Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

  Poets now regularly appear as film and TV characters. This trend goes beyond literary biopics about Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, and William Shakespeare. In the Netflix sci-fi series Altered Carbon, an Edgar Allan Poe replicant is the hero’s sidekick. In The Tudors, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Earl of Surrey play major roles. Shakespeare pops up all over, most notably in his own flashy TNT series, Will, where not only Christopher Marlowe and Robert Southwell but even the obscure Robert Greene play significant parts.

  There are many factors behind this trend, but at least two things seem obvious. First, the film community finds poetry creatively potent—as a cultural reference, sign of sophistication, or proof of artistic seriousness. Second, media’s mass audience hears bits of poetry on a regular basis, whether it remembers them or not. If poetry’s place in American culture is essentially paradoxical, one should savor the irony that poetry’s rapid emergence as an element in TV scripts occurred at the same time that print media was cutting back on poetry reviews and the education system was shrinking poetry’s place in its utilitarian “language arts” curriculum. As elite culture has less use for poetry, popular culture has embraced it.

  American poetry is currently full of such contradictory trends. That’s one reason why the articles announcing poetry’s demise are usually right and wrong at the same time. The grim facts they report may well be apocalyptic, but what they measure isn’t what currently matters. So often commentators miss the big new thing happening next door. No one in an Ivy League English department would have predicted the current vogue of teen poetry and pop verse novels just as no one predicted the creation of hip-hop poetry or the renewal of rhyme and meter forty years ago. The trends did not originate in the English department. How could Kool Herc change world poetry without an MFA?

  The university’s role in poetry may be the most complicated paradox of all. For decades, the expansion of academic writing programs provided a home for poets, first as students and later as instructors. Academia gave thousands of poets secure, paid employment—something unprecedented in the history of Western literature. It was America’s version of the Imperial Mandarin system, which once employed poets as bureaucrats across China’s vast empire. Our system was even better. Poets got summers off.

  Then, like most booms, the surge ended. The university system stopped expanding, especially in the humanities. Job applicants greatly outnumbered job openings. Rather than address the problem by cutting back graduate programs, universities chose to exploit their junior personnel as a cost savings. Tenure-track careers became adjunct gigs with low pay, no benefits, and minimal job security. The academic situation is old news, but it is still awful to the young and often not-so-young people caught up in crappy jobs or no jobs at all. The tale of this city clearly depends on what side of the tenure track a poet lives.

  Academia’s problems, however, had an unexpected cultural benefit. The legions of young writers, artists, musicians, and scholars who met with disappointment in the academic job market haven’t all vanished. Most of them just moved. Not finding a place in one world, the academic refugees sought new lives in another. As old bohemian neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, San Francisco, and other cities were being destroyed by gentrification, tourism, and rising real estate prices, a steady stream of unemployed and underemployed artists helped enlarge or create new communities in places like Oakland, Austin, Portland, Jersey City, Astoria, or downtown Los Angeles. Here they joined and revitalized preexisting local communities. Bohemian communities have also emerged in smaller towns, but in such cases their size makes them vulnerable to tourism and development. Witness the stultifying impact of money on Aspen and Carmel or on a larger scale the French Quarter of New Orleans and Santa Fe.

  Thirty years ago the typical young poet taught in the university. Today’s new generation is more likely to be living in a big city and employed outside academia. They work as baristas, brewers, and bookstore clerks; they also work in the law, medicine, and business. Technology has made it possible to publish books without institutional or commercial support. Social media connects people more effectively than any faculty lounge. An online journal requires nothing but time. A phone and a laptop can produce a professional poetry video. Any bookstore, library, café, or gallery can host a poetry reading.

  New circumstances create interesting possibilities for poets. In the new bohemia a poet doesn’t need to worry about tenure, peer review, or academic fashions. A poet doesn’t even need a degree. Audience is not an abstract entity; the poet sees a diverse crowd at readings. Those faces are not the same ones found at a research university. The new communities include large parts of the population unlikely to participate in academic literary life because they are blocked by poverty, education, language, and race. Those groups have brought new perspectives and new energy to literary life. Minority authors and audiences often share a conviction that literature and literacy are fundamental to the identity, advancement, and even survival of their communities. When creating your own literature becomes a life or death issue, different sorts of poetry emerges than what one commonly finds in an English department.

  The new bohemia is no demi-Eden. Writers struggle to balance their art with practical exigencies. Their situation is complicated but exciting. Existing outside both the academic and market economy makes these poets marginal in society, but their circumstances also give them freedom from commercial and academic conventions. Most boho writers, with or without degrees, probably still dream of snagging a professorship, but they also recognize that as outsider artists they represent an important cultural enterprise. Together they have created a vigorous alternative culture that has broken the university’s monopoly on poetry. They have diversified, democratized, and localized American poetry.

  The situation of poetry is impossible to describe but easy to summarize. No one fully understands what is happening because poetry and its audience are changing too quickly in too many places. There is considerable continuity with the past. The traditional ways in which poetry has been written, read, and evaluated still have relevance, but those methods don’t always seem very useful in understanding new developments. Old theories (including postmodern ones) are incommensurate with the present realities. There is no emerging mainstream replacing a dying old order. There is no mainstream at all—only more alternatives. The best metaphor is not death but birth. The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward.

  So don’t panic. Poetry is not in danger, at least no more than usual. New forms of poetry don’t eliminate established forms. They do, however, influence and modify them. Culture is not binary but dialectical. Poetry now has as many competing categories and audience segments as popular music. What plays at Harvard won’t get anyone on the dance floor in East Los Angeles, and that’s just fine. All styles are possible, all approaches open, and everyone is invited.

  When David Lehman asked me to edit the 2018 edition of The Best American Poetry, my first impulse was to decline. What an impossible task it would be to read and evaluate all the new poetry being published! Selecting the best poems of the year is made even more difficult because there is currently no consensus on what constitutes a poem, not to mention a “best” poem. For starters, how do you even define “poetry” when the term is used to describe a broad range of artistic forms from word art to hip-hop? Is poetry a graphic, typographic, audiovisual, or auditory medium? The answer is always yes. You or I may practice the art in a particular manner, but “poetry” now encompasses many different ways of compressing words into expressive shape. No wonder American poetics has become so contentious. My own taste in poetry is broad, but can any single editor have sympathies broad enough to evaluate everything fairly? Each volume of The Best American Poetry is necessarily an exercise in individual sensibility.

  Why did I accept the offer? As A. E. Housman once remarked, vanity is the poet’s ruling vice. It was an honor to join the celebrious ranks of previous editors. There w
as, however, another motivation—curiosity, that imp of the perverse who got Pandora into such trouble. I was curious about new poetry, especially the multitudinous work of the younger generation. Twenty-five years ago when I still made my living as a literary journalist, I had a better sense of new poetry. I reviewed books, read for prize committees, judged manuscripts for competitions, participated in writers’ conferences, edited anthologies. I could, with difficulty, almost keep up. As I got older, the writers got younger and more numerous. The poetry world kept expanding, segmenting, and evolving. This project was my chance to catch up.

  My editorial method was simple and entirely unoriginal. For twelve months (starting in October 2016) I spent two or three hours each day reading new poetry. I read through every journal I could find as well as dozens of online journals. I bought piles of unfamiliar small magazines and subscribed to new journals. I read every issue of every literary magazine in my university’s large periodical room. When I traveled, I brought along a separate bag of journals to read on the plane or in the hotel room. Meanwhile the series editor sent me weekly packets of poems that had caught his attention. I initially wondered if David Lehman might want to press his suggestions. He is a persuasive advocate for the poetry he loves. Lehman, however, gave me complete editorial autonomy. I told no one outside my family that I had taken on the assignment. I didn’t want to be lobbied by poet friends and acquaintances.

  I’m not sure how many thousands of poems I read. I surely broke the five-digit mark. Every time a poem grabbed my attention, I earmarked it or printed it out for rereading. My studio became a mountain range of periodicals, printouts, and photocopies. The most interesting part of the process was rereading and comparing the hundreds of poems that had made the first cut. Week after week I read and sorted the poems into three scientific categories—Yes, No, Maybe. After much agonizing, I made the final selections.

  Every editor has an agenda. I had two main goals. The first was to include the broadest variety of poems possible. American poetry is a wildly inclusive enterprise, full of innovations, continuities, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies. If one doesn’t capture the diversity of style, theme, and perspective, the editor isn’t doing a good job. I wanted long poems, short poems, lyrics, narratives, visions, satires, prayers, rants, protests, confessions, and collages. I wanted sonnets to sit next to prose poems, light verse to cohabit with elegies.

  I did face one practical limit. The present volume focuses on forms of poetry that can be reproduced on the printed page in standard type. I would have liked to include some spoken poetry and hip-hop, but those auditory and performative modes lose impact when transcribed. To present them effectively would require electronic reproduction, which is beyond the scope of the book.

  I also wanted to represent the social complexity of the country. There may never have been so many races, cultures, religions, and lifestyles coexisting, conflicting, and often merging as in America today. That myriad of perspectives needed to be reflected. I also wanted to capture our poetry’s regional variety. If The Best American Poetry doesn’t have a national perspective, it isn’t being true to its ambitious title. New York City remains the nation’s literary capital, but it exercises no monopoly on poetic excellence. MFA programs have spread writers across the country. Strong regional centers, supported by powerful institutions such as the Library of Congress or the Poetry Foundation, have emerged in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston. There are fine writers everywhere.

  My second goal was to include only poems that evoked a deep personal response. The sort of response might vary—wonder, delight, terror, fascination, gratitude. My taste is not perfect, but it is all I have to register the human effect of a poem. I see too many anthologies in which editors include the things that they are supposed to like. The books feel joyless and antiseptic. For me, the essence of poetry is an individual voice speaking to an individual reader. I didn’t want to lose that subjectivity or intimacy. The poems in this book were chosen by a person, not by a committee.

  If you spend a year of your finite life reading thousands of new poems, it is impossible to convey the thoughts and emotions you experience. The impact of this daily rhythm is too intense, frustrating, amazing, indulgent—too everything. Poems trigger emotions, ideas, and memories. You notice strange things. You change your opinions. You get great flashes of insight that you can’t remember the next morning. To describe the process would require a book-length journal, but that book would be more about the reader than the poems. Instead, I made notes about the poems. Here are a few basic things I noticed—not just about the poems in the book but the larger body of new work I read.

  First, a few words about style because the news is so positive. We have now decisively entered the Cole Porter period of American poetry—anything goes. The poetry wars of the late twentieth century have been forgotten. Form and free verse are no longer viewed as mutually exclusive techniques. A benevolent sanity prevails in which poets seem free to write in whatever way inspiration suggests. I was pleased to see individual writers publish work in widely different styles, sometimes even in the same issue of a journal. Free verse remains the dominant mode, but rhyme and meter are widely used again, often in ways that imitate hip-hop. Prose poems still make a strong showing. The haiku tradition continues to thrive, though mostly in its own subculture. My biggest surprise was the surge in sonnets. I had not expected to find so many, often in such unlikely places and written by poets not usually associated with form. It was a pleasure to turn the pages of a journal and not know what to expect next.

  I was interested in what poets wrote about. Had the themes and subjects changed much in recent years? It wasn’t always what I expected. American poetry remains very autobiographical—no surprise there. The most common subject in the thousands of poems I read was “Family.” Today’s poets still deeply identify themselves with their personal origins, whether those domestic sources were happy or sad.

  The next most common subject was also autobiographical—“Childhood and Adolescence,” which, of course, overlaps with “Family.” Then came “Love,” which often took the form of describing early sexual experience with its manifold discoveries and disappointments. Then came my big surprise. The fourth most common topic was “Poetry.” I couldn’t believe how many poems I read about poetry, poets, teaching poetry, or being a poet. I suspect that the subject’s ubiquity came from equal parts of anxiety and fascination. Defining what it means to be a poet in a society that doesn’t give poets an established place clearly preoccupies American writers. Poets feel a need to explore and articulate their artistic identities.

  The top five themes were rounded out—naturally—by “Nature,” though it might be more accurate to say “Nature and the Environment.” I had expected to see more political poetry. (There was, of course, a time lag in effect: most of the poems I read had been written before the last presidential election.) I realized, however, that the nature poem had become the major vehicle for political meditation and protest. The bright innocence of Walt Whitman’s American Eden has been overtaken by Robinson Jeffers’s dark prophesy of rapacious modern civilization. The natural world is no longer a secure source of joy and renewal for poets; it is a matrix of anxiety about human despoliation and ecological apocalypse. The text may be nature, but the subtext is environmental disaster.

  If nature poetry has become a medium for public politics, then Family, Childhood, Love, and Poetry were also often vehicles to explore the politics of personal identity. In a nation where individual writers no longer feel confident they will be heard, personal politics has overtaken civic politics as the main mode of protest poetry. To assert the right to one’s own voice and values has become a form of dissent. What better medium than poetry to insist on the voice of the individual?

  Those were a few things I noticed. I probably missed the biggest trend. How do you measure something that won’t hold still? American poetry is now so large, complex, and dynamic that no one can
accurately describe it. At least I can’t. I gave it my best for twelve months. Now my job is to get out of the way, and let seventy-five other poets do the talking.

  ALLISON ADAIR

  * * *

  Miscarriage

  The colors are off. Muted, like a confession.

  That’s what drew me to it, this rug

  in the middle of my living

  room floor. I found it enchanting.

  We’d lost our first

  to moths—what could we do?

  It was their season.

  I didn’t know how to save things.

  This one would be different.

  Woven into the pattern were women

  facing one another, each passing

  a small, blurry object to the next. I was

  determined to take better care this time—

  swept and scrubbed, tried

  to comb out of the fibers anything wrong, unnatural.

  The wood planks bowed as I worked.

  But something had already laid its eggs

  in a place I couldn’t reach.

  The women in the carpet looked away

  as if they knew what they’d come to deliver.

  from Southwest Review

  KAVEH AKBAR

  * * *

  Against Dying

  if the body is just a parable

  about the body if breath

  is a leash to hold the mind

  then staying alive should be

  easier than it is most sick

  things become dead things

  at twenty-four my liver was