Customer Reviews

The Best American Poetry 2001

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2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was terribly disappointed by this collection. I am an avid fan of the "Best of..." series, both the short story and poetry annual collections, and wished I had read through this collection before I purchased it. That would have told me just how much "intellectual passion" as opposed to "pleasure" these poems would present. There is a lot of poetry of ideas and form and what feels like postmodern self-conscious gimmickry, but little true emotion or connection to the human experience. And no, I am not an "old fogey moon-june" poetry lover. I love experimentation in poetry. But I feel hoodwinked by Hass' choices (and hey-why didn't he tell us in his nice introduction that his wife was in here!??). Much of this is a poetry in love with language and ideas, but not the connection they must make with sensation and experience in order to move a reader. It's not that the poems are difficult to read through--much great poetry is after all, and much great poetry originally broke the "rules"-- but many of these poems I found thoroughly, frustratingly, truly incomprehensible until I read the author comments in the back. And these notes were at times laughable in their ostentation and/or pitiable in their affectedness. They explain the poem in many cases, but what were we expected to do without these author remarks? In fact, some of these author comments read like indispensable footnotes, not enlightenment on the artistic experience.
All is not lost. The Ashberry and Bishop and Koch, among others, are marvelous, and proof that a great poet doesn't need afterwords or explanatory remarks and footnotes in order to make meaning out of their poetry. And since Ashberry, for example, rarely makes "sense" in the obvious way, it is not that events need to be spelled out in order of poetry to be moving. But it must have an element of emotion in order to please this reader, not just language that sounds good put together or ideas that only mean something to the writer and must be explained in detail.
Anyway, there are many out there who will certainly love this collection-mostly critics and graduate students and professors, is my guess (and I just graduated recently from a writing program, so I know whereof I speak). But more and more these people determine the direction poetry is taking, so it is informative to read this collection for that reason if none other. But save your money if any of my comments mean something to you, or at least read through this at the bookstore before buying.
If you are disappointed by this collection, try the "Best of American Poetry..." that anthologizes the earlier decades. It is a wonderful collection.

BAP 2001 continues the tradition established by previous volumes by presenting great poetry from well-known, lesser-known, and unknown American poets.

True, no annual volume of poetry can collect all of the "best" poems published that year, but the BEST AMERICAN POETRY series comes awfully close. This collection is just as diverse as past collections: John Ashbery shuffles alongside Thomas Sayers Ellis, Billy Collins plays in the snow, Anne Carson longs, watching Christopher Edgar drifting in the clouds. Donald Hall's poem "Her Garden" is heartbreaking and nearly perfect. Yusef Komunyakaa, Haryette Mullen, and Robert Bly also show up and there's a beautiful banter abounding.

David Lehman has written another funny and insightful foreword and Robert Hass fulfills the guest editor's job of distancing himself as much as possible from the claim of the series' title.

This is a fantastic collection, an indespensible series, and one that should be read if you want to discover the current, vibrant, thriving state of American poetry.

If, very generally, the world is divided into experimental-elliptical and narrative-lyric poetry, then Hass, who has finally realized poetry has changed since he was a boy, is trying to reflect that. Everyone knows these books aren't really books of bests, they're books of trends and tend to be a bit behind the curve. Admitting that, there's no reason to be getting excited here. Rita Dove's was good, this one's eh. It's not the preponderance of more oblique, non-narrative stuff that's the problem--there's a fair amount of dreary gabble, but there are also some electric pieces--Szporluk's series of metaphors has energy, though the last two lines are right out of I-am-woman-hear-me-roar; Lydia Davis is intense and nifty and fun; etc., etc. Where Hass falls down on the job is in picking poetry of more traditional pleasures: most of the clearer narrative pieces are sentimental and unenergetic. It's as if to Hass, the new can only be the elliptical--can't be in a narrative mode that has different sound, sentiment or idea from what he does himself. Alan Feldman's piece, for example, is a namedropping and overlong bit of tripe the point of which seems to be the poet reassuring himself that his mother loved him. Of course there are Kalytiak-Davis, Anne Carson, McHugh, Stewart and a few others who are working outside all the usual boxes, and their work is always fun to read. Gluck is the real thing, and her poem Time is, I think, from her latest book, which is her best so far. Young is fun, as usual; Bernard Welt's "I stopped writing poetry" might be the freshest, funniest and also--to poets anyhow--poignant thing in here. Sayers Ellis is fine--he's a good poet--though I've seen other work by him that I like much more. But other than that you could almost go through this book and say, without checking the bios, this one teaches here, this one got their mfa here, and do it almost to the date. That is to say, what an academic bunch of stuff! I guess that's a pretty accurate reflection of what's going on today, but I think Dove, last year, produced an anthology which found more new voices which couldn't be pigeonholed quite as easily, while her taste in older voices at least tended to lead her to their better stuff.

I agree with the other reviewer. I was disappointed in this year's BAP as well. I'm an avid reader of previous collections and was happy to see Rita Dove edit the previous edition, as she seemed to value diversity in gender, ethnicity, and style much more than Haas, who seemed to select more academic, less human works (and as the previous reviewer mentioned, his wife, which I have mixed feelings about). His wife is a wonderful language poet, but really. Overall, a stuffy volume that didn't seem very representative of modern American poetry today. Save your money and borrow it from the library if you really must read it.

want to know why nobody reads poetry anymore? read the first 58 pages of this book and you will know. 58 pages is all of my free time that i could justify wasting. page after page of dull words thrown up by pretentious people with next to nothing to say. truly horrible.

This series is becoming more and more boring with time. The main reason is that it is more and more "intelectual" and smells university. Many poems are well written by today's standards, but that may just be the best way to write a bad poem. A bad poem can be considered good literature, but many good ones were considered in their time bad literature. I didn't buy this book, I read a lot of pages in the store and didn't even find three poems to make me part from my 15 bucks. The other volumes I have just sit in my library and just one or two poems in the 4 volumes I have really hit the score and make want to come back again. Want a good american anthology? Then go fot Alan kaufman's "The Outlaw bible of American poetry". Another good one is the "vintage book of American poetry". I hope someone tries to compete with this series because there is a lot of great stuff going on, the editors here seem to be fishing in the wrong waters.

This book and books like this one are probably the best way to come in contact with modern poets. Many people know the time-honored favorites and even a few who garnered acclaim through the sixties, but resources like this book make it possible to see what is considered 'great' in modern works. The presentation is perfect; the poems are arranged alphabetically and without comment leaving the reader to make up his or her mind as to whether or not this poem is truly great.

There has been much debate over the past ten years of what constitutes poetry. This book involves a broad scope of what is now considered poetry and why very few people "like" poetry. To sum it up, "good grief!"

Nearly every edition in this series contains I like and poems I hate. It really does depend on the editor's tastes. Since Hass is big on ambiguity, language poetry, and fragmented narratives, many of the poems here follow that. My favorites include: Bly, Rich, Lydia Davis, James Galvin. I think overall this is one of the top few books in this series. I can already see that I'm not going to like the 2002 edited by Creeley

...And if there is a democracy in writing, indeed, it is poetry. The Best American Poetry 2001 is a compilation of great poems from various writers and covers wide range of subjects, from sad to happy and from abstract to everyday situation proems are covered in this great book. Some poems touch your heart, others make you laugh, and some leave an everlasting impact upon you... best part is that all of them co-exist in this great book. This book is the best companion that a young developing poet can have, this book is the best refenrence a mature poet could use... and this very book is something that a very common man can refer to. Poetry starts where prose ends, it can say one paragraph in a few words... it can summarize an article into a stanza. It can trigger a war of words and it has the power to hold great romance in form of sonnets. Poetry is something that all of us associate to... some refer to it in the hour of crisis, the others turn to it in the moment of celebration. This book is indeed deep... it could well be termed a perfect mosaic, an extraordinary collage, a magically colourful painting... one that has been completed by many great artists, and it is a book that could leave an impact of many young writers who could well be the future artists. The Best American Poetry 2001 is a must to read - Its somethig that we have to keep!