Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters
published 1915 - read 2005

I don't tend to read volumes of poetry (although I'll never unload my Shel Silverstein), and this book is a perfect example of why not: sure, nearly every poem is excellent or at least above-average, but just try and read two hundred and fifty excellent poems back to back and retain anything. As it was, I could only read a few at a sitting if I wanted to digest them at all, giving this by far the longest start-to-finish time of any book since I began this whole "finishing books I start" phase a year ago.

The premise of the book is that all the poems are elegies delivered by the dead for themselves - all the dead people in the fictional small town of Spoon River, Illinois get to reflect for a page or so on their lives, their deaths, their friends and enemies and so on. Writing at the turn of the century, Masters presumably delighted in all his bleak little biographies, which certainly do a good job of puncturing the myth of cozy, happy small-town America. Lives are ruined by jealousy, gossip, anomie, put-off hopes, random violence, racial prejudice, denial, self-righteousness, and complete accidents. The few happy lives stand out nicely and seem to serve mainly as Masters's shield against charges of repetitive cynicism. The overall approach works quite well in each individual poem, and his blank verse (radical at the time, I gather) to my eyes reads with a certain grace and dignity appropriate to the cemetery.

If only there weren't so damn many of these elegies! It's the White Album problem - you know it would be better if the author had cut it in half, but where do you start making the cuts? Many of the poems share characters and plot points, suggesting larger storylines, and also making it harder to just delete individual tombstones. Two safe removals would be the moronic postscripts, "The Spooniad" and "Epilogue." "The Spooniad" is a cheesy American epic of specific events in Spoon River, some of which have already been hinted at by the epitaphs (and are better off when left vague). Adding insult to injury, its fictional author died before it could be completed...meaning it cuts off in mid-sentence. What's the point? The epilogue is even worse, though: a poem written as a one-act play, featuring singsongy rhyming blather from the Devil, God, some displaced Voices, and other Allegorical Figures offering wordy and limp postulations on Life. Why Masters couldn't let the epitaphs stand for themselves I can't fathom, but certainly if there were any book that didn't need even more pages, it was this one.

If you see a copy, pick it up for the coffee table; read a few poems every so often, and when you reach "The Spooniad," just start over. I can't not recommend this book; so much of the poetry is just too good. But I wouldn't recommend reading it straight through as I did.

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