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Considering Garlands: On Anthologies
EP 9.
In Considering Garlands, six innovative nonfiction editors discuss the nature of editing & the art of anthologizing.
Excerpt:
We are all indebted to Meleager of Gadara, who gave us the Garland, which stands for us as the beginning of the anthology, the anthologia, a floral collection, or in Latin, “florilegium.” Meleager connected flora as emblems to various poets and epigrammatists, thus the name of this anthological root of ours. Only parts of the original version of the Garland now survive, subsumed into the larger and later Anthologi Graeca.
But we can imagine that the urge to collect, to preserve, to arrange precedes even this. There is something floral, and something culinary in the urge to choose and arrange. Because there is the desire to recreate an experience in the anthology – just as there is in a meal, or garden. In all three cases, too, the impulse to share is a generous one, and also bound up in a reasonable degree of ego. As with the chef, the anthologist says, or rather, must assert, “I know what is good, or what is interesting.” And yes, the generous part, is “I’d like you to know it, too.” Perhaps that is confirmation. And sometimes, one might think, it is the desire for influence, though heaven knows that kind of hubris seems bound to have its second parachute fail.
—from David Lazar's introduction
In Considering Garlands, six innovative nonfiction editors discuss the nature of editing & the art of anthologizing.
Excerpt:
We are all indebted to Meleager of Gadara, who gave us the Garland, which stands for us as the beginning of the anthology, the anthologia, a floral collection, or in Latin, “florilegium.” Meleager connected flora as emblems to various poets and epigrammatists, thus the name of this anthological root of ours. Only parts of the original version of the Garland now survive, subsumed into the larger and later Anthologi Graeca.
But we can imagine that the urge to collect, to preserve, to arrange precedes even this. There is something floral, and something culinary in the urge to choose and arrange. Because there is the desire to recreate an experience in the anthology – just as there is in a meal, or garden. In all three cases, too, the impulse to share is a generous one, and also bound up in a reasonable degree of ego. As with the chef, the anthologist says, or rather, must assert, “I know what is good, or what is interesting.” And yes, the generous part, is “I’d like you to know it, too.” Perhaps that is confirmation. And sometimes, one might think, it is the desire for influence, though heaven knows that kind of hubris seems bound to have its second parachute fail.
—from David Lazar's introduction
113 pages, ebook
First published January 31, 2014
9 people want to read
About the author
David Lazar
44 books14 followersDavid Lazar’s books include essays: Occasional Desire, (Nebraska) and The Body of Brooklyn (Iowa); prose poetry: Powder Town (Pecan Grove) nonfiction anthologies: Truth in Nonfiction (Iowa), After Montaigne (forthcoming from Georgia), and Essaying the Essay (Welcome Table Press); and interview collections: Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both Mississippi). He has lectured widely on nonfiction and editing, and founded the Ph.D. program in nonfiction writing at Ohio University, and directed the creation of the MFA program in nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches. He is the founding editor of Hotel Amerika, now in its fourteenth year.
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