I'm a sucker for a good list poem. Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" is a list poem, of the cockamamie, villanelle sort. A list poem that includes Henry Reed? That much better. The last one we had, I think, was Anthony Thwaite's "On Consulting 'Contemporary Poets of the English Language'," from the anthology New Poetry (1976), edited by Patricia Beer.

Not surprisingly, this poem also comes from New Poetry (Julian Symons, ed., 1983): "Contemporary Dearth," by Valerie Blake. Blake has a little something to say about Dame Edith Sitwell's decision not to be included in Kenneth Allott's 1950 survey, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (something about which her brother Sachie, apparently, had no qualms):

Yeats and Eliot, Wyndham Lewis
Lawrence, Joyce and de la Mare;
John Heath-Stubbs and William Plomer
Francis Scarfe and Edwin Muir.

Sidney Keyes and David Gascoyne
Williams, Charles, and Laurie Lee;
Lawrence Durrell, Peter Quennell
Herbert Read and Watkins, V.

Normans Nicholson and Cameron
Terence Tiller, Wilfred O.;
Blunden, Rosenberg and Huxley
Empson, Auden, H. Monro.

Robert Graves and Alun Lewis
Edward Thomas, Barker, G.;
Michael Roberts, Dylan Thomas
Fuller, Roy, Day Lewis, C.

Siegfried Sassoon and Arthur Waley
Andrew Young and Henry Treece;
Heppenstall, R., and W. R. Rodgers
Kathleen Raine and Louis MacNeice.

Kenneth Allott, Stephen Spender
Richard Church and Spencer, B.;
Betjeman, John, Sacheverell Sitwell
Henry Reed and Prince, F. T.

Campbell, Roy, Charles Madge, Anne Ridler
Patric Dickinson, Alan Hodge;
Lehmann, John, and Laurence Binyon
Warner, Rex, and Ruthven Todd. . . .

Kenneth Allott, Editor, The Penguin Book of Contemporary
Verse, 1950.