The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry series consists of books annually published, each with poems from 75 authors who, in the opinion of the guest editors, represent the best American poetry published in a 12-month period.

The series continues to be "one of the most popular and best-selling poetry books published each year", according to an article on the Academy of American Poets Web site.

The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman with the inaugural 1988 edition, has a different guest editor every year, usually a major poet. Lehman, still the general editor of the series, contributes a "state-of-poetry" foreword, and each year's guest editor also contributes an introduction. The book titles in the series always follow the format of the first, changing only the year: "The Best American Poetry 1988".

Another annual anthology presenting American poetry without any further specialization is the Pushcart series, which also anthologizes the year's short stories and essays. Two differences with the Best American series are that Pushcart anthologies carry fewer poems and all are from small presses.

A compendium for the first decade of the series has also been published, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, guest edited by literary critic Harold Bloom, who selected what he regarded as the 75 best poems from the previous 10 anthologies. Bloom criticized the 1996 issue of the series, with poems compiled by guest editor Adrienne Rich, and he did not include any of Rich's selections in Best of the Best, although Lehman disagreed with that decision . Bloom claimed that Rich had selected poems based on the "race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet" rather than on aesthetic merit . Lehman said a number of Rich's selections would have met Bloom's criteria .

Rules and process

In his foreword to the first book in the series, in 1988, Lehman laid out these rules for the series, which John Ashbery helped him develop:

• Lehman would select a prominent poet each year as guest editor
• Each year's new guest editor would select the poems
• Each year's anthology would have poems from the previous calendar year (the 1988 anthology, for example, would include poems published in 1987)
• There would be 50 to 75 poems in each annual anthology (in fact, there have always been 75 poems)
• The guest editor could select as many as three poems by an individual poet (in fact, extremely few poets have appeared more than once in the same year through the 2006 edition)
• Poets are asked to submit brief biographical information and, at their option, they may write a bit about the poem chosen ("its form or its occasion or the method of composition or any other feature worth remarking on" — page x), but this is entirely optional.
• The poems could come from magazines, including large circulation periodicals and small presses, and even books by individual poets
• For poems that appeared in the past but were reprinted in a magazine during the previous calendar year, Lehman decided to have no rule: "To such questions, the anthologist's ever-ready response is: you just play it by ear."
• Foreign poets residing in the United States, "especially in cases where the poet has come to seem a vital presence in a particular American community" are eligible to appear, and so John Ash, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott all made it into the 1988 edition.

Lehman wrote that he set some tasks for himself as general editor:

• Maintain continuity from year to year
• Enforcing "such rules as there are"
• Help the guest editor, in particular by helping find poetry for the guest editor to look over
• Pick the guest editor

In Lehman's foreword to the 1992 book, he noted that translations are ineligible.

In 2001, guest editor Robert Hass gave some additional insight into the editorial process for the series, noting, in his introductory essay, that he received "boxes...[of] xeroxes and notations of the indefatigable David Lehman....I had marked for rereading a couple of hundred poems [myself] and I had David's sometimes overlapping lists..." [2].

Lehman has indicated on repeated occasions that excellence is the only criteria for selection for Best American Poetry. Some of the poets whom Lehman has acknowledged for their useful suggestions have had their poetry selected for inclusion in individual volumes of the series. Four guest editors of the series have found that their own or David Lehman's family members poems meet their standards of excellence for inclusion in the anthology. In 1989, Donald Hall selected a poem by his wife Jane Kenyon [3]; in 1990, Jorie Graham selected a poem by her then-husband James Galvin [4]; in 2001, Robert Hass selected a poem by his wife Brenda Hillman [5]; and in 2005, Paul Muldoon selected Stacey Harwood, Lehman's wife, for inclusion in his volume.[6]

Guest editors

Many major contemporary poets have served as guest editors of the series:

• 2007: Heather McHugh
• 2006: Billy Collins
• 2005: Paul Muldoon
• 2004: Lyn Hejinian
• 2003: Yusef Komunyakaa
• 2002: Robert Creeley
• 2001: Robert Hass

• 2000: Rita Dove
• 1999: Robert Bly
• 1998: John Hollander
• Best of the Best: '88-'97: Harold Bloom
• 1997: James Tate
• 1996: Adrienne Rich
• 1995: Richard Howard

• 1994: A. R. Ammons
• 1993: Louise Glück
• 1992: Charles Simic
• 1991: Mark Strand
• 1990: Jorie Graham
• 1989: Donald Hall
• 1988: John Ashbery

Critical reception of the series

According to an article on the Academy of American Poets Web site, "these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry" and to "provide a bird's-eye view of the breadth of American poetry."

Literary critic Joan Houlihan, in an essay entitled "How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem," criticized Series Editor David Lehman for "operating in another world, a world where his anthology series has a kinship with those of Louis Untermeyer or Oscar Williams...even as [2004 guest editor Lyn] Hejinian insists in her introduction, there is no real 'best,' Lehman maintains in his that an anthology inevitably represents a selection process of some kind..." [7]. In the same essay, Houlihan questions whether "it [would] have been more ethical" for a guest editor who "admits her reservations about taking on the responsibility for making choices given she doesn't think there is such a thing as 'best'" to refuse to participate in guest-editing a volume of the series rather than become complicit in its project. Hejinian herself noted, in her introduction to the 2004 edition of the series, "Initially I had qualms about taking on the editorship. My problem was simple and, going by what the editors of some of the previous volumes in this series have said in their own introductions, it seems to have vexed many of us. I don't believe in 'bestness'" Hijinian concluded with a reference to poet Jack Spicer's statement that "'poems should echo and reecho against each other'. .It is precisely that kind of "bestness"-- the common good of being lively--that I hope this volume . . . celebrates." [8].

Writing for The Constant Critic, literary critic Ray McDaniel has opined that the selection process employed for Best American Poetry 2006 was "indisputably bullshit...bullshit in its Platonic form, the quintessence of bullshit, the mold from which all lesser expressions of bullshit are cast....[t]he problem, however, is not the bullshit itself, but the consequence of the bullshit for the poems unfortunate enough to meet [2006 guest editor Billy] Collins's criteria, some of which are good, and don't deserve to be esteemed by Collins..." [9]. McDaniel further decried what he called "Lehman's filter," the "substance" of which, he noted, is unclear.

External links

• [10] Best American Poetry series Web site