When The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997 came out in Spring 1998, it caused a critical firestorm with much hysteria on the part of reviewers offended not by the poems guest editor Harold Bloom [left] chose for the book, nor by the endeavor of the project, but by Bloom's introduction in which he assails multiculturalism and, in Bloom's opinion, its disastrous effect on poetry. Revisiting the controversy, I tried hard to find a review that discussed the poems in the book. In "Misreadings," a review that appeared in The Boston Book Review, July/August 1998, Dan Chiasson joined the chorus of plaintiffs. Bloom, the critic wrote, "has grown weirder and weirder with every passing year, culminating in 1994's The Western Canon, a giant, necrophiliac put-on of a book, as hokey as a Soiviert military parade"
Most of Chiasson 's review concerns itself with Bloom. The reviewer makes sure we know he lines up with defenders of identity poetics — those who believe, to use his terms, that the ethical takes precedence over the aesthetic. These are redoubtable terms. But what he means, in specific practice, is that "it is a good thing (ethically good) for a lesbian to write a poem about domestic life: growing flowers, raising a family, burying a lover" — regardless of whether the poem has merit as an aesthetic work. It is as if political considerations prevail over all else. The logic is dismal and detrimental to the art form.
What surprised me, as I read over the review, is a paragraph about the project of The Best American Poetry. Chiasson writes, "David Lehman — a tireless advocate for contrmporary poetry, and a fine poet himself — is the series editor, and every year he has handed the reins to a different poet (beginning with John Ashbery in 1988 and ending, in 1997, with James Tate; John Hollander's 1998 edition is forthcoming.) The result has been, every year, a fascinating document: both 'objective,' whatever that means, and idiosyncratic; and if no reader would be likely, lacking the editors' names, to confuse A. R. Ammons's volume with Adrienne Rich's, all the better for poetry."
Moreover, "every poem in the book is more or less impressive." Chiasson has appreciative things to say about the poems by Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop ("the guardian spirit of the whole undertaking"), Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Carl Phillips, Rosanna Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As the reviewer sees it, the best poem in the book is "The Problem of Anxiety" by John Ashbery. There are interesting judgments and observations, such as the notion that the selections from Ammons and Ashbery "give the lie to their self-professed similarity." I disagree with the writer's conclusion, and with the proposed dichotomy between "our poet of the colon" (Ammons) and "a poet of the full-stop" (Ashbery). But the argument is provocative. Too bad you have to read the elaborate condemnation of a caicatured Bloom before you get to the good stuff. — DL