In celebration of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s 75th anniversary, this November the venerable publisher will be releasing The FSG Poetry Anthology, a book comprising the wide range of poets FSG has brought to light over the decades. Edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, the collection includes work by every poet FSG has published in its 75-year history — not so much a compilation of “greatest hits” as a selection of poems that feel alive and vital to this day.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s initial forays into poetry included books by John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Over the years FSG has published international voices (Leopardi, Rilke, Pablo Neruda and Adam Zagajewski), Nobel Prize winners (Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Louise Glück), and emerging voices (Roya Marsh, Chet’la Sebree, and Valzhyna Mort). The FSG Poetry Anthology captures the spirit of the house’s diverse poetry list and makes for a vibrant celebration of the publisher’s rich poetic history.
I corresponded with Mr. Galassi and Mr. Creswell via email about poetry’s capacity to reveal “what is going on under the surface of the culture” and to say “things it doesn’t seem to be saying,” the act of reading poetry as akin to “listening to the noise in the wall.” We also discussed the fallibility of any given reader — how “great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great” — and the inevitability of great poems once “their innovation catches on,” often in retrospect.
The FSG Poetry Anthology is dedicated to the memory of Robert Giroux, who joined the firm headed by Roger Straus and John Farrar in 1955. Giroux signed up Berryman, Bishop, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Stafford and, eventually, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Louise Bogan. (And, some years later, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes.) How was Mr. Giroux so effective at identifying, attracting, and cultivating poetic talent?
JG: Giroux had had a long and distinguished career as an editor at Harcourt, Brace, one of the leading literary publishers of its time. Among his authors there was T.S. Eliot, who was also a central figure at Faber and Faber in London, which he’d made the leading poetry publisher in the U.K. (if not the world). Plus, Bob’s best friend in college, at Columbia, was John Berryman. So you could say he was ideally suited to publish poets, and no doubt they recommended their friends to him. He had the perspicacity to choose well.
The anthology includes work by nearly all the poets FSG has published since Mr. Giroux’s arrival at the house, presented in broadly chronological sections. According to the anthology’s introduction, this structure “affords some sense of how the company’s editorial perspectives have evolved over the decades, and how the scope of FSG’s poetry has gradually expanded from Giroux’s classic core in widening, more or less concentric circles.” How has FSG’s editorial perspective on poetry evolved over the decades?
JG: New editors bring new enthusiasms, new interests. And as authors mature and age, new voices emerge, and the readers’ taste change, too. It’s a natural, you might say an actuarial process. I think you can see in the book how international poets became important on our list, and how our interest in new strains of American poetry developed and broadened over time.
RC: One of the deep satisfactions of making this anthology was to discover the many hidden — and sometimes not-so-hidden — byways that run between poets of different generations and sensibilities. It begins with one of Berryman’s “Dream Songs” (number 22), a poem of quick changes, which mixes vernacular language with lots of other voices and registers. I hear echoes of Berryman in so many later FSG poets — so he’s one example of a widening but concentric circle. On the other hand, there are just as many poems that we hope will make readers think, “I’ve never heard a voice quite like that before.” A tradition is made of individual talents, after all.
What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this expansive anthology?
JG: The anthology was planned as a way of celebrating FSG’s 75th anniversary this year, and of marking how central poetry has been to the entire company enterprise. As the two members of the editorial department currently involved in editing and publishing poetry, Robyn and I stepped up to the challenge.
RC: The challenge and also the pleasure. It was wonderful to have an excuse, during the long hours of our endless quarantine, to read through the archive of FSG’s poetry. Maybe even more fun was to talk about the poems with Jonathan, who knows the nooks and crannies of this archive better than anyone. The hardest part, of course, was whittling down our choices. Our initial list was three or four times as long as the final selection. We chose poems that were characteristic of the individual poets, but we were also on the lookout for poems that somehow rhymed with others in the collection.
The anthology’s introduction expresses FSG’s conviction that “poetry is fundamental to literary expression, that it is here the writer strikes her distinctive note most powerfully.” What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?
JG: Poetry, it seems to me, always reveals what is going on under the surface of the culture. It predicts developments; reading it is like listening to the noise in the wall. It can disturb, inspire, frighten, confirm our fears, and our hopes. It is always, I think, saying things it doesn’t seem to be saying. And I think it captures the spirit of a moment, of a culture. As Pound said, it’s news that stays news.
RC: I’ll only add that I don’t think poetry ever has just one role to play — not in the present, and not ever. It’s impossible to say what poetry is in any final sense, because poets are always coming up with new things to do with it. This often happens through the translation of foreign poetry, which is something FSG has always been committed to publishing.
What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?
JG: I think true poetry is an authentic reflection of the poet’s mind. That is the most radical, the most fundamental thing.
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?
JG: We need more poetry criticism, not less. Great critics read below the surface and help open up what the poet is doing--sometimes better than the poet can. Poetry needs to be talked about, challenged, deeply responded to. Real poetry can always meet the challenge. Lesser criticism fades and has no real lasting effect. But the reception of poetry is something that happens over time. It needs to be digested, mulled over, read and re-read.
RC: It’s well known that the big critical outlets — with few exceptions — make less and less room for poetry. But poets and poetry readers have come up with ways to find each other: at readings, through independent presses and small magazines, on social media. I think our critical culture is more diffuse than ever, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s no shortage of passion — including invective! Let one hundred flowers bloom.
What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you both?
JG: To me, the poet’s voice is all-important, their angle of approach to the universe. That is the theme. They can be writing about toothpaste or birdsong; it doesn’t matter. It’s how it’s done that’s all-important.
Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?
JG: Very often, the best books do not win the prizes. Because readers are fallible; they get distracted by externals, by fashion, by the heat of the moment. In my view, real things emerge in the long run. We’re all fallible, needless to say, editors as much as anyone, of course. I do believe though, that there is an absolute value, a fundamental integrity, that survives all our failings — very Platonic of me, I admit.
RC: A different way of making the same point is to say that great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great. Once their innovation catches on it seems inevitable, but of course it only looks that way in retrospect. And great books aren’t always perfect books. Berryman’s Dream Songs, to use that example again, is full of daring performances and many of them fall flat (or worse). Sometimes great books have to survive their own failings, too.
Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?
JG: My only thought is that poets need to respond to whatever is impelling them to write. That listening, that following, is its own reward.
RC: My day job is teaching and studying Arabic poetry and there’s story about Abu Nuwas — the great, polyamorous eighth-century poet of Baghdad — that I especially love. The short version goes that when Abu Nuwas was a young man he approached a master of the tradition named Khalaf al-Ahmar and asked how he could become a poet. The master told him to go away and memorize 10,000 lines of verse. Abu Nuwas came back some time later and al-Ahmar asked him to recite all 10,000 lines. Abu Nuwas did so flawlessly. “Now forget them,” says the master. “Then you’ll be ready to be a poet.”
What is poetry’s greatest role in both of your inner lives? Why do you read poems?
JG: From early on, poetry struck me as the most concentrated and powerful means of expression. I still believe that the contraption of the poem is a miraculous thing that often takes on a life of its own, and even drives the poet to make it. It sounds mystical and I'm not a mystic. But I am always looking to be blown away. And it happens, again and again.
RC: For me, reading poetry isn’t a specialized activity. It isn’t something I do on the side or for any particular reason. I don’t think of it as belonging to my inner life any more than it belongs to my outer life: it’s part of both. Because there are poems for all occasions and moods. I read poems while waiting for the subway, or putting my kids to bed (or putting myself to bed); I read for wit or wisdom or consolation; I’ll read poems on the screen or the page (though I prefer the page); and I’m as likely to enjoy a poem about an exotic animal as one about Susan Sontag, or visiting the underworld, or falling in love. The anthology has poems about all these things, incidentally.
What inquiry or exploration — if any — unifies the anthology? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?
JG: This anthology, like any anthology, represents a winnowing of a particular field, in this case the field of poets FSG has published over its history. It might well have been different, but this was the particular path that the house ended up taking. There’s so much that's not here, but there are a lot of great moments--of perception, expression, deep surprise, real beauty. It’s exhilarating to come on these. We hope readers enjoy doing just that, just as we did. We want them to be blown away, too.
