by David Lehman
Praise for The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
—Robert Pinsky
“The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman’s ‘state-of-poetry’ forewords and the guest editors’ introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
—Academy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness . . . in all of these volumes . . . there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
—The Villager
“A year’s worth of the very best!”
—People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
—Booklist
“Certainly it attests to poetry’s continuing vitality.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
—The Washington Post
“For the small community of American poets, The Best American Poetry is the Michelin Guide, the Reader’s Digest, and the Prix Goncourt.”
—L’Observateur
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David Lehman was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return from England. His recent and forthcoming publications include Playlist (Pittsburgh, 2019), One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press, 2019), and Poems in the Manner Of (Scribner, 2017). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. He has also written books about murder mysteries, the case of Paul de Man, the New York School of poets, and Frank Sinatra. A contributing editor of The American Scholar, he edits the journal’s weekly online feature “Next Line, Please.” Lehman lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
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by David Lehman
In The Unquiet Grave, his book of pensées in the manner of Pascal, Cyril Connolly has a line that in its form may be the prose equivalent of a two-line imagist poem. “Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.” Connolly wrote the line in 1945, but you can still hear that snarl today. Ubiquitous instruments of social media make it easy for anyone to pop off, get attention, air grievances, join the mob. While there is little enough criticism in the traditional sense, there is a tremendous amount of rage, and it fuels a censorious impulse that spells trouble for writers, publishers, believers in free speech, and readers of works that get denounced for one reason or another and then get pulled off the shelves.
The mob struck often in 2018. Certain radio stations, bowing to pressure, refused to air “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the classic duet and holiday favorite that won an Academy Award for Frank Loesser in 1949. Recorded by such redoubtable duos as Betty Carter and Ray Charles, Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer, the song is a long good-bye as on a balcony in Verona, only our Romeo begs for five minutes more and Juliet doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no.1 The preceding sentence alludes to a play and two classic American popular songs for the reason that the predicament of girl fending off beseeching boy at the door is a show-biz tradition.2 The offense: the song—courtly by the standards of some popular songs today—can be construed not as the clever repartee of a persistent suitor and an ambivalent lady, but as a melodrama in which the villain will stop at nothing to take advantage of the damsel in distress. This is a nutty argument, reminiscent of the inattentive college student who somehow got the idea that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner describes a journey to a honey-sweet land of charm and romance.
The distinguished First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams deplored what he called the “self-abasing decisions” made by important publications.3 Three such stood out for him. The New Yorker invited Trump crony Steve Bannon to take part in a discussion, where you may be quite sure that he would have been raked over the coals by moderator and audience. But the magazine felt compelled to withdraw the invitation, because of Bannon’s right-wing views. More grievous was the case of Ian Buruma, who lost his job as editor of The New York Review of Books, because he published a mediocre and arguably repellent article by a man with a history of sexual harassment. “Reflections from a Hashtag” by former CBC radio broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi reeked of puffed-up self-pity, but that’s not what caused an outrage. What irked people was the very fact that the paper was giving a hearing to the disgraced broadcaster. Staffers grumbled that the decision to publish the piece was made against their wishes. Social media magnified the furor. “Now let it work,” Mark Antony said after firing up the crowd in Julius Caesar. “Mischief, thou art afoot.”
According to Buruma, a cabal of university presses, without whose advertising dollars the paper could not long survive, threatened a boycott. And the magazine that had once instructed readers on how to make a Molotov cocktail—the magazine that prided itself on printing fiery exchanges of in-your-face letters from angry readers and unrepentant writers—fired its top editor, a New York Review contributor since 1985. I was “convicted on Twitter,” Buruma said.4
In midsummer 2018 a poem in the pages of The Nation spurred an angry backlash and a craven apology. “How To” by Anders Carlson-Wee used Black English for a monologue from an apparently homeless person asking for a handout. When it transpired that the author was white, a Twitter firestorm erupted in protest of the writer’s appropriation of a black person’s voice. The criticism, shrill and shaming, had its intended effect. The poetry coeditors of the magazine apologized, as did the author. So much for the tradition of editorial independence. So much for the habit of standing behind what you have published and welcoming letters to the editor in protest or support. Longtime Nation columnist Katha Pollitt voiced her dismay on Facebook: “So embarrassing! The poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Gimenez Smith, liked the poem enough to publish it, which means they read it many times and did not see problems, but when challenged by the twitter mob they folded and sent themselves to reeducation camp. Now the whole magazine looks ridiculous. Thanks a lot!”
We who work on The Best American Poetry are familiar with such controversies. For all we know, it is possible that something in this edition of The Best American Poetry may raise hackles. We don’t anticipate that, but even if we did, I like to think that we would stick to our guns
as we offer the seventy-five poems that Major Jackson, our editor, has chosen as representative of the best poetry getting written today. I advocate making bold statements, offering no apologies, and leaving it up to others to mount arguments in favor of, or against, poems that are their own best defense.
Major Jackson is one of the foremost poets of his generation, and a natural choice to make the selections for The Best American Poetry 2019. As we headed into production, I asked Major how the experience affected him. “Most of my free time was spent reading to the 10th power,” he said, balancing this activity with work on his own manuscript in progress, The Absurd Man. “I’d find myself tinkering on old poems (or yes, starting a new poem) after having imbibed on the verbal richness of others almost like having eaten a can of Popeye’s spinach.” In his own poems he felt pushed, he added, toward “great pockets of humor, if not a lyricism that hinted at the issues” facing us as a society. To the pessimists among us, Major has a succinct credo: “Poetry, like all art, never goes out of fashion. The will and spirit to represent our inner states and outer truth never dies. Humankind, as historians and scientists have observed, has continually sought new forms to reflect the changing shape of our existence. What waxes and wanes is our willingness to hear each other, to give each other a reading.” To do that is exactly the mission of this book.
Pessimism is perennial. In September 2018, the poet Sally Ashton told me of a discovery she made in the stacks of the San José State University library: a 1926 anthology of American poetry in thirteen volumes edited by Edwin Markham, author of “The Man with the Hoe,” a poem that achieved great popularity and raised the general awareness of the plight of laborers. Markham began his introduction to the anthology with these sentences that push back against the naysayers:
Certain critics are saying that poetry is doomed to perish, to be sponged out by the hand of science. As well say that poetry will obliterate science, for each stands on its own ground, separate and secure, coequal, eternal, like Jungfrau and Matterhorn. Others, again, are saying that the world of poetry has been exhausted by the poets themselves—that nothing new is left to see or to say. But these, too, are idle words.
Substitute “technology” for “science” in this formulation and what remains is robust confidence. Do poets today have that confidence? Does the image of a great Alpine mountain, firmly fixed, with a wide base to accommodate the many and an apex to signify hierarchy, still apply to American poetry today? Has there been an abatement of the feeling that “nothing new is left to see or to say,” or is “make it new” an imperative that now does more harm than good? And do people who believe that poetry is “doomed to perish” realize that this prediction is as worn and threadbare as it is?
As the editor of The Best American Poetry 1989, Donald Hall addressed these questions in his introduction, which appeared in Harper’s bearing the headline “Death to the Death of Poetry.” It may well be the single best riposte to the biannual magazine article predicting the demise of poetry and verse. Why, he asks, do so many people connected with poetry wonder whether we’re fighting for a last cause? “The pursuit of failure and humiliation is part of it,” Don wrote. But poetry, he added, is the victim of its surprise success. With the acceptance of creative writing as a popular part of the curriculum, more and more people write poems, some of these get published, and “ninety percent are doubtless terrible. (Shall we require capital punishment?) Because more poems than ever are written, doubtless more bad poems are written and printed. Amen.”
Lionhearted Don died last year at the age of eighty-nine. He was a mentor and a model for me. A beloved professor at the University of Michigan, he gave up a coveted appointment (with tenure and all its perks) in exchange for a life of jeopardy, “forty joyous years of freelance writing,” twenty of them shared with his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. In Eagle Pond Farm, in New Hampshire, Don, an inveterate correspondent, got so much mail—books, magazines, manuscripts, poems, and letters—that for a time the post office assigned him a zip code of his own. He made his living by his pen (literally; Don hired someone else to do his typing for him). He wrote about subjects not strictly literary, tried his hand at a variety of genres (children’s literature, sports journalism), interviewed eminences, explored other arts (sculpture, painting), edited journals and anthologies, wrote textbooks.
Working with Don on BAP 1989 was a wonderful experience—in their differing ways, he and John Ashbery taught me more than anyone else about editing a poetry anthology. Reading for the 1989 book, Don voted for pluralism over purism. In a sentence that I have taken to heart, he wrote that he forced himself “to admit some dead metaphors, maybe even an unscannable line in a metrical poem, and certainly a disgusting line break or two—for the famous sake of the whole . . . although I have wept salt tears over my principled antinomianism.”
In 1994 Don asked me to succeed him as the general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series. As it was Don who invented the series, he and I were its only editors for its first thirty years. A denizen of New Hampshire, Don loved baseball in general, the Boston Red Sox in particular, so when it was my turn to toast him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1998, I turned to the erstwhile national pastime, recalled that the Dodgers had exactly two managers for four decades, and grandly declared that the two of us were “the Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda / of the University of Michigan Press, / and though you and I are not exactly like / either of them, Michigan links us / and we have uniform jackets to prove it.”
Don won many accolades, book prizes, and medals, and was appointed the nation’s poet laureate in 2006. “Poetry is my life,” he wrote in Essays after Eighty (2014)—it was at the vital center of all his activities. He identified himself as a poet even before his student years at Phillips Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford. Some of the finest poems of Don’s late period were chosen for The Best American Poetry: “Prophecy,” “History,” “The Porcelain Couple,” and “Her Garden” among them. With his versatility and energy, he always demonstrated the value of hard work in one’s poetic practice. The title of Life Work, his 1993 memoir, sums up in two words the moral imperative that work represented for Hall. He revised incessantly, always believing that a better draft lay ahead. “Some of these essays took more than eighty drafts,” he tells us in Essays after Eighty, a title with a concealed double meaning.
Provocative, fearless, Hall warned against the “Workshop Poem, McPoem, Clone-Poem, or Standard American Poem” in the 1980s, and surely we still suffer from the mass-produced “product of the workshop, a poem identically cooked from coast to coast.” Aspiring poets who wish to write prose would do well to observe Don’s strictures: “Don’t begin paragraphs with ‘I.’ ” “Avoid ‘me’ and ‘my’ when you can.” “Do not commit dead metaphors.” “Overuse or misuse of adjectives and adverbs makes prose weak and lethargic.” “When we hope to persuade, we should pay court to the opposition.”5 In his essays he wrote what I call exclamation-point sentences, sentences next to which I place an exclamation point in the margin. In “Thank You Thank You,” a 2012 New Yorker essay in which Don muses about the effect of poetry readings on the composition of verse, note in this sequence of sentences how cogent analysis and historical example give way to whimsy, humor, casual insight, and a totally unexpected opinion:
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the out-loud mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performances. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.”6 Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is Paradise Lost.
It’s hard to stop reading at this point, isn’t it? Don’s opinions were exemplary in the sense that they always made you think. And he had generosity of spirit; he felt, as I do, that the warring factions and movements of contemporary poetry can sit down and break bread together.
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br /> To the memory of Donald Hall we dedicate this volume in The Best American Poetry series.
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1. For a more recent interpretation, see the song as performed by Chris Colfer and Darren Criss in the tenth episode of Glee’s second season.
2. “Five Minutes More” (Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn); “She Didn’t Say Yes, She Didn’t Say No” (Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach); the balcony in Verona: Romeo and Juliet.
3. Floyd Abrams, The Wall Street Journal, September 29–30, 2018: “Retreating from, let alone abandoning the intellectual battlefield will only encourage more cries for self-censorship by offended readers. There is simply no excuse for these so often revered publications to comport themselves as if they resided in some sort of cultural re-education camp.”
4. Interviewed in Vrij Nederland, Buruma said this of the Review’s publisher: “No, he did not fire me. But he made clear to me that university publishers, whose advertisements make publication of The New York Review of Books partly possible, were threatening a boycott. They are afraid of the reactions on the campuses, where this is an inflammatory topic. Because of this, I feel forced to resign—in fact it is a capitulation to social media and university presses.” Conor Friedersdorf, “The Journalistic Implications of Ian Buruma’s Resignation,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2018. See also Lionel Shriver, “Easy Chair,” Harper’s, February 2019, pp. 5–7.
5. The first two of these quotations are from Essays After Eighty (Mariner Books), the third from Breakfast Served Any Time All Day (Michigan), the final two from the third edition of Writing Well (Little, Brown).
6. It was actually Robert Creeley who said that “form is never more than an extension of content.” Don’s was an easy mistake to make, as Creeley and Olson were close friends and colleagues; both were associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s, and it was in their correspondence that Olson developed many of his theories on poetics.
