The latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world.
The Best American Poetry 2011: Series Editor David Lehman
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
David Lehman, who founded The Best American Poetry series in 1988, is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
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FOREWORD
by David Lehman
What makes a poem great? What standards do we use for judging poetic excellence? To an extent, these are variants on an even more basic question. What is poetry? Poetry is, after all, not a neutral or merely descriptive term but one that implies value. What qualities in a piece of verse (or prose) raise it to the level of poetry? The questions face the editor of any poetry anthology. But only seldom do we discuss the criteria that we implicitly invoke each time we weigh the comparative merits of two or more pieces of writing. And to no one’s surprise, it turns out to be far easier to recognize the genuine article than to articulate what makes it so, let alone to universalize from a particular instance. Thus, so astute a reader as Randall Jarrell will linger lovingly on the felicities of Robert Frost’s late poem “Directive” only to conclude sheepishly: “The poem is hard to understand, but easy to love.”
The standard definitions of poetry spring to mind, each one seeming a near tautology: “the best words in the best order” (Coleridge), “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (Pound), “memorable speech” (Auden). Other justly celebrated statements may stimulate debate but have a limited practical application. Is poetry the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth) or is it precisely “not the expression of personality but an escape from personality” (T. S. Eliot)? The statements contradict each other except in the mind of the reader who enjoys with nearly equal gusto the poetry of the Romantic movement, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the one hand, and that of the modernists who reacted so strongly against them (Eliot, Pound) on the other.
Poetry is “what gets lost in translation” (Frost); it “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty” (Shelley); it “is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself” (Hazlitt). Although poems do come along that seem to exemplify such statements, the problem remains unsolved except by individual case. Archibald MacLeish’s famous formulation (“a poem should not mean / But be”) is conceptually useful in a class of writers but leaves us exactly where we started. Asking herself “what is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose,” Gertrude Stein makes us understand that poetry is a system of grammar and punctuation. “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns”—a valuable insight, but try applying it to the task of evaluating poems and see if it gets any easier. Wallace Stevens, a master aphorist, has a score of sentences that begin with the words poetry is. Poetry is “a search for the inexplicable,” “a means of redemption,” “a form of melancholia,” “a cure of the mind,” “a health,” “a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” It is metaphorically “a pheasant disappearing in the brush” and it is also, in one word, “metaphor” itself. The proliferation of possibilities tells us a great deal about Stevens’s habits of mind. But epigrams will not help the seasoned reader discriminate among the dozens of poems crying for attention from the pages or websites of well-edited literary magazines.
The emancipation of verse from the rules of yore complicates matters. It is tough on the scorekeeper if, as Frost said, free verse is like playing tennis without a net. (Some varieties of free verse seem to banish ball as well as net.) But even if we set store by things you can measure—rhyme, meter, coherence, clarity, accuracy of perception, the skillful deployment of imaginative tropes—the search for objective criteria is bound to fail. Reading is a frankly subjective experience, with pleasure the immediate objective, and in the end you read and judge the relative value of a work by instinct. That is, you become aware of the valence of your response, whether it is positive or negative, thumbs-up or -down, before you become aware of why you reacted the way you did. There is in fact no substitute for the experience of poetry, though you can educate your sensibility and become better able to summon up the openness to experience that is the critic’s first obligation—that, and the ability to pay attention to the poem and to the impact it has made on you. Walter Pater asked these questions upon reading a poem or looking at a picture: “What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?”
Whatever else it is, American poetry today is as plentiful as it is diverse. And because very good poems may reflect esthetically incompatible ideas, an editor’s job has an added complication; one must be willing to suspend one’s natural critical resistance. Poetry may happen “in the valley of its saying,” in Auden’s phrase, but discussions of poetry take place on academic battlefields. There are possibly as many different movements or schools, cliques or cabals, as there are states in the union. Conflicts may erupt, just as states may quarrel over their share of the federal budget. (The budget for poetry is small and exists therefore in an inverse ratio to the intensity of the skirmishing among poets.) The good reader is or tries to be indifferent to all this—to everything, in fact, except his or her own experience, when sitting down with, say, the latest issues of FIELD, Antioch Review, New England Review, and Green Mountains Review. I can report, having just spent pleasant evenings with these magazines, that there is a wonderful symposium on Richard Wilbur in FIELD, that one of Richard Howard’s schoolboy memory poems graces Antioch Review, that Joanne Dominique Dwyer has a brilliant poem addressed to St. Teresa of Avila in New England Review, and that there is compelling work in Green Mountains Review from two poets previously unknown to me: Anna Maria Hong and the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, whom Stephen Dunn singles out in an interview. Many poems in these and other new journals pass the first and arguably most crucial test a critic asks of them—that they give pleasure, sustain interest, and compel a second reading.
It may be that in specifying these pragmatic criteria, I have strayed from my original question when I meant merely to rephrase it. What do we ask for in poems of high excellence? To answer you need to make a list, and by the time you get to the third or fourth item you realize that no poem can do all the things people expect from poetry, not only because we may be perfectionists when it comes to judging the works of others but because we want mutually exclusive things. Do we read for moral fortitude, humane knowledge that can help us lead our lives? (Thus, to elucidate the dominant strain in Frost’s poetry, W. H. Auden quotes Samuel Johnson: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”) Or are we more interested in what the scholar calls transcendence and the reader knows to be escape—whether to Xanadu or Byzantium? (Thus Emily Dickinson: “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away / Nor any Coursers like a Page / Of prancing poetry.”) Perhaps we respond to feats of ingenuity: complicated verse forms mastered and married to colloquial speech, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s sestinas: diabolically clever meaning-making puns in the service of a narrative, as in a sonnet sequence by James Merrill. There is a delight in artifice. In past editions, The Best American Poetry has published a poem consisting entirely of palindromes (Lydia Tomkiw: “sad as samara, ruff of fur, a ram; as sad as / Warsaw was raw”) and another that exemplifies the zeugma in every line (Charles North: “To break the silence or your newly acquired Ming vase, / or raise my expectations and the flag over the Brooklyn Navy Yard”), in addition to tricky sestinas, villanelles, pantoums, centos, traditional sonnets, ballads, the occasional abecedarius, chant royal, and narrative in terza rima, though these are vastly outnumbered by the many varieties of poems in plain speech, such as you will find exemplified by Robert Hass in the 2011 volume (“When the police do a forced entry for the purpose / Of a welfare check and the deceased person is alone, / The body goes to the medical examiner’s morgue”) and by Mary Ruefle in a completely different way (“I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive”).
Marianne Moore valued the “compactness compacted” that she found in Louise Bogan’s poems. But excess has its proponents as well, and there will always be those who want the act of writing to be an act of defiance before it is anything else. Too many poems fail because they try too hard to change the world. But then along comes a work proving that poetry does make something happen. The timely cry of protest may have a longer shelf life than poems with immortal designs on them. Consider the case of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” tried for obscenity in San Francisco in 1957, lionized nationally more than a half century later with the release of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s full-length film homage in 2010. The actor James Franco, who has studied creative writing at Columbia, UCLA, and in the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program, “captures the Ginsberg we hear in our heads and know in our bones,” Ken Tucker writes in his review. The acting borders on impersonation. Franco “looks at the camera with Ginsberg’s cockeyed, moist...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful
By Rain Tent
Format:Paperback
Whoa, Dabbler, take a chill pill! It's easy to pick fault with a collection like this, and with this series in particular. There are a lot of poems to wrap your head around, and it's always too consistent or not consistent enough, too this or that, depending on your perspective. Personally, I've read some of the collections that are represented here, and was pleased to see the poems again, but did think that some better poems had been left out. I've also read really good collections that aren't represented here at all, so... But take it for what it is, a yearly bulletin of what's happening in American poetry. Ok, what's happening in creative writing programs - fair enough, as almost all the poets here are creative writing instructors. But is there poetry that's not somehow affiliated with creative writing these days?! I strongly suspect that a best of non-creative-writing poetry would not please the discerning reader any better!
Anyway, for me it's reassuring, the appearance of this collection every year, like the changing of the season. What would we do without our annual Ashbery poem! especially for those of us who have given up on the annual collections! And there are really enjoyable poems here. I'm going to list them, according to my taste: Maurice Manning's "The Complaint against Roney Laswell's Rooster" (an elegant, classical poem); Jane Hirschfield's "The Cloudy Vase"; Olena Kalytiak Davis' shockingly accomplished "Three Sonnets"; Rae Armantrout's "Soft Money" (indeed the best of Money Shot, her collection from this past year, in my opinion); Alan Michael Parker's "Family Math" (a melancholy but strangely life-affirming poem); Mary Jo Salter's "The Afterlife" (amazing); Patricia Smith's "Motown Crown" (it's freakin' crown of sonnets!... Read more ›
Anyway, for me it's reassuring, the appearance of this collection every year, like the changing of the season. What would we do without our annual Ashbery poem! especially for those of us who have given up on the annual collections! And there are really enjoyable poems here. I'm going to list them, according to my taste: Maurice Manning's "The Complaint against Roney Laswell's Rooster" (an elegant, classical poem); Jane Hirschfield's "The Cloudy Vase"; Olena Kalytiak Davis' shockingly accomplished "Three Sonnets"; Rae Armantrout's "Soft Money" (indeed the best of Money Shot, her collection from this past year, in my opinion); Alan Michael Parker's "Family Math" (a melancholy but strangely life-affirming poem); Mary Jo Salter's "The Afterlife" (amazing); Patricia Smith's "Motown Crown" (it's freakin' crown of sonnets!... Read more ›
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Flannery
Format:Paperback
I thought for a long time about whether I wanted to review this or if I had the capacity to do so. I feel like there are hordes of poetry fans and critical readers who are waiting in the wings to tell me I'm an idiot and that I don't understand poetry. Anthologies are always hit and miss for people--it's near impossible to contain something meaningful to every reader but this collection had enough poems that truly hit it out of the park for me that I felt I should at least write something about it. Is this the definitive collection of the best poems of the year? I really couldn't say; I am no authority. I'll leave that to other people to debate and just speak to my reading experience. Thankfully, David Lehman discusses this point in his foreword. The plethora of quotations in the first half of the foreword made it a choppy read for me but I am ecstatic to say that the part I enjoyed most about it was the last few paragraphs that Mr. Lehman wrote which summarized his own feelings on anthologizing poems, the wherewithal of poetry, and the structure and organization of the collection and all while devoid of quotes. It came as quite a surprise to me that this anthology is organized alphabetically. I read the foreword and introduction after the collection and didn't notice (and constantly wondered about) the connective thread. I'm happy to finally know. Kevin Young, who selected the poems for this work, manages quite a feat in his introduction--he made me want to reread every poem in the book with his discussion and he compared the comeback of the sonnet to the much-hyped and awaited return of the McRib sandwich. Bravo, Mr. Young.
My favorite poems are the ones that punch you in the gut in the fewest number of stanzas possible.... Read more ›
My favorite poems are the ones that punch you in the gut in the fewest number of stanzas possible.... Read more ›
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By Simeon
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I look forward each year to the 'The Best American Poetry' series - and the 2011 version is a good one.
It may well be the product of (mostly) creative writing courses, as some have claimed - but so what if the result is good? I found here plenty to enjoy and to be challenged by. And isn't that the point of an anthology? To be enjoyable? To make some new discoveries and to read old friends too? This volume provides both.
I really liked the controlled melancholy of Rosanna Warren's The Latch, the intensely imagined world evoked in David Wagoner's Thoreau and the Lightning, the longing of Gretchen Steele Pratt's To my father on the anniversary of his death, the sense of musical passion in Horn by Robert Pinsky, the marvelous wit demonstrated in Family Math by Alan Michael Parker (and sadness too), the solid reality in Jude Nutter's Word and (again) the music in Jennifer Knox's Kiri Te Kanawa Singing 'O Mio Babbino Caro'. And I especially loved Cornelius Eady's Emmett Till's Glass-Top Casket - chilling and spare.
This is enough for me - a lively and varied selection that is a glimpse of the richness of contemporary American Poetry.
It is proudly what it is - and I regard this volume (in particular) as a conscientious attempt to be varied and to reflect the depth of cultural contributions made by some of America's most interesting practitioners. And I enjoyed it. Enough already!
Simeon Kronenberg
It may well be the product of (mostly) creative writing courses, as some have claimed - but so what if the result is good? I found here plenty to enjoy and to be challenged by. And isn't that the point of an anthology? To be enjoyable? To make some new discoveries and to read old friends too? This volume provides both.
I really liked the controlled melancholy of Rosanna Warren's The Latch, the intensely imagined world evoked in David Wagoner's Thoreau and the Lightning, the longing of Gretchen Steele Pratt's To my father on the anniversary of his death, the sense of musical passion in Horn by Robert Pinsky, the marvelous wit demonstrated in Family Math by Alan Michael Parker (and sadness too), the solid reality in Jude Nutter's Word and (again) the music in Jennifer Knox's Kiri Te Kanawa Singing 'O Mio Babbino Caro'. And I especially loved Cornelius Eady's Emmett Till's Glass-Top Casket - chilling and spare.
This is enough for me - a lively and varied selection that is a glimpse of the richness of contemporary American Poetry.
It is proudly what it is - and I regard this volume (in particular) as a conscientious attempt to be varied and to reflect the depth of cultural contributions made by some of America's most interesting practitioners. And I enjoyed it. Enough already!
Simeon Kronenberg
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
[The following book review first appeared in The University Bookman.]
Consider the following--"Rally"--the first poem in this year's annual Best American Poetry series, reproduced in its entirety:
The awesome weight of the world had not yet descended
upon his athlete's shoulders. I saw someone light but not feathered
jog up to the rickety stage like a jock off the court
played my game did my best
and the silent crowd listened and dreamed.
The children sat high on their parents' shoulders.
Then the crowd made noise that gathered and grew
until it was loud and was loud as the sea.
What it meant or would mean was not yet fixed
nor could be, though human beings ever tilt towards we.
This poem is an example of the common usage of contemporary American poetry as a medium for communal feelings and observations. That is not necessarily a bad artistic or cultural purpose, but it does not go very far towards creating something new and engaging. T. S. Eliot's admonition to the literary critic seems relevant: "The point is that you never rest at the pure feeling." Most of the poems and many of the poets in this year's celebratory volume appear unwilling to go or incapable of going the greater distance beyond feeling.
According to Elizabeth Alexander's notes in this volume, her poem "Rally" captures "a beautiful moment in the Obama presidential campaign in late October 2008... Millions of people had put their muscle and money and shoe leather and hearts and souls into the campaign and all the hope and progress it represented. And so it seemed to me that ardent campaign supporters settled into a mode of saying, let's see what history brings, because we have done everything we can.... Read more ›
Consider the following--"Rally"--the first poem in this year's annual Best American Poetry series, reproduced in its entirety:
The awesome weight of the world had not yet descended
upon his athlete's shoulders. I saw someone light but not feathered
jog up to the rickety stage like a jock off the court
played my game did my best
and the silent crowd listened and dreamed.
The children sat high on their parents' shoulders.
Then the crowd made noise that gathered and grew
until it was loud and was loud as the sea.
What it meant or would mean was not yet fixed
nor could be, though human beings ever tilt towards we.
This poem is an example of the common usage of contemporary American poetry as a medium for communal feelings and observations. That is not necessarily a bad artistic or cultural purpose, but it does not go very far towards creating something new and engaging. T. S. Eliot's admonition to the literary critic seems relevant: "The point is that you never rest at the pure feeling." Most of the poems and many of the poets in this year's celebratory volume appear unwilling to go or incapable of going the greater distance beyond feeling.
According to Elizabeth Alexander's notes in this volume, her poem "Rally" captures "a beautiful moment in the Obama presidential campaign in late October 2008... Millions of people had put their muscle and money and shoe leather and hearts and souls into the campaign and all the hope and progress it represented. And so it seemed to me that ardent campaign supporters settled into a mode of saying, let's see what history brings, because we have done everything we can.... Read more ›
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great review
I love the diversity and quality of poetry found in this volume. Very well organized too so it is a good way to keep up with most contemporary writing.
Published 5 months ago by Marjorie Rissman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outside a Jeweler's
For four weeks now, I've kept this by my bed
to sample now and then, as in a jeweler's.
Not each a gem, but many gleams among them:
this sudden apercu, that striking... Read more
to sample now and then, as in a jeweler's.
Not each a gem, but many gleams among them:
this sudden apercu, that striking... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Roger Brunyate
5.0 out of 5 stars
A list of the most popular words for poetry in 2011
A list of the most common words found in this edition:
bra
paint
music
sound
gray-silver
memory
strings
windows
degradation... Read more
bra
paint
music
sound
gray-silver
memory
strings
windows
degradation... Read more
Published 16 months ago by angela
2.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry at the 'top' is 'dead'
I agree with many others that poetry 'at the top' (winners of the main prizes and poems in this book) is not good enough to criticize, and will not be remembered very long. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Einar Olsen
1.0 out of 5 stars
Best of creative writing programs
I propose that the name of this series be changed to: The Most Representative University-Based American Poetry (MRUBAP, pronounced the way it's written) - but that wouldn't be... Read more
Published 20 months ago by DabblerArts
