Finding Lost Poetic Gems: DARK HORSES: POETS ON OVERLOOKED POEMS by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer

Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer, DARK HORSES: POETS ON OVERLOOKED POEMS (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007, $19.95) by
Nancy Yanes Hoffman, nywriter@rochester.rr.com,
www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, 16 San Rafael Drive, Rochester, New York 14618

When I was in college, I used to carry Louis Untermeyer’s anthologies of poetry in my book bag. Then, John Ciardi’s HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? came along to replace Untermeyer’s occasionally hoary selections.

Now, Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer’s DARK HORSES: POETS ON OVERLOOKED POEMS (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007, $19.95) has supplanted Untermeyer’s tried-and-true resources and Ciardi’s invitation to think. At least, for a while.

Prufer, a  gifted poet and passionate archeologist of lost poems and poets, and, like Katz, editor of PLEIADES: A JOURNAL OF NEW WRITING, is driven to help poetry--and poets-- survive in the jungles of You Tube, ESBN, IPod and other distractions. To restore lost poetry for readers who seek it, Prufer and Katz asked 100 “well-known” (whatever that means) poets to choose their favorite, yet most neglected poem. The 100 poets each defended their choices in a partnering essay, which often are as provocative as the poems chosen.

Poetry is the most personal of the literary genres, which may account for its disappearance in the printed and electronic fieldst. It is also the most demanding of the surviving genres, which accounts for our current unwillingness to confront it, read it, and make it ours. Our unwillingness to memorize also compounds the lost-poem felony.

DARK HORSES  does not always satisfy. Leigh Hunt’s treacle, “The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit” is a disappointing pseudo-choice that relegates the poet who wrote “Jennie Kissed Me” to a backstreet (reviewers also have favorite poems that they quote at the drop of a computer key). It’s hard to believe that the man who wrote, “Time, you thief, who loves to put sweets in your list/ Put that in,” could have written this empty exchange among fish, man, and spirit.

But when DARK HORSES satisfies, it hits a home run. When Kingsley Amis’s “A Bookshop Idyll” speaks of  “Between the gardening and the cookery/Comes the brief poetry shelf;” it could be DARK HORSES’ s epigraph. Amis’s “Idyll” says it all while wondering who are the most gifted poets—men or women. Amis opts for women because “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/ Girls aren’t like that.” Ironically, Amis himself is an overlooked poet. Despite Amis’s 20 major “comic” novels, his poetry is little known outside the sometime world of anthologies.

Missing from this anthology are three poets who matter greatly to the contemporary reader. One is Philip Larkin. The other two are the editors themselves, Kevin Prufer and Joy Katz. Editorial etiquette may have excluded their  poetry but etiquette be damned,  Prufer’s “Death Comes in the Form of a Pontiac Trans Am” or “Ode to Rome” belong in these pages as does Katz’s “Daffodils.”

Caveats aside, DARK HORSES tells us what individual poems mean to the poets who chose them. As such, they open old, forgotten worlds—and wounds--to those of us who can’t remember how much a single poem can change our lives. DARK HORSES  resuscitates the poetry cemetery where “Sic transit, Gloria” is buried. 

Just to prove how much we need Prufer and Katz’s offering, the Internet’s POETRY DAILY crisply informs the poem-seeker, “If you were looking for a poem, it may no longer be available. Poetry Daily only archives poems for 365 days from their original appearance.”