Best American Poetry Blog

“A Milestone Reached” [by Philip Brunst]

Thursday the 19th of April was a special
night for The Best American Poetry and
series editor David Lehman. At the New School’s Tishman Auditorium an all-star
cast of poets celebrated the anthology’s 25th
anniversary with the launch of The
Best of the Best American Poetry, guest
edited by distinguished poet and man of letters, Robert Pinsky.

As Mr. Pinsky noted in his
introductory remarks,The Best American Poetry series, which Mr. Lehman started in 1988, has filled
an important cultural place in society. It acts out what Mr. Pinsky described
as a “significant cultural process,” whereby artists confer recognition upon other artists — a
process of discovery and advocacy responsible for the reputations of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name but two poets who were once overlooked.

The Best of the Best American Poetry is a collection of 100 poems selected from the nearly 2000 already
published in the anthology’s twenty-five-year existence. The LA times called it
an embarrassment
of riches, and the lineup of poets who read on Thursday night was certainly
that. From Richard Howard to Marie Howe to Yusef Komunyakaa, the range and
quality of voices was nothing short of exceptional.

Mark Doty began the evening with
his hypnotic poem “Difference,” which opens with a description of jellyfish
floating in a Massachusetts harbor.

“The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,
 
a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures
these elaborate sacks
 
of nothing?”
                                                           

   — Mark
Doty, “Difference”

 
One of the distinctive qualities of all The Best American
Poetry volumes, readily apparent at book launches, is how different one poem is from the next. The poets read in
alphabetical order and there is an unexpected quality to the event. There are, in rapid order,
sonnets and sestinas, rhymed- and free verse, on subjects ranging from Vietnam to New Mexico.
 
Major Jackson read “Urban Renewal XVI,” his poem selected
for the volume, which is in part a poem of how he came to be named Major.
 
“What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,
who weary after failed attempts to set to memory
names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around
the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:
Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class
after French painters whether boy or girl.”
                                                           
— Major
Jackson, “Urban Renewal XVI”
 
This was followed shortly afterwards by Sarah Manguso’s
prose poem “Hell.”
 
“The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's
slave. Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking
continually of those who were truly great.
 
Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the
fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.”
                                                           
— Sarah
Manguso, “Hell”
 
And then two poets later there was Paul Muldoon with his
alliterative and rhymed poem “The Loaf,” where the poet experiences sensations
through a hole in the wall of his house, built in 1750. 
 
“When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer
switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch
 
with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.
 
When I put my ear to the hole I'm suddenly aware
of spades and shovels turning up the gain
all the way from Raritan to the Delaware
 
with a clink and a clink and a clinkie-click.”
                                                           
— Paul
Muldoon, “The Loaf”
 
In the end the evening highlighted the
seminal, twenty-five-year mark that David Lehman has reached with the now
invaluable Best American Poetry
series as well as the strength of American poetry today.
— Philip Brunst