The Best American Poetry 2007: Series Editor David Lehman

By David Lehman and Heather McHugh

The twentieth edition of The Best American poetry series celebrates the rich and fertile landscape of American poetry. Renowned poet Heather McHugh loves words and the unexpected places they take you; her own poetry elevates wordplay to a species of metaphysical wit. For this year's anthology McHugh has culled a spectacular group of poems reflecting her passion for language, her acumen, and her vivacious humor.

From the thousands of poems published or posted in one year, McHugh has chosen seventy-five that fully engage the reader while illustrating the formal and tonal diversity of American poetry. With new work by established poets such as Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and Richard Wilbur, The Best American Poetry 2007 also features such younger talents as Ben Lerner, Meghan O'Rourke, Brian Turner, and Matthea Harvey.

Graced with McHugh's fascinating introduction, the anthology includes the ever-popular notes and comments section in which the contributors write about their work. Series editor David Lehman's engaging foreword limns the necessity of poetry. The Best American Poetry 2007 is an exciting addition to a series committed to covering the American poetry scene and delivering great poems to a broad audience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Sep 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9781416568353

Book preview

OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

John Ashbery, editor, The Best American Poetry 1988

Donald Hall, editor, The Best American Poetry 1989

Jorie Graham, editor, The Best American Poetry 1990

Mark Strand, editor, The Best American Poetry 1991

Charles Simic, editor, The Best American Poetry 1992

Louise Glück, editor, The Best American Poetry 1993

A. R. Ammons, editor, The Best American Poetry 1994

Richard Howard, editor, The Best American Poetry 1995

Adrienne Rich, editor, The Best American Poetry 1996

James Tate, editor, The Best American Poetry 1997

Harold Bloom, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997

John Hollander, editor, The Best American Poetry 1998

Robert Bly, editor, The Best American Poetry 1999

Rita Dove, editor, The Best American Poetry 2000

Robert Hass, editor, The Best American Poetry 2001

Robert Creeley, editor, The Best American Poetry 2002

Yusef Komunyakaa, editor, The Best American Poetry 2003

Lyn Hejinian, editor, The Best American Poetry 2004

Paul Muldoon, editor, The Best American Poetry 2005

Billy Collins, editor, The Best American Poetry 2006

SCRIBNER POETRY

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by David Lehman

Foreword copyright © 2007 by David Lehman

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Heather McHugh

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner edition September 2007

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2005049982

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9972-5

eISBN: 978-1-416-56835-3

ISBN-10: 0-7432-9972-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9973-2 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-7432-9973-6 (Pbk)

CONTENTS

Foreword by David Lehman

Introduction by Heather McHugh

Kazim Ali, The Art of Breathing

Jeannette Allée, Crimble of Staines

Rae Armantrout, Scumble

Mary Jo Bang, The Opening

Nicky Beer, Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions

Marvin Bell, The Method

Christian Bök, Vowels

Louis E. Bourgeois, A Voice from the City

Geoffrey Brock, Flesh of John Brown’s Flesh: Dec. 2, 1859

Matthew Byrne, Let Me Count the Ways

Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

Julie Carr, marriage

Michael Collier, Common Flicker

Billy Collins, The News Today

Robert Creeley, Valentine for You

Linh Dinh, Continuous Bullets over Flattened Earth

-----, A Super-Clean Country

Mike Dockins, Dead Critics Society

Sharon Dolin, Tea Lay

Denise Duhamel, Language Police Report

Stephen Dunn, Where He Found Himself

Russell Edson, See Jack

Elaine Equi, Etudes

Landis Everson, Lemon Tree

Thomas Fink, Yinglish Strophes IX

Helen Ransom Forman, Daily

Louise Glück, Archaic Fragment

Albert Goldbarth, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Donald Hall, The Master

Mark Halliday, Best Am Po

Forrest Hamer, Initiation

Matthea Harvey, From The Future of Terror/Terror of the Future Series

Robert Hass, Bush’s War

Jane Hirshfield, Critique of Pure Reason

Daniel Johnson, Do Unto Others

Richard Kenney, Auguries

Milton Kessler, Comma of God

Galway Kinnell, Hide-and-Seek, 1933

David Kirby, Ode to the Personals

Julie Larios, What Bee Did

Brad Leithauser, A Good List

Ben Lerner, From Angle of Yaw

Joanie Mackowski, When I was a dinosaur

Amit Majmudar, By Accident

Sabrina Orah Mark, The 10 Stages of Beatrice

Campbell McGrath, Ode to the Plantar Fascia

Leslie Adrienne Miller, On Leonardo’s Drawings

Marilyn Nelson, Etymology

Ed Ochester, Voltaire at Cirey, 1736

Meghan O’Rourke, Peep Show

Gregory Orr, From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

Danielle Pafunda, Dear Pearce & Pearce, Inc.

Chad Parmenter, A Tech’s Ode to the Genome Computer

Susan Parr, Swooping Actuarial Fauna

-----, Ecstatic Cling

Peter Pereira, Nursemaid’s Elbow

Robert Pinsky, Louie Louie

-----, Stupid Meditation on Peace

David Rivard, The Rev. Larry Love Is Dead

Marya Rosenberg, If I Tell You You’re Beautiful, Will You Report Me?: A West Point Haiku Series

Natasha Sajé, F

Frederick Seidel, The Death of the Shah

Alan Shapiro, Country Western Singer

David Shumate, Drawing Jesus

Carmine Starnino, Money

Brian Turner, What Every Soldier Should Know

Arthur Vogelsang, The Family

Cody Walker, Coulrophobia

Kary Wayson, Flu Song in Spanish

Charles Harper Webb, Big

Joe Wenderoth, The Home of the Brave

Richard Wilbur, From Opposites and More Opposites

George Witte, At Dusk, the Catbird

Theodore Worozbyt, An Experiment

Harriet Zinnes, Remiss Rebut

Contributors’ Notes and Comments

Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published

Acknowledgments

David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999) and The Perfect Murder (Michigan, 2000). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003. He teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City and offers an undergraduate course each fall on Great Poems at NYU. He edited the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman has collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull), and with Judith Hall on a p’lem, or play poem, combining words and images, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts). He initiated the Best American Poetry series in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship a year later. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

FOREWORD

by David Lehman

A parody, even a merciless one, is not necessarily an act of disrespect. Far from it. Poets parody other poets for the same reason they write poems in imitation (or opposition): as a way of engaging with a distinctive manner or voice. A really worthy parody is implicitly an act of homage.

Some great poets invite parody. Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence prompted Lewis Carroll to pen The White Knight’s Song in Through the Looking Glass. In a wonderful poem, J. K. Stephen alludes to the sestet of a famous Wordsworth sonnet (The world is too much with us) to dramatize the wide discrepancy between Wordsworth at his best and worst. At certain times / Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes, / The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst, Stephen writes. At other times—good Lord! I’d rather be / Quite unacquainted with the ABC / Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

Among the moderns, T. S. Eliot reliably triggers off the parodist. Wendy Cope brilliantly reduced The Waste Land to five limericks (The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep; / Tiresias fancies a peep—/ A typist is laid, / A record is played—/Wei la la. After this it gets deep) while Eliot’s late sententious manner stands behind Henry Reed’s Chard Whitlow with its throat-clearing assertions (As we get older we do not get any younger). In a recent (2006) episode of The Simpsons on television, Lisa Simpson assembles a poem out of torn-up fragments, and attributes it to Moe the bartender. The title: Howling at a Concrete Moon. The inspiration: The Waste Land. The cigar-chewing editor of American Poetry Perspectives barks into the phone, Genius. Pay him nothing and put him on the cover.

Undoubtedly the most parodied of all poems is Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has long served graduation speakers and Polonius-wannabes as a touchstone. Arnold turned forty-five in 1867, the year the poem first appeared in print. Here it is: DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The greatness of this poem lies in the way it transforms the painting of a scene into a vision of eternal sadness and imminent danger. Moonlight and the English Channel contemplated from atop the white cliffs of Dover by a man and woman in love would seem a moment for high romance, and a reaffirmation of vows as a prelude to sensual pleasure. But Dover Beach, while remaining a love poem, is not about the couple so much as it is about a crisis in faith and a foreboding of dreadful things to come. It communicates the anxiety of an age in which scientific hypotheses, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, combined with philosophical skepticism to throw into doubt the comforting belief in an all-knowing and presumably benevolent deity. The magnificent closing peroration, as spoken by the poet to his beloved, has the quality of a prophecy darkly fulfilled. Genocidal violence, perpetrated by ignorant armies, marked the last century, and it is undeniable that we today face a continuing crisis in faith and confidence. Seldom have our chief institutions of church and state seemed as vulnerable as they do today with, on the one side, a citizenry that seems alienated to the extent that it is educated, and on the other side, enemies as implacable and intolerant as they are medieval and reactionary.

Though traditional in its means, Dover Beach is, in its spirit and its burden of sense, a brutally modern poem, and among the first to be thus designated. Arnold showed an awareness of the emotional conditions of modern life which far exceeds that of any other poet of his time, Lionel Trilling observed. He spoke with great explicitness and directness of the alienation, isolation, and excess of consciousness leading to doubt which are, as so much of later literature testifies, the lot of modern man. And Trilling goes on to note that in Dover Beach in particular the diction is perfect and the verse moves in a delicate crescendo of lyricism to the great grim simile that lends the poem’s conclusion its desperation and its pathos.

While perfect for the right occasion, a recitation of the poem is, because of its solemnity, absurd in most circumstances, as when, in the 2001 movie The Anniversary Party, the Kevin Kline character recites the closing lines from memory in lieu of an expected lighthearted toast, and