We have decided to end the
Best American Poetry blog on September 30, 2025, the last day that our host, Typepad, shall remain in business.That this outfit is going under signals, perhaps, the decline of blogs in the new Substack era. More to the point, by uncanny and entirely fortuitous timing, we lose our digital venue at the end of the very month when we have officially published and launched the thirty-eighth and last annual volume in an anthology series that began in 1988. The blog commenced twenty years later.
The newsletter we produce and distribute every Saturday morning will also terminate at the end of this month.
This is the moment to thank you, our readers and followers, and to acknowledge with pleasure and pride the creative and invariably inspired work of our contributors. I wish I could guarantee that all our posts will remain accessible on the Internet. We are investigating; our computer people will do their best.
The blog o
f The Best American Poetry has been not only an important adjunct to our books but also a vital forum in its own right. While Typepad keeps imperfect records, we know that since January 2008, we have published nearly 14,000 posts and twice as many comments. Sooner than we expected, our average daily readership rose to 1,500, and on some days — as, for example, when a Frank O'Hara poem was quoted on
Mad Men, and readers were hungry for information about this poet — we received many thousand hits.
Since 1988, when the initial volume of The Best American Poetry was published, we have worked very hard on behalf of American poets and poetry, and we have made a significant difference. We have promoted poets, made them feel validated, given them an audience, joined them with their peers and mentors, discussed and elucidated some of the great poems of the past. We have initiated readers into the mysteries of poetry, and we have introduced to a wider public the most prominent poets of our time. I am proud of the work we have done.
As for myself, the last line of Milton's "Lycidas" applies: "Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 
