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The Best American Poetry 2007, Scribner, $16.00

Guest Edited by Heather McHugh

Series Editor, David Lehman

Review by G. Tod Slone

Lost in Verbosity

The Best American Poetry, a series anthology edited by David Lehman, is probably the most embarrassing annual anthology in existence.  Reading through the 2007 edition, guest edited by Heather McHugh, it is impossible for me not to laugh out loud periodically, not because of intentional poet humor, but because of the amazing banality of the highlighted poetry.  The first verse of Landis Everson’s “Lemon Tree,” published in The American Poetry Review, serves not as a particularly egregious example but as a sadly common one: 

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden

a tree of innocence called

the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless

Surely, Everson, whose bio notes John Ashbury as an old friend (it’s not what you write, it’s who you know, stupid!), must have something better to do like standing in his garden digging holes to airate the soil.  In this volume, one will find anything but what could intelligently be considered the “best.”  Indeed, so many of its “best” poems illustrate convincingly that embarrassing point. Cite, for example, the first verse of “Scumble,” published in American Poet, by professor Rae Armantrout

what if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as ‘scumble,’ “pinky,”

or “extrapolate”? 

Who would want to read more of that poem, who with the exception of Armantrout students drooling for a letter of recommendation?  Cite also the first verse in Nicky Beer’s “Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions,” published in Beloit Poetry Journal: 

So what are you working on these days?

A metaphor machine.

Cite the first verse of Christian Bok’s “Vowels,” published in New American Writing:

Loveless vessels

we vow

solo love

we see

love solve loss

As an editor, I would have thrown those poems out immediately.  Who has time to read past such trivial first verses?  Well, the professor poet editors of this volume apparently do.  By the way, any particularly weak poems, including those cited above, are necessarily fair game since the author-poets will surely be boasting on their resumes of having appeared in this perhaps most “prestigious” annual anthology published by the established-order literary milieu in America.  (Sadly, if not conveniently, the nation’s MFA professor poets don’t seem to be teaching students to question and challenge the concept of literary “prestige” or canon.)  Rather than “Best American Poetry,” perhaps “Most Cutesy American Poetry” would have been more appropriate and in that sense, who could argue against the inclusion of Russel Edson’s poem, “See Jack,” as in Look Jack, look, hear comes Spot?

Any number of positions: see Jack sleep.  See Jack up and pacing.

Any number of cups raised, emptied and lowered any number of

times.  See Jack drinking coffee.

[…]

See Jack dead, modified by an objective complement.

Where’s Jane?

How about the next poem in the volume, “Etudes,” published in the tiny by Elaine Equi.  No doubt, a vaguely hidden wit must be embedded in it somewhere, but who wants to hunt for it? 

Autumn is a solitude.

Winter is a fortitude.

Spring is an altitude.

Summer is an attitude.

[two more similar verses]

Winter is a beatitude.

Spring is a platitude.

Summer is a verisimilitude.

Autumn is a semi-nude.

By the way, the review I wrote for the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry was actually published by Rattle, though not in the magazine, only on its website.  Subsequently, however, I had the literary audacity to send Rattle an unflattering review of Rattle, which, of course, was not published on its website.  Evidently, Rattle will not be publishing this review (one of the poems it published appears in this volume of the “best”), though I shall send it on to prove the point.  Citizen responsibility pushes me to write reviews such as this one because the established-order literary milieu tends to reject questioning and challenging with its regard and any other such attempt to instigate vigorous debate.  Moreover, that milieu seems to be indoctrinating citizen/students into believing that somehow the “best” is an objective decision, as is the canon.  Also, I write the review in the hope of attracting that rare unindoctrinated student somewhere out there in the nation sitting in a deadly boring English class.  Indeed, I did receive an email from such a student, Richard Vargas: 

just read your review of the Best Poetry of 2006, or whatever they call it. i agree with you. in fact, i'm using it as a sample review for one of the classes i'm taking at univ new mexico MFA program. i'm sure it will hit a nerve here and there. i was wondering, did you get any feedback? did any of the poets fire back? i bought their 10th anniversary issue (used) edited by harold bloom. what a crock of shit. glad i didn't pay full price. good luck. 

Needless to say, not one poet criticized in that review ever “fired back.”  Vigorous debate, cornerstone of any thriving democracy, is not exactly encouraged, as mentioned, by the established-order literary milieu. 

What if the poetry written today in America was, in fact, simply not that good, perhaps because so much of it was being written from places of comfort by poets securely cocooned in comfort?  Both editors of this “best” edition live in such comfort, as professors with life-time job security.  Should we not therefore expect them to select poems apt to please the comfortable academic crowd and certainly not apt to offend or otherwise upset it via questioning and challenging?  That was my hypothesis, prior to reading the volume.  It was also my hypothesis that few if any poems at all in this volume would actually risk upsetting the poet-author’s comfort realm.  With that regard, think of poets Villon, Saro-Wiwa, Mandelstam, Niemöller, Neruda, and Rivero.  In addition, it is important to hold the egregiously pretentious, self-proclaimed “best” editors accountable. In today’s university, accountability has all but vanished.  Indeed, academics like Lehman and McHugh can simply proclaim “best” without any concern of being questioned within that milieu.  After all, who within it would ever challenge it? 

On the front cover of the anthology, the Chicago Tribune trumpets, anonymously, “A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”  How original, right?!  But why not skip the hackneyed, mind-numbing, two-thumbs-up blurb?  The series has been around long enough (since 1988).  The cover is bright and yellowy colorful, though with a rather innocuous pop-art, Warhol/Picasso-like sketch of a blond woman, tear in eye, beach ball in the sky, and one nipple next to a floppy flying breast with the sun resting upon it.  Why the innocuousness?  Should/must sketches on the covers of poetry books and journals be thusly inoffensive?  Why not have a meaningful “best” sketch on the front cover instead? 

The “forward” to this volume, presented by series editor Lehman, is an essay on the parodying of famous poems.  In it, however, Lehman manages to present a vague, subjective definition of the “exceptionally high criteria” used in the selection process.  He explains that the poem has a “complicated cultural status: revered, iconic, but also mildly desecrated, like a public statue exposed to pigeons and graffiti artists,” but that the “exceptionally high” poem must also be “somehow antidotal to malice and vice, cruelty and wrath” and “shoulder the burden of conscience.”  And in order for one to be considered an “exceptionally high” poet, ones “first obligation is to always give pleasure” (Lehman paraphrasing Wordsworth).  “Comic spirit” is thus the chief criteria.  “Some of these poems are very funny, and need no further justification,” notes Lehman as if “funny” is somehow an objective trait.  Personally, I didn’t find any of them funny.  Not one!  Yes, that must surely eliminate me as an “exceptionally high” reader.  Lehman also cites a Simpsons’ episode.  Laugh thus seems to constitute his odd, if not aberrant, definition of “best.”  Just the same, he notes that the selected poets in this volume are “unafraid to confront the world.”  But are they unafraid to confront the world when such confrontation might be risky to their poet careers?  We all know the answer to that, right? 

As for the guest editor of this edition, McHugh is, according to the back cover, “author of numerous books of poetry.”  That little note seems to reflect what is important today for the poet:  mass production, mass publication, and of course the resume, as opposed “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson).  McHugh’s brief introductory essay seems more like an essay in the art of obfuscation and high-brow script (i.e., the art of saying not much at all in a cloud of pedantic verbosity), as opposed to one introducing this year’s “bestov, schmestov,” in her words.  “Half-spoken’s a broken wheel,” she notes.  “The music rides home on music.  Poetry cares for the means of the meaning business.”  Yeah, tell me about it, baby.  Tell me why the poems you’ve chosen for this volume seem anything but “thunderstruck, wonderstruck.”  McHugh seems like she’s writing/campaigning to become the next official U.S. poet laureate spokesperson hyper-inflator of the social value of disengaged poetry.  But all her glorifying yap about the genre’s supposed grandeur will not convince an intelligent person.  What will convince, one way or the other, are the poems she’s collected in this volume.

For McHugh, the definition of “exceptionally high” corresponds with Lehman’s: “[…] the is in the wish, the or in the word. No word-fun should be left undone.”  “Word-fun” is, however, the key to “public pap,” a term she uses to describe the fate of Romanticism today.  It is the key to rendering poetry as something that does not matter and poets as courtjesters.  “So much contemporary American poetry is deadly serious […],” complains McHugh.  “Against the tedium, a little unholiness comes as a big relief—the skeptic skeleton, the romping rump.”  But what about McHugh’s tedium?  Would she be accepting of a little “unholiness” with that regard?  Would she be accepting of my “romping rump,” regarding the uncanny amount of flaming hot air in her prose, as in “And words can blaze—most brightly where (like fires) their logs are interlaid with airs. They can flow—or flock—or fluster!”? 

By the way, a few months prior to my examining this volume, I was actually being interviewed by one of its selected poets, Louis E. Bourgeois, for Vox, which he co-edits.  Then, midway through the interview (Bourgeois had expressed a surprising interest in my antipathy towards academics), something occurred:  total silence.  Bourgeois simply stopped mid-interview, leaving me wondering if somebody might have indicated to him that publishing an interview with me might prove damaging to his poet career.  Needless to say, Bourgeois’ poem, “A Voice from the City,” published in Sentence, is as riskless and as distant from the poet’s own experience as it gets, illustrating that perhaps the age-old writer’s wisdom of “write what you know” has been replaced, at least in the established-order literary milieu, by “write what you don’t know because what you know isn’t worth writing about.”  Indeed, if academic poets were to write about what they know (Bourgeois is a professor), they’d be writing about life in the academic cocoon.  In Bourgeois’ own words, that poem is his “first attempt at writing a surrealist poem in the context of a historical event.”  It represents just the type of writing task one might expect from the “first graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program in creative writing.”  But the “best”?

The poets in this volume appear alphabetically in an evident effort to eliminate the thought that the first appearing might be the “best” of the “best,” as if somehow that wouldn’t be desirable, as if the “best” must somehow be equally the “best.”  Jeannette Allée’s poem, “Crimble of Staines,” published in Field, illustrates how wordplay in the minds of the “best” selectors is so much more important than meaning, passion, and engagement.  The poem begins as follows: 

You’re back with motherbickered

England dumb with brick

& viper typists.

Such organized fear: rigidity as fetish

Sphincter sphunct filthiness in wainscoted ways.”  I give up. 

Well, I also give up.  One by one, I read through the poems, discovering that one by one it appeared the poets had no songs of passion, no songs of personal battle, personal struggle, personal engagement against the “machine,” as in “let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau).  Perhaps the “machine” had simply been too nice to them.  For many, if not most of the poets, like Allée, the “word” served to obfuscate, as opposed to communicate.  Their poems served to illustrate the common sentiment that modern poetry had become irrelevant to modern life, that it had become but intellectual fancy, wit, and, of course, fun… while the dollar tumbled, inflation soared, war bombs blew up, and the politicians slept as usual with the corporations.  With regards irrelevance, ex-poet laureate of the U.S. Congress Billy Collins is perhaps exemplary.  In his poem, “The News Today,” published in Bookforum, he uses the word “motherfucker,” proving that a famous poet can do so in a poem and have the poem declared “best.”  The last lines read as follows

And so I hail you Catullus

across the wide, open waters of literature,

you nasty motherfucker, you flaming Roman prick.

Several pages further into the volume, Linh Dinh seems to relish in Collins’ groundbreaking with a four-letter word rant at the end of his “A Super-Clean Country,” published in New American Writing: 

Holy shit, that shit’s wack.

She thinks she’s hot shit but she ain’t dogshit.

There’s nothing but shit on the Internet.

Why are you so hung up on shit like that?

I got some good shit at home, some far-out shit.

You’re so full of shit, you dumbshit motherfucker.

How can one not be utterly dumbfounded that two professor poet editors found that poem to be “exceptionally high”?  Indeed, with all the “shit” happening in America today, Dinh seems in desperate need to connect with a piece of concrete “shit” to get his “shitass” engaged in a little risk taking. 

Astonishingly, a banal love poem, “Valentine for You,” published in Crazyhorse and authored by dead-professor-poet Robert Creeley appears.  Can Creeley actually be writing as a corpse poet today, a writing beaver unable to stop even in death?  Nearly every first verse in this volume would be enough to kill a thinking student’s interest in poetry.  Cite Helen Ransom Forman’s “Daily,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review. 

Daily we match, two scrappy parlor pets

Feinting in some established glee; your tall

Coming from the dark into our hall

Commences a short bit of flirts and frets.

Laugh out loud I do upon reading the first verse of ex-poet laureate of the U.S. Congress Louise Glück’s “Archaic Fragment,” published in Poetry: 

I was trying to love matter. 

I taped a sign over the mirror:

You cannot hate matter and love form.

            One could feel, I suppose, pity for professor poet Glück bored to death in her wainscoted office at Williams College, bored enough to write that poem.  Ah, so you think there must be something more! 

It was a beautiful day, though cold.

This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture.

………..your poem:

tried, but could not.

And blablabla it goes!  Another ex-poet laureate of the U.S. Congress, Donald Hall, presents an equally banal “best” poem, “The Master,” published in The American Poetry Review: 

Where the poet stops, the poem

begins.  The poem asks only

that the poet get out of the way.

The poem empties itself

in order to fill itself up.

And blablabla it goes.  Evidently, though not explicitly, badges and names help a poem rise to the “exceptionally high” category, no matter how low it might actually be.  “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions,” had stated Emerson, quite accurately.  Yet another ex-poet laureate of the U. S. Congress, Robert Pinsky, presents a “best” poem, “Louie, Louie,” also published in The American Poetry Review.  The first stanza is as follows: 

 I have heard of Black Irish, but I never

But I never heard of White Catholic or White Jew.

I have heard of “Is Poetry Popular?” but I

Never heard of Lawrence Welk Drove

Sid Caesar Off Television.

A true genius, right?  If you don’t believe it, check out his “Stupid Meditation on Peace,” appearing also in this volume, published in The New Yorker.  Well, if it’s not better, perhaps it’s stupider.

 Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,

Symbol not only of peace but sexual

Love, the couple nestled and brooding.

After coupling, the human animal needs

The woman safe for nine months and more.

But the man after his turbulent minute or two

Yet another ex-poet laureate of the US Congress, Robert Hass, pens a four-page poem, “Bush’s War,” published in The American Poetry Review.  The title heartens me a tad, though I’d much rather see Hass manifest the guts to criticize in a poem the poetry and academic established-order celebrating him ad nauseum.  After all, that order’s status quo is really a vote for the Bush status-quo.  I read and read, then give up.  The following first lines explain why:   

I typed the brief phrase, “Bush’s War,”

At the top of a sheet of white paper

Having some dim intuition of a poem

Made luminous by reason that would,

Though I did not have them at hand,

Set the facts out in an orderly way.

Berlin is a northerly city.  In May

At the end of the Twentieth Century

In the leafy precincts of Dahlem Dorf,

South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,

Spring is northerly; it begins before dawn

In a racket of bird son.  The amsels

Shiver the sun up as if they were shaking

And on and on it goes.  Aren’t they teaching the “hook line” in writer’s classes any more?  In any case, be assured the Academy of American Poets won’t be censoring Hass, Glück, Hall or Pinsky from commenting on its online forums… as it did me (see www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmerican

Poets.htm). The blather in the “best” poetry is truly unfathomable.  It alone would make this volume an important addition to any English 101 class, that is, with the right, risk-taking, truth-speaking, non-career moving professor at the helm.  Cite Milton Kessler’s poem, “Comma of God,” published in Sentence: 

I am nothing compared to the Medicaid sneer

I am nothing compared to the owner of the door

I am nothing compared to the elevator of Heidegger

I am nothing compared to the spokes of Vincent’s Belgian sunflower

I am nothing compared to the Rodin’s least mistress

I am nothing compared to the frames of Hamlet

And on and on it goes for another 25 repetitive lines until the finale:  “I am nothing compared to the comma of God.”  A-mutherfuckin-men!  Ah, now if role-model Billy Collins can use the word, why can’t I?  Cite the first lines of David Rivard’s “exceptionally high” poem “The Rev. Larry Love Is Dead,” published in TriQuarterly: 

He’s dead now,

His balls will

never get itchy

again—

because he’s dead now forever—

Anything goes for a professor like Rivard, anything but having the guts to criticize the free-speech hating colleagues and deans at Tufts University (see www.thefire.org/index.php/case/51.html).  Well, he won’t be getting censored either.  Au contraire, the Academy of American Poets awarded him its “prestigious” James Laughlin Prize!  Ah, so you want more?  Here are the next few lines: 

his hair having been

hennaed free of charge

for one last time

by the Egyptian cosmetologists

at the Style Connection,

there’s no doubt now that he’s dead—

And on and on it goes.  More?  Here’s the ending:

                        […]

the Everlys,

the miscreant pheromone

Sly Stone, Barry White,

of the undulant jherricurls,

and every 6^th or 7^th song

the always early autumn river foam

of tenor Orbison—

why is it the world gets in his way like this?

The first few lines from Natasha Sajé’s “F,” published by Beloit Poetry Journal, are unsurprisingly not much better: 

Firethorn, a trope for

Fucking, which people talk entirely too much about, the

Flurry of phonemes a substitute,

Foucault would say, I’m beginning to be

The first few lines from Alan Shapiro’s “Country Western Singer,” published by Virginia Quarterly Review, are similar in their, by now, predictable triteness: 

I used to feel like a new man

After the day’s first brew.

But then the new man I became

Would need a tall one too.

Should we be at all surprised that Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?  Not at all.  Should we be at all surprised that the nation is in such dire straits today with men like him being labeled “distinguished”?  Not at all.

Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Hide-and-Seek, 1933,” published in Beloit Poetry Journal, is not bad, though one would be hard-pressed to label it “best.”  It is short, clear, a tad poignant, though somewhat banal and predictably disengaged.  Hard-pressed, it actually represents my second choice for the “best” of the “best” in this volume.  The following is the entire poem:   

Once when we were playing

hide-and-seek and it was time

to go home, the rest gave up

on the game before it was done

and forgot I was still hiding.

I remained hidden as a matter

of honor until the moon rose.

One by one, I read through these poems, and verse after verse sadly support my conclusion that this volume is pretty damn bad.  Cite the first lines of Julie Larios’ “What Bee Did,” published in The Cortland Review: 

Bee not only buzzed.

When swatted at, Bee deviled,

Bee smirched.  And when fuddled,

like many of us, Bee labored, Bee reaved.

He behaved as well as any Bee can have.

Cite the first lines of Joanie Mackowski’s “When I was a dinosaur,” published by Pool: 

I was stegosaurus, a.k.a. “armed-roof lizard” with seventeen

Headstones growing from my spine.  And not one brain

Cite the first lines of Gregory Orr’s poem excerpt from his Concerning the Book That Is the Body Beloved, published by Rattle: 

Weeping, weeping, weeping.

No wonder the oceans are full;

No wonder the seas are rising.

Cite the first lines of Chad Parmenter’s “A Tech’s Ode to Genome Computer,” published in The Kenyon Review: 

Charming, how you hammer

human glamour and the hymn everyone sings

to everything into

one