The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (American Poetry Series) [Paperback]

David Lehman (Editor)

Book Description

Series: American Poetry Series | Publication Date: April 2, 1998

Every year since 1988 a major poet has selected seventy-five poems for publication in The Best American Poetry. But who is to undertake the formidable task of reading all 750 poems anthologized in The Best American Poetry and picking the 75 "best of the best"? The seventy-five poems Bloom has chosen go a long way toward defining a contemporary canon of American poetry. Included are unforgettable poems from A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur, among many others. Diverse in form, style, method, and metaphor, the poems are united in their power to move and enlighten readers. Also included are comments from the poets themselves about their work and fascinating excerpts from the introductory essays of the ten previous editors. The Best of the Best American Poetry reflects not only the taste of the current editor, but the predilections of the all-star list of poets who have contributed their time and intellect to make this series what it is today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Dance Mania by Jonathan Aaron
Anxiety's Prosody by Archie Randolph Ammons
Garbage by Archie Randolph Ammons
Strip: 1 by Archie Randolph Ammons
Baked Alaska by John Ashbery
Myrtle by John Ashbery
The Problem Of Anxiety by John Ashbery
It Is Marvellous by Elizabeth Bishop
The Fire Fetched Down by George Bradley
Inevitably, She Declined by Lucie Brock-broido
The Life Of Towns: A Town I Have Heard Of by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Anna Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Apostle Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Bride Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Death Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Desert Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Emily Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Entgegenwartigung Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Freud Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Holderlin Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Judas Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Lear Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Love Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Luck Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Memory Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Pushkin Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: September Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Sylvia Town by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Gone To Sleep by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Just Before The Lightning Flash by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of Bathsheba's Crossing by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of Finding Out About The Love Of God by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of My Farewell To You by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of Spring Once Again by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of The Death Of Sin by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of The Dragon Vein by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of The Man In The Mind At Night by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of The Sound Of A Twig Breaking by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town Of The Wrong Questions by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Town On The Way Through God's Woods by Anne Carson
The Life Of Towns: Wolf Town by Anne Carson
My Cousin Muriel by Amy Clampitt
True Solar Holiday by Douglas Crase
Litany by Carolyn Creedon
The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play In One Act by Thomas M. Disch
Terminal Laughs by Irving Feldman
The Printer's Error by Aaron Fogel
Powers Of Congress by Alice Fulton
Salutations To Fernando Pessoa by Allen Ginsberg
Celestial Music by Louise Gluck
Vespers (9) by Louise Gluck
Manifest Destiny by Jorie Graham
What The Instant Contains (lyle Van Waring, 1922-1988) by Jorie Graham
The Piano Player Explains Himself by Allen Grossman
The Porcelain Couple by Donald Hall
Prophecy by Donald Hall
St. Luke Painting The Virgin by Vicki Hearne
Prospects by Anthony Hecht
Man On A Fire Escape by Edward Hirsch
Kinneret by John Hollander
An Old-fashioned Song by John Hollander
The See-saw by John Hollander
Like Most Revelations; After Morris Louis by Richard Howard
Invitation To A Ghost by Donald Justice
Nostalgia Of The Lakefronts by Donald Justice
The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Three Songs At The End Of Summer by Jane Kenyon
When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell
Sonogram by Karl Kirchwey
One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch
Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa
Phyche's Dream by Ann Lauterbach
Scouting by Philip Levine
Histoire by Harry Mathews
An Essay On Friendship by Joseph Donald Mcclatchy
Family Week At Oracle Ranch by James Ingram Merrill
The 'ring' Cycle by James Ingram Merrill
A Room At The Heart Of Things by James Ingram Merrill
The Stranger; After A Guarani Legend Recorded By Ernesto Morales by William Stanley Merwin
Havana Birth by Susan Mitchell
Protracted Episode by A. F. Moritz
The Warmth Of Hot Chocolate by Thylias Moss
At The Lakehouse by Brighde Mullins
Have You Ever Faked An Orgasm? (1) by Molly Peacock
Movie by Bob Perelman
A Mathematics Of Breathing by Carl Phillips
Outsider Art by Kay Ryan
The Present Perfect by Grace Schulman
The Seasons: Autumn by David Shapiro
The Seasons: Drawing After Summer by David Shapiro
The Seasons: Spring by David Shapiro
The Seasons: Summer by David Shapiro
The Seasons: Winter by David Shapiro
Country Fair by Charles Simic
The Something by Charles Simic
Ripples On The Surface by Gary Snyder
Dark Harbor: 20 by Mark Strand
Dark Harbor: 32 by Mark Strand
Dark Harbor: 44 by Mark Strand
Morning, Noon And Night: 1 by Mark Strand
Morning, Noon And Night: 2 by Mark Strand
Morning, Noon And Night: 3 by Mark Strand
Reading In Place by Mark Strand
Sleeping With Boa by May Swenson
Seven Seas Rose In The Half-dark To Make Coffee by Derek Walcott
The Cormorant by Rosanna Warren
Diversion by Rosanna Warren
What Memory Reveals by Susan Wheeler
Lying by Richard Wilbur
A Wall In The Woods: Cummington by Richard Wilbur
Disjecta Membra by Charles Penzel, Jr. Wright
The Cradle Logic Of Autumn by Jay Wright
Madrid by Jay Wright
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

Harold Bloom was born in the Bronx in 1930. He is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. In his first book, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), Bloom made a spirited case for a poet then out of favor with the academic critical establishment. His subsequent books include The Visionary Company (1961), The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Poetry and Repression (1976), and The Western Canon (1994). He has edited numerous volumes, including several hundred critical studies of major authors that appear under the Chelsea House imprint. Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989) presents the lectures Bloom delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. In The Book of J (1990), Bloom speculated that the author of the oldest portions of the Hebrew Bible may have been a woman in the court of King Solomon. He has also written on religion in two other books, The American Religion (1992) and Omens of Millennium; The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection (1996). Bloom, who has held a MacArthur Fellowship, is currently finishing a study of Shakespeare under the title Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684847795
• ISBN-13: 978-0684847795
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An All-American roster of the best poems of the decade!, May 4, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Henderson NV) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

The process is simple: each year, you have a prominent poet (a practitioner of the art whose ear is ostensibly close to the ground of the craft) select 75 of the best poems from the hundreds published in magazines that year. Then you make this selection available in a single volume which provides a broad portrait of the current state of the art of poetry in America.

For a decade, this is how it's been done, and John Ashberry, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, A.R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate have each had a hand in fashioning The Best American Poetry anthologies that are the result, resulting in excellent collections whose range and quality have made the series ever more popular with each passing year.

Now, the critic Harold Bloom has taken the 10 resulting volumes and selected the 75 best poems out of the bunch, making a literal Best of the Best American Poetry anthology that is, at the very least, provocative.

Bloom's introductory essay, in which he takes no prisoners in his bombastic critique of the state of American poetry, is worth the price of the book alone. Even if you agree with Bloom's conclusions about what's wrong with how poetry is treated nowadays, his skewering of academia (and even of Adrienne Rich, who served as editor for 1996) is guaranteed to set your blood aboil. If, as Shelley wrote, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, then Bloom has set himself up as Chief Justice. And it turns out that this outspoken critic happens to be a hangin' judge!

As if this weren't enough, then there are the poems themselves: they are all bard-inspiringly good. All the big guns are present (with the exception of Ms. Rich), as well as some less-famous artisans, even including Carolyn Creedon, who is "basically a waitress who goes to school" and whose poem, "litany," is full of "sweaty immediacy" and heartbreaking insight. Talk about a democratic selection!

Other standou! t selections include John Ashberry's "Myrtle," a poem I can't seem to stop thinking about; Lucie Brock-Broido's "Inevitably, She Declined," a compressed and vivid evocation of human history; Anthony Hecht's virtuousic "Prospects"; and Molly Peacock's "Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?," a cycle which manages to be hilarious, moving, and technically-brilliant all at once.

This is a volume that passes the only real test of literary worth: it rewards re-reading. I urge you to begin.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bloom at his idiosyncratic, agonistic, feisty best, April 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

In his introduction to THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY, Harold Bloom continues his knockdown fight against the modern multi-culturalists whom he had soundly whipped in his most recent work, THE WESTERN CANON.Seeking to uncover for us the true heirs of the Whitman-Dickinson-Stevens-Hart Crane tradition, he gives us vintage Ashbery, Ammons, Bishop, Clampitt, Hecht, and Kinnell, alongside such exciting new masters as George Bradley, J.D. McClatchy, Thylias Moss, and Charles Wright. Bloom reserves his greatest scorn for Adrienne Rich, editor of the 1996 edition of the BEST AMERICAN POETRY and the apotheosis for Bloom of dedication to multicultural mediocrity. Bloom doesn't argue that these poets and their poems constitute the best of all contemporary poetry, but only that they are the best among the first ten editions of this series. I can't imagine anyone arguing with his choices. Here, he is at his selective best and gives us a powerful volume of visionary poems.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, July 11, 1998

By 

Georges CSIZMADIA ([e-mail]) (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY: 1988 1997 (American Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

The selection of the poems is absolutely interesting.

In terms of value for your money, the ratio of this book is super-high. You won't need to buy other books for a while since you will spend so much time reading and reading this anthology.

Georges