London Calling

Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar has been teaching in the Department of English since 1993. During that time she has served as Director of the Creative Writing Program and of the Area Program in Poetry Writing, an undergraduate honors program she founded eight years ago. Despite the exigencies of teaching and administration, Spaar has published several books of her own poetry, including the forthcoming Satin Cash: Poems (Persea, 2008) and edited an anthology of poems about insomnia, Acquainted with the Night. Her poems and essays have been featured in a number of national and international literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and Shenandoah. Her most recent project, All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, an anthology of poems about the city of London, will soon hit bookstores.

In the summers of 2001 and 2002, Spaar was invited by colleagues to teach a course entitled “Poetry of London” as part of the University’s Summer Culture of London Program and Regents College. “I couldn’t find an extant anthology that suited me,” Spaar says. “The books of London poems I managed to track down lacked diversity—culturally, aesthetically, thematically, and in terms of gender.” Instead Spaar compiled on her own eclectic group of poems about London to use with her students. “This Xeroxed handout became the germ of what is now the book, All That Mighty Heart,” she says.

Spaar recalls becoming first acquainted with London through poetry and nursery rhyme during her childhood. Later, as an English student, she imaginatively made her way through the city in the many novels, plays, and poems set there. “Visiting London as an adult,” remarks Spaar, “deepened and complicated my feelings for London. Having first known London through poetry, I was strongly drawn to provide that opportunity for my students and other readers.” The more she worked on the book, the more aware she became of the deep bonds between poetry and London, and between literature and place, and between poetry and cities in particular. 

Spaar hopes that her London anthology, which represents over 15 different languages and cultures and spans nearly five centuries, will be “a kind of meta-anthology of the metropolis itself.” Rather than taking an historical approach, Spaar organizes her book into elemental sections—water, earth, fire, and air—to allow poems to speak ahead and back to one another across time and space. In a section about the Thames,  for example, Spaar juxtaposes poems by 16th-century English poet George Turberville, Yiddish poet Max Hershman, Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandon, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and U.Va.’s own poets Stephen Cushman and Charles Wright. In this way, Spaar highlights the rich multiculturalism of London, and the ways in which it has shaped aesthetic imagination over time.

“London as a city and as a text manifests a tremendous range of social, storied, and cultural flux, with profound implications for and challenges to the aesthetic imagination. I wanted this book to reflect my sense of London as a protean site of history, projection, culture, and personal drama,” says Spaar.

However, putting together this diverse compilation did not come without setbacks and expenses. Hunting down permissions to publish certain works and tracking down rights holders gave her considerable trouble. “There’s a lot of detective work, frustration, and luck involved,” Spaar states. Because many of the chosen poems are in translation or not in the public domain, permission costs to reprint several works were exceedingly high. “One irony of anthologizing,” Spaar notes, “is that beautiful poems by Wordsworth or Blake can be used for free, while the permissions fees of lesser-known poets who are represented by large publishing conglomerates are astronomically high.” On the other hand, Spaar was impressed by the generosity of small press publishers, non-profit presses, and individual poets who sometimes offered permission to reprint for free, or a small fee. “Anthologizing raises all sorts of interesting questions about the literary publishing,” Spaar muses, citing a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that suggested that big publishing houses may be pricing their own authors out of the canon by charging exorbitant fees.   

Spaar is very grateful for assistance for this costly project, which came in the form of research grants from the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences and research assistants in the Department of English. Even so, Spaar found herself bearing most of the cost of permissions herself. However, this in no way diminished her enthusiasm for the project. “The subject and project of All That Mighty Heart: London Poems is an act of love on a deep level, otherwise it would be hard to muster the stamina to see the endeavor through the completion,” shares Spaar. “The Mrs. Dalloway factor—‘I’m going to have a big party and invite all of these poets I love to converse’—is inevitably countered by practical and financial obstacles.”

Small and portable, the University of Virginia Press has embodied Spaar’s book beautifully, intending it to be “giftable” and portable enough to accompany any traveler, either in the armchair or in the air or on the road. It will be something one can buy at Heathrow airport, slip into a carry-on-bag, and keep close at hand while visiting London. It may also be used in the classroom in poetry classes, or courses thematically tied to London or to the relationship between literature and the city 
  
The English department eagerly awaits the arrival of her anthology, which is now available in bookstores in the United States, and will soon be available in the United Kingdom, as well.