled by Robin F. Malan. These are collections of poems by South African high school students, who would submit original works yearly in hopes of their being selected. Of the published works, my all-time favourite is "If Jesus Came To Jo'burg", by a spectacular writer whose name I deeply regret forgetting. I haven't been able to find the copy which contained it, but here is the verse that strikes me now as it struck me then:
If Jesus came to Jo'burg
He wouldn't come to me
For we're just like the people
Who hanged him on the tree.
(The mind who wrote this is clearly one who understands the human condition in its ineffable hypocrisy. But more on that another time.)
The English Alive series is notable to me for another, more personal reason: two of my poems were published in the 2009 and 2011 editions, respectively. I was immensely proud of them. I am still, but there is a distance to that pride that has come with time. It's fascinating to think how much my mind and voice have grown since then.
Many of my anthologies have gone here and there in moves between towns and cities and houses, but I still have a few. One is The Bible According To Spike Milligan (gifted to me by a darling friend with as wicked a sense of humour as I have), a delightfully irreverent set of verses from a master comic whose work I had eagerly devoured in an older, forgotten anthology of poetry for children.
These are all the most memorable of anthologies that I can think of right now. So I shall leave you with what is, very possibly, my favourite little poem of all time for its celebration of nonsense:
What a wonderful bird the frog are!
When he sit he stand, almost
When he hop he fly, almost
He ain't got no head, hardly
He ain't got no tail, either
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got
— almost.