Customer Reviews

The Best American Poetry 2002

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(11)

 

 

The Best American Poetry series can never live up to its title (just about every editor has said in their introduction, "These may not really be your idea of 'the best' -- they're just the poems I most liked this year"), but by having different editors each year, the books offer an interesting view of what eminent poets consider work of note.

For me, the books work best when the editor is someone with a specific and, most likely, controversial vision -- a person who isn't afraid of manifestos and subjectivity. Thus, up until now, my favorite volume in the series was the 1996 edition edited by Adrienne Rich -- not because I think all of the poems she chose were brilliant (many weren't), but rather because the choices were unpredictable and, though diverse, held together by a clear philosophical intent on the editor's part. (It was exactly this philosophical intent which made the book the most controversial one in the series, with Harold Bloom deliberately excluding any of Rich's choices from the ten-year retrospective volume.)

Robert Creeley's volume seems even better to me than Rich's (partly because I like Creeley's view of poetry more than Rich's). I expect, though, that the book will either be loved or hated by readers, for though there are some old favorites such as Donald Hall and Sharon Olds included, the majority of the poems are innovative and "difficult".

Approached with an open mind, a high tolerance for ambiguity and confusion, and a certain sense of humor, though, and this book reveals itself to be full of wonders. I couldn't tell you what the exact meaning of Forrest Gander's magnificent "Carried Across" is, but I can say that reading it was one of the most powerful and rewarding experiences I've had while reading contemporary poetry. None of the other poems had quite the same effect on me, but why should they? Jenny Boully's footnotes-to-blank-space "The Body" had me laughing and thinking and wondering and rethinking as I wandered through it, a bit lost but also amused, and many other poems had similar effects.

Frank O'Hara maintained that poetry should at least be as interesting as movies, and, with the proper willingness on the reader's part to stay open to oddity, just about all of these poems meet that test.

I've read this series regularly, and I've also often chosen to use it in my college courses, though in the last five years or so, I've found it less useful as a teaching tool and more useful as a compendium of trendiness in American Poetry. The last really comprehensive "Best" in this series was Richard Howard's year, but then, Howard is really an editor, a writer and reader with broad tastes, and secure enough in his own achievements that he doesn't submit to the kind of cronyism that afflicts this year's anthology. Creeley's choices are so very dull that I fear these must be buddies. I'm going to have to find another anthology for my students. This one has been disappointing too many years in a row.

This has been a wonderful series of books, a great way to keep abreast of where current American poetry is going - and I'm sure it will be again. Unfortunatley this edition doesn't measure up. The reason for this failure falls at the feet of the editor, Robert Creely. I understand an editor's desire to place his own stamp on such a work. Furthermore, if that weren't the idea behind the series, it wouldn't have a new editor ever year. That said, I have to say that Creely put far too much of his own mark on this year's edition. Unless you happen to really enjoy Creely's own poetry, you probably will not enjoy this book. It reads like a collection of his own work. About every tenth poem I feel like I have a clue what the author is trying to say. All the rest amount to little more than gratuitous verbal fireworks, pointless word plays, excessive alliteration, and general self-absorbed drivel. In the future I hope series editors will try to bring us once again a broad collection of what is great in current American poetry, not simply one marginal poet's collection of the poems he happened to like that year.

I disliked the 2001 collection and made certain to check this out in the bookstore before buying. I'm glad I did. Much of the poetry in this collection suffers from the same self-conscious elitism of the prior collection. Great, and good, poems can require more than one reading for true comprehension. But impenetrable? Inaccessible? I hate to sound like a crab but ...when are we going to stop judging art as good solely because it break the rules, and start requiring it to be shored up by meaning, and represented by talent? Language poetry can be done well - but it's not done well just because its language poetry. Transgression for transgression's sake is B-O-R-I-N-G. A few bright lights, but all in all, a murky, sad collection. Recommended instead: A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz. A transcendent collection.

I've read this series since 1989 or so and have thought it consistently excellent. This volume, however, is almost entirely made of exceptionally eccentric poetry that will alienate almost all readers. As I read it, I kept thinking about this: Somewhere a thoughtful, educated and well-read person decides he or she will finally take time to explore what is going on in today's poetry. Our hypothetical friend goes to his or her local bookseller and finds "The Best American Poetry 2002" and understandably concludes this is an ideal book with which to start. It would likely be his or her last purchase of contemporary poetry. It's very much unbalanced and is simply not at all representative of poetry in 2002. The editor indulges his own taste for the inaccessible and quirky with no consideration for the task of presenting, well, "The Best American Poetry."

Maybe too many aspiring poets hold inclusion in "The Best American Poetry" as being the pinnacle of having "arrived." This reasoning makes for a lot of frustrated poets, who feel as if their work is more deserving, which in turn makes for negative reviews. There are a lot of talented writers in this volume, writers whose work might have been overlooked or lost on readers, because so many poets don't turn to literary journals--they turn to this anthology to see who's who. I'm sure that younger poets (and very talented poets) such as Sarah Manguso and Jenny Boully benefited from this anthology because their work suddenly found hundreds of new readers. Of course, there is also bad, very bad poetry in this collection. However, I'm willing to take the good with the bad if it means having a yearly summary of the current poetry scene.

Besides the very fine introduction by David Lehman, this has to be the most abstruse collection of poetry I have ever read. I am a college teacher and have traditionally used the Best American series in my classes. Year after year, it has been my favorite poetry anthology. I had my students purchase this edition before I had a chance to look through it this year and I am worried that a collection like this will just fortify all their worse preconceptions about poetry: elitist, inside, arch, academic, and bloodless. It seems to be an elaborate joke played by Creeley on the whole idea of a "Best American Poetry". Could his taste possibly be so narrow? Perhaps this issue should be called "The Best American Language Poetry" or "The Best American Poetry out of The University of Buffalo."

Gad, what a dreadful bore! The problem is not that the poetry in this volume is experimental--it's that it's incredibly dull, hiding its lack of content, or even anti-content--its lack of new ideas--in its inscrutability. Experimental poetry is not necessarily a dead end, but from this pleasureless, drearily mannered volume you'd think it was. There's hardly a narrative poem by anyone under 50--and there's plenty of excellent young narrative poetry being written. Creeley's got his head in the sand. This is a monument to what's already over and done with. Please, David Lehman, pick somebody a little younger, a little hipper, to edit this next year.

For a great many years now, I have been buying and reading cover to cover the annual issues of "Great American Poetry." This is by far the best example the anthology has had to offer. Every poem is unique, powerful with a vast command of language and nuance, and they each invite rereading after rereading. These gems are diverse and yet extraordinary in their methods. The poets are seen at their finest. 2001-2002 must have been a highly creative year.

For many years, I have been taking the Best American Poetry books down from the shelf at the local bookstore for a peek, but I never felt compelled to buy one until I read the 2002 version selected by Robert Creeley. I've always had more respect than affection for Creeley, finding it hard to get into his stuff, but I loved the synergy (Marketing stole this word from the Greeks--I'm stealing it back) produced by the juxtaposition of devil-may-care experimentation with the best of more traditional, "mainstream" offerings in this volume. My favorite examples of these divergent impulses here are Jenny Boully's "The Body," a poem in the form of footnotes to blank pages (this poem has been ridiculed in other reviews found here, but I find it daring and exhilirating--in fact, I wish I had thought of it first) and Donald Hall's "Affirmation," an astonishingly straightforward and devastating poem that is one of my favorites from his body of work and one that should warm (freeze?) the heart of the most esthetically conservative reader.

Even though I received a B.A. in English with a focus on creative writing ten years ago, I have only recently begun to understand the struggle between those who would keep poetry at a place it never was (the "School of Quietude" in Ron Silliman's terms--you MUST read his blog, it's good whether you agree or not, just as long as you care about poetry) and those who want poetry to continue to evolve (not "improve"), no matter what unexpected and scary turns it may take (what Mr Silliman calls, in our time, the "post-avant"). This book seems to have frightened most of the reviewers who felt compelled to contribute their opinions here, which frightened state they express as distaste. Just know that the most innovative and forward poetry that has lasted was seen in its time as "eccentric" or "inaccessible" or "repugnant" or "unreadable" or "incomprehensible," ad nauseam, from Euripides to T.S. Eliot, who, despite of his conversion to stultifying artistic conservatism and his weird adoption by "the Establishment" (and weirder disinheritance by "the anti-Establishment"), told us, if I remember correctly, that meaning should not be sought when first reading poetry that is new to us, but rather an understanding of the qualities of language the poet is presenting to us.

[This may be a complete misrepresentation of Eliot; I'm sorry I don't remember where I read his statement about reading for meaning. Anyway, people who hate this book will respond that there is no quality to the language here, the good old days were the best, blah blah blah etc etc, but this is as good a place as any to end this review.]