Arguments against anthologizing poetry as necessarily exclusive of others whose work is equally as deserving of consideration are well articulated and apt. And yet the impact of Don Allen's New American anthology, for instance, is undeniable, as Ron Silliman has so thoroughly dissected on his blog.

In my own case, the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg were huge in providing a broader basis of traditional possibilities on which to construct a personal poetic strategy. Most notably, I refer to Shaking the Pumpkin, Technicians of the Sacred, Revolution of the Word, and America, a Prophecy.

For anybody who is not familiar with these works, or even for those who are, I highly recommend listening to Rothenberg's rendition of one of the Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell.

Anyway, I picked up Shaking and Technicians used in Browser's Bookstore in Olympia WA a couple of decades ago, and I grabbed Revolution as a new book for about $4.95 in the same town but different store of which I no longer remember the name. The only one of these I regrettably don't own is America, though I've checked it out of libraries many times over the years.

Prior to computers, anthologies were one of the best means of finding out about work more recent in historical terms if one lived far from the poetic community centers and otherwise disdained the more obvious route of study via formal education. While I tried to write poems off and on from about the age of 11, and while knew I really wanted to write (and did) by the time I was in high school, I never graduated from HS to continue along a preordained trajectory through college. Instead I read as much as I could on my own and took notes and wrote badly a lot. In this way, my teachers were Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jack Kerouac, Jean Genet, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Burroughs, Rimbaud translations, Apollonaire translations, among others, and from whatever I could glean in bookstores, including Rothenberg's anthologies. All of this stuff of course led me in numerous other directions, but one thing that consistently stood out was that many of the writers whose work I most admired had (l)earned through an intense personal effort and away from formal educational settings.