Saturday, September 30, 2006

brit editions

rod and kevin discuss a brit edition of the collected poems of george oppen relative to the various u.s. editions. this was one enjoyable discovery of browsing a mainstream bookstore in england this summer, as i pointed out a while back without going into much detail.

carcanet collected williamscarcanet collected williamsin some cases, the carcanet two-volume collected poems of william carlos williams are essentially identical to the u.s. new directions editions but with more interesting covers...

carcanet selected frank o'haracarcanet selected frank o'harain other cases though, you get an edition unlike anything in the u.s., for example these two distinct selected frank o'hara books. published not quite two years apart, the thinner earlier volume apparently contains o'hara's semi-serious poetics statement "personism: a manifesto," while the more recent volume offers a slightly more generous selection (180 some pages as opposed to 90 some). this latter appears to be the same as the selected that don allen edited for knopf back in the 1970s (and which carcanet had printed earlier too). question is, aside from the cooler looking covers, what are they thinking with these marginally different editions?

No comments: