The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

  In the antagonism between science and the humanities, it may now be said that C. P. Snow in “The Two Cultures” was certainly right in one particular. Technology in our culture has routed the humanities. Everyone wants the latest app, the best device, the slickest new gadget. Put on the defensive, spokespersons for the humanities have failed to make an effective case for their fields of study. There have been efforts to promote the digital humanities, it being understood that the adjective “digital” is what rescues “humanities” in the phrase. Has the faculty thrown in the towel too soon? Have literature departments and libraries welcomed the end of the book with unseemly haste? Have the conservators of culture embraced the acceleration of change that may endanger the study of the literary humanities as if—like the clock face, cursive script, and the rotary phone—it, too, can be effectively consigned to the ash heap of the analog era?

  There is some resistance to the tyranny of technology, the ruthlessness of the new digital media. And in the incipient resistance, there is the resort to culture as we traditionally knew it—the poem on the printed page, the picture in the gallery, the concerto in the symphony hall. “There is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a text or an image,” Leon Wieseltier told the graduating class at Brandeis University in May 2013. Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic, feels the situation is dire. “In the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of information.” In truth, however, “knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method. And the devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives.” Let us not be so quick to jettison the monuments of unaging intellect. “There is no task more urgent in American intellectual life at this hour than to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of science and technology.”15

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  One thing you can count on is that people will keep writing as they adjust from one medium to another, analog to digital, paper to computer monitor. Upon the appearance of the 2004 edition of The Best American Poetry (ed. Lyn Hejinian), David Orr wrote that the series stands for “the idea of poetry as a community activity. ‘People are writing poems!’ each volume cries. ‘You, too, could write a poem!’ It’s an appealingly democratic pose, and it has always been the genuinely ‘best’ thing about the Best American series.”16 Is everyone a poet?17 It was Freud who laid the intellectual foundations for the idea. He argued that each of us is a poet when dreaming or making wisecracks or even when making slips of the tongue or pen. If daydreaming is a passive form of creative writing, it follows that the unconscious to which we all have access is the content provider, and what is left to learn is technique. It took the advent of creative writing as an academic field to institutionalize what might be a natural tendency in American democracy. In the proliferation of competent poems, poems that meet a certain standard of artistic finish but may lack staying power, I cannot see much harm except to note one inevitable consequence, which is that of inflation. In economics, inflation takes the form of a devaluation of currency. In poetry, inflation lessens the value that the culture attaches to any individual poem. But this is far from a new development. Byron in a journal entry in 1821 or 1822 captured the economic model with his customary brio: “there are more poets (soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally less poetry.”18

  Another thing you can count on: at seemingly regular intervals an article will appear in a wide-circulation periodical declaring—as if it hasn’t been said often before—that poetry is finished, kaput, dead, and what are they doing with the corpse? Back in 1888, Walt Whitman read an article forecasting the demise of poetry in fifty years “owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force.” (Whitman’s comment: “I anticipate the very contrary. Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to exist—nay, is already formed—to which the poetic genius must emigrate.”)19 In his introduction to The Sacred Wood (1920), T. S. Eliot ridiculed the kind of argument encountered in fashionable London circles of the day. Edmund Gosse had written in the Sunday Times: “Poetry is not a formula which a thousand flappers and hobbledehoys ought to be able to master in a week without any training, and the mere fact that it seems to be now practiced with such universal ease is enough to prove that something has gone amiss with our standards.” Here is Eliot’s paraphrase of the Gosse argument: “If too much bad verse is published in London, it does not occur to us to raise our standards, to do anything to educate the poetasters; the remedy is, Kill them off.” (Eliot also asks: “is it wholly the fault of the younger generation that it is aware of no authority that it must respect?”)20 On occasion the death-of-poetry genre can produce something useful; Edmund Wilson’s essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” comes to mind. But today you are more likely to find “Poetry and Me: An Elegy.”

  In its July 2013 issue, Harper’s published a typical example of the genre, Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse.”21 The piece by an older academic bewailing the state of something he calls “mainstream American poetry” and praising the poetry he loved as a youth is embarrassing for what it reveals about the author, who is out of touch with the poetry in circulation. And then “mainstream American poetry” is poor turf to stand on: Would you offer a course with that label? Would anyone want to fit into such a category? The professor’s chief complaint appears to be that “there’s no end of poetry being written and published out there,” and though he knows he shouldn’t generalize, he will do just that and say that today’s poets lack ambition—“the poets who now get the balance of public attention and esteem are casting unambitious spells,” which is at least a grudging acknowledgment, if only by virtue of the metaphor, that our poets remain magicians.

  When such a piece runs, the magazine subsequently prints a handful of the letters the offending article has provoked. Of the three letters that Harper’s saw fit to print in its September 2013 issue, one writer was vexed that Edmundson had focused “almost exclusively” on white males. A second thought it a shame that the author had overlooked the work of hip-hop lyricists (such as Kendrick Lamar and Nas). The third letter was written by Harvard Professor Stephen Burt, an assiduous critic and reader. He pointed out that there is “something bullying” in the call for “public” poetry. Whose public, he asked: “A public poem, in Edmundson’s view, might be an interest-group poem whose collective has a flag.” Attacks on contemporary American poetry such as Edmundson’s “have been made for centuries” and are best seen as “screeds [that] create an opportunity for those of us who read a lot of poetry to recommend individual poets as we come to poetry-in-general’s defense.”22

  Each year in The Best American Poetry we seize that opportunity and ask a distinguished poet to glean the harvest of poems and identify the ones he or she thinks best. Terrance Hayes has undertaken the task with vigor and inventiveness. A native of South Carolina, Hayes went to Coker College on a basketball scholarship, studied the visual arts, and wrote poetry on the side. An instructor directed him to the MFA poetry program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Toi Derricotte and joined Cave Canem, the organization that has done so much to nourish the remarkable generation of African American poets on the scene today. Terrance won the 2010 National Book Award for his book Lighthead (Penguin). His poems—which have appeared seven times in The Best American Poetry—reflect a deep interest in matters of masculinity, sexuality, and race; a flair for narrative; and a love of verbal games as the key to ad hoc forms and procedures. I was thrilled when Hayes told me that the first book of poems he ever acquired was the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry, Jorie Graham’s volume, and that he owns all the books in the series. When I asked him to read for the 2014 book, I had in front of me the winter 2010–11 issue of Ploughshares, which Hayes edited. In his introduction, he wrote about a notional three-story museum, the “Sentenced Museum,” which resembles an inverted py
ramid with the literature of self-reflection on the ground floor, the language of witness one flight up, and a host of “tangential parlors, wings and galleries” on the third and largest floor. I remember reading the issue and thinking, “as an editor, he’s a natural.”

  As ever, this year’s volume includes our elaborate back-of-the-book apparatus. To the value of the comments the poets make on the work chosen for this book, the poets themselves attest. In the 2013 edition, Dorianne Laux comments on her “Song,” “Death permeates the poem, which wasn’t apparent to me until I was asked to write this paragraph.”

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  It used to be the death of God that got all the attention—God whose decomposing corpse made the big stink. Was it, in the end, Nietzsche, Freud, Time magazine, or the masses (who preferred, in the end, other opiates) that did Him in? I can’t say, but I take solace in knowing that there are, besides myself, other holdouts refusing to suspend their belief. Meanwhile, the subject has receded to the terrorism and fundamentalism pages of your newspaper, and the focus has long since shifted to literature. The death of the novel worried all-star committees for years. There was a split decision that satisfied no one, and now, with Updike dead and Roth retired, a new consensus is starting to form around the notion that the TV serial as exemplified by The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Homeland has supplanted not only the novel but the movie as a mass entertainment form—one that can aspire to be both wildly popular and notably artistic, as the novel was at its best. The past tense in that last clause makes me sad, though I have seen the future and it is even more enthralling than Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga given the Masterpiece Theatre treatment with Damian Lewis as Soames.

  As to poetry, is it dead, does it matter, is there too much of it, does anyone anywhere buy books of poetry? The discussion is fraught with anxiety and perhaps that implies a love of poetry, and a longing for it, and a fear that we may be in danger of losing it if we do not take care to promote it, teach it well, and help it reach the reader whose life depends on it. Will magazine editors continue to fall for a pitch lamenting that poetry has become a “small-time game,” that it is “too hermetic,” or “programmatically obscure,” lacking ambition and public spiritedness? The lack of originality is no bar. Think of how many issues of finance magazines are identical in their contents year after year. Retire at sixty-five. Insider tips from the pros. What to do about bonds in 2014 “and beyond.” Why it makes dollars and sense to “ditch cable.” Or consider the general audience magazine, editors of which will not soon tire of running articles that contend that a woman today either can or cannot “have it all.” I am so sure that death-of-poetry pronouncements will continue to be made that I am tempted to assign the task as a writing exercise. It’s an evergreen.

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  1. Kathryn Schulz, “Seduced by Twitter,” The Week, December 27, 2013, pp. 40–41.

  2. Katy Steinmetz, “The Linguist’s Mother Lode,” Time, September 9, 2013, pp. 56–57. Jacob Eisenstein, a computational linguist at Georgia Tech, is quoted: “Social media has taken the informal peer-to-peer interaction that might have been almost exclusively spoken and put it in a written form. The result of that is a burst of creativity.” The assumption here is that the new is necessarily “creative” in the honorific sense.

  3. “Even the best computer will seem positively geriatric by its fifth birthday.” Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Mac Pro Is a Lamborghini, but Who Drives That Fast?” The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2014, D1.

  4. The 1959 Rede Lecture in four parts was published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. An expanded version conjoining the lecture with Snow’s subsequent reflections (A Second Look) appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1964.

  5. I take the term “humanist” to cover historians and philosophers, literary and cultural critics, music and art historians, professors of English or Romance Languages or comparative literature or East Asian studies, classicists, linguists, jurists and legal scholars, public intellectuals, authors and essayists, most psychologists, and a great many other academics across the board: very nearly everyone not committed professionally to a career in one of the sciences or in technology.

  6. The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow by F. R Leavis.

  7. For more on the affair, and an especially sensitive and sympathetic reading of Leavis’s “relentlessly withering” attack on Snow, see Stefan Collini, “Leavis v. Snow: The Two-Cultures Bust-Up 50 Years On,” in The Guardian, August 16, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/16/leavis-snow-two-cultures-bust

  8. Douglas Belkin, “Private Colleges Squeezed,” The Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2013.

  9. “Major Changes,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2014, p. 20.

  10. Russell A. Berman, “Humanist: Heal Thyself,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2013. http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/06/10/humanist-heal-thyself/

  11. Thomas Frank, “Course Corrections,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2013, p. 10. The editorial writers of the New York Post begin a defense of the liberal arts with “the nightmare scenario for many parents of college students. Suzie comes home from her $50,000-a-year university to tell you this: ‘Mom and Dad, I’ve decided I want to major in early Renaissance poetry.’ ” New York Post, February 22, 2014.

  12. Lionel Trilling, “The Two Environments: Reflections on the Study of English,” in Beyond Culture (1965; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 184. See also Trilling’s lucid account of the Leavis–Snow controversy in the same volume, pp. 126–54.

  13. “In according the least legitimacy to the word ‘genius,’ one is considered to sign one’s resignation from all fields of knowledge,” Jacques Derrida said in 2003. The very noun, he said, “makes us squirm.” At the same time that academics banished the word, magazines such as Time and Esquire began to dumb it down, applying “genius” to all manner of folk, including fashion designers, corporate executives, performers, comedians, talk-show hosts, and even point guards who shoot too much (Allen Iverson, circa 2000). See Darrin M. McMahon, “Where Have All the Geniuses Gone?” in The Chronicle Review, October 21, 2013. http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Have-All-the-Geniuses/142353/

  14. Heather Mac Donald, “The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304858104579264321265378790

  15. Leon Wieseltier, “Perhaps Culture Is Now the Counterculture,” The New Republic, May 28, 2013. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113299/leon-wieseltier-commencement-speech-brandeis-university-2013

  16. David Orr, “The Best American Poetry 2004: You, Too, Could Write a Poem.” The New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004.

  17. Madeline Schwartzman, an adjunct professor of architecture at Barnard College, is stopping someone on the subway every day and asking the person to write a poem on the spot for “365 Day Subway: Poems by New Yorkers.” Heidi Mitchell, “Artist Solicits Poetry from Other Subterraneans,” The Wall Street Journal, February 1–2, 2014, A15.

  18. Byron, “Detached Thoughts” (October 1821 to May 1822), in Byron’s Poetry, ed. Frank D. McConnell (W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 335.

  19. Whitman in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1888), in Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Murphy (Penguin, 1969), pp. 110–11.

  20. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920; rpt. Methuen, 1960), p. xv.

  21. Harper’s Magazine, July 2013, pp. 61–68.

  22. Harper’s Magazine, September 2013, pp. 2–3.

  Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He was educated at Coker College, where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan; Columbus, Ohio; and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes returned to Pittsburgh in 2001 and taught for twelve years at Carnegie Mellon Universi
ty before joining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2013. He is the author of Lighthead (Penguin Books, 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first book, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), won both a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly, whose reviewer wrote: “In his hip, funny, yet no less high-stakes third collection, Hayes solidifies his reputation as one of the best poets—African American or otherwise—now writing.” He has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. How to Be Drawn, Hayes’s new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2015.