Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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

I'm pro-Bloom in the general political/aesthetic sense, and it was satisfying for me to see him crystalize some of my sentiments in his foreword. But I bought the book for the poetry, and (judging from the other Best... books I own) I'm of the opinion that Bloom did a mediocre job as editor. His options were, thankfully, limited to a set comprised mostly of strong poems. This book could probably have survived the abuses of a monkey-throwing-darts-at-a-list-of-options editor.

This entire volume constitutes one of the strongest defenses of the aesthetic I've ever seen. The cumulative effect on the reader is a sense of gratitude and relief that poetry continues to exist (though precariously, as Bloom notes), that a few people continue to produce the sort of language that clarifies and exhilarates. SONOGRAM, a poem by a poet unknown to me, is an amazing piece of writing which manages in great concision to utter funny, ominous, and moving truths about the after all bizarre experience of peeking at the lineaments of one's future. The Ginsberg poem - a consideration of a fellow poet - is a riot. Completely unexpected, full of hilarious asides. Virtually all the poems collected here are things of enchantment. Do buy this book.

How disappointing! Harold Bloom's diatribe against Adrienne Rich and her selections for the 1996 edition was not unexpected. However, to make inclusion in her volume the acid test of their unworthiness for inclusion in his own was nothing more than an act of shallow spitefulness on his part. One must read only a few pages into the anthology to appreciate just how unfair the decision is to the 1996 authors and to the readers who bought the decennial collection based on their trust for the series and the editorial integrity Mr. Lehman has, until now, provided. A. R. Ammons, one of Mr. Bloom's blessed, hits us right on with a poem titled "Garbage". "Garbage" rambles pointlessly--an improvisation so says the poet in his own note--and, while it may reflect a degree of instrumental virtuosity, it made me very sad to think as I slogged through it that Wang Ping's lovely "Song of Calling Souls" had been left out in order to accomplish Bloom's little temper tantrum. While I appreciate Bloom's perspective and criticism, I think his decisions in relation to this volume escalates a situation that desperately needs to be de-escalated and focused on real issues of aesthetics and artistic integrity. Such an experienced writer, scholar and critic as Harold Bloom should have known better than to act out this juvenile hyperbole. And Mr. Lehman should have insisted on some selection from each year of the series' offerings. Like form in poetry, a few simple, arbitrary rules have helped keep this series interesting. In this case it would have saved Bloom this embarrassment. It is his reputation, not Rich's, that will suffer.

Here in Australia, where I've been living for twenty years as a teacher, I'd lost contact with American poetry. I happened on the Poetry Daily web site and dived in. And found, I could order books through Amazon which I'd never seen. I now have two shelves of much read poetry and more in containers on slow ships on their way. I remember the pleasure I got from reading the commentaries and the poems in the Best...of 1997. So when I saw the Best of the Best (Harold Bloom's ed) I picked it up here, even though it was very expensive. While I enjoyed most of the poems, I found his introduction surprising. What a grump!

I could relate to about 1/10th of the poems. My instinct (late from the moldering glades of the academy) is that these poems were chosen to broaden (not deepen) the moat around the ivory tower -- poetry IS dead in this volume, mostly.

Face it--Bloom is insulated, not in touch with the real issues and trends facing poetry today. His utter rejection of Adrienne Rich and her volume of 1996--one of the best in the series--only shows to his detriment, not hers, and to the detriment of this volume. While there are memorable moments in Bloom's volume, it falls flat for its lack of relevance to the lives lived by poets and readers alike in this day and age.