The Best American Poetry 2001
Edited by Robert Hass, Series editor David Lehman
Scribner, 288 pages, $30, $16 paper
Among his many other virtues and gifts, translator and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass may be the sanest critic of poetry writing in the U.S. today. His introduction to the latest annual installment of “The Best American Poetry” proves that wide reading in and curiosity about contemporary poetry need not turn one into a raving maniac. Unlike previous editors, among them Harold Bloom, who edited “The Best of the Best American Poetry” in 1998, Hass has chosen not to use his forum to fire a partisan salvo in the poetry wars. Hass sums up the contemporary scene thus:
“There are roughly three traditions in American poetry at this point: a metrical tradition that can be very nervy and that is also basically classical in impulse; a strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two; and an experimental tradition that is usually more passionate about form than content, perception than emotion, restless with the conventions of the art, skeptical about the political underpinnings of current practice, and intent on inventing a new one, or at least undermining what seems repressive in the current formed style. . . . At the moment there are poets doing good, bad, and indifferent work in all these ranges.”
Although one may wish that Hass named some names here, it’s hard to imagine a more judicious account of major tendencies.
Those familiar with Hass’ own acclaimed and influential books of poetry (including “Field Work, Praise” and the most recent, “Sun Under Wood”) may not be surprised that he takes time to clarify the “strong central tradition of free verse” out of and into which his own poetry largely flows. Yet there is a restlessness in Hass as an editor, as there often is in his poetry, which has developed intriguingly from book to book (one might wish to ponder, for example, the gorgeous, melancholy and sensual prose poems that form the middle section of Hass’ third book, “Human Wishes”).
Hass opens up for readers the space for an attentive pluralism: If we’re used to a certain kind of thing as a poem, perhaps we’ll discover in this anthology some other excellent, startling things, also poems, we’d never have encountered in, say, Poetry magazine (a current flagship of Traditions 1 and 2, formerly friendly to Tradition 3, for example, modernist experimentalists like Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle). Or if we’re keen on innovative work in little magazines such as Another Chicago Magazine, the journal Fence (based in New York) or Chain (based in Philadelphia), perhaps we’ll find room in our hearts for the exquisitely chiseled melancholia of Anthony Hecht’s “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven,” or the lyrical erudition of John Hollander’s “What the Lovers in the Old Songs Thought.”
Editors of the “Best American Poetry” volumes tend to play down the definitive claim encoded in the adjective “best,” but however partial, constrained or plain weird you might find the contents of these yearly anthologies, they are almost always interesting-barometers of editorial taste and sometimes of the actual range of contemporary American writing in its various Englishes. Judged by both criteria, Hass’ choices seem exceptionally good.
Hass remarks that he and the general series editor, David Lehman (also a noted poet), came up with different preliminary lists of poems worth looking at for inclusion in the anthology:
“I was aware that David had, on the whole, favored a poetry of wit and that I, on the whole, had singled out poems that were a little spiky or raw, and intellectually demanding. He was drawn to charm and I had been drawn away from it.”
So let the reader beware: While many charming, witty poems have made it into this anthology, there are plenty of others that would seem to evade not only the perils of being charming but indeed the strictures of being a poem, conventionally understood.
What a poem is, conventionally understood, is exactly the problem, or one of them, in contemporary U.S. writing. Maybe it’s time to revive one aspect of Edgar Allen Poe’s definition of poetry as a piece of writing that can be read in one sitting. These poems all qualify. The long poem necessarily loses out in “The Best American Poetry,” limited as the editors are to choosing 75 poems. It’s my impression, however, that Hass has included more longish poems than many predecessors, including the experimental unspoolings of Alice Notley’s “Where Leftover Misery Goes” and the tightly wrought, three-section “Tattoos,” by J.D. McClatchy.
Although it was frustrating to Hass, who’d wanted to organize this anthology by generation, this series’ convention of presenting poets in alphabetical order makes for some serendipitous illumination. Consider some poets included here under the letter “H”: Hecht’s aforementioned “Sarabande” segues into the ludic philosophic explorations of Lyn Hejinian’s “Nights,” which in turn leads us to Brenda Hillman’s “The Formation of Soils,” a poem that economically and beautifully cuts across geologic, mythic and biological time:
. . . pines grew skyward though the pines were not. . . .
I had to go down in the earth for something- . . .
Experience had been sent up, at an angle.
The formal, stylistic and thematic range here is striking, as is the excellence of each of the three poems. It is a great pleasure to come upon such juxtapositions. And in these three poems we see as well the delineations of a preoccupation with time that becomes (perhaps inadvertently) one of the motifs of the volume, not least in Louise Glueck’s characteristically austere and beautiful poem about aging and remembered childhood, “Time.”
Based on this anthology, what can we say about contemporary American poetry? For one thing, some poets are quite preoccupied, wittily so, with the cultural status of poetry and with their relation to their elders. Alan Feldman’s comic, elegiac poem, in part a rivalrous mediation on a poem of Donald Hall’s, is called “Contemporary American Poetry.” (Hall, in fact, has a new poem, “Her Garden,” in this volume.) And in what is one of the funniest, loosest and yet sharpest pieces here, Bernard Welt offers many verse paragraphs under the rubric “I stopped writing poetry . . .”. Welt informs us:
I stopped writing poetry
when everyone else did — in the early 90s, when television
became more interesting than culture. . . .
I stopped writing poetry —
well, basically, because I’m white. . . .
I stopped writing poetry
but I still love the stanza.
Excerpts do not do justice to this poem, in which Welt fully plays out his riffs, bringing us to some surprising, amusing, uncomfortable places.
The languages of American poetry, as represented here, range from the cheerfully vulgar to the elegant and Latinate. Some poems assume a bi- or multilingual play and sophistication: the gorgeous “Ceriserie,” by Joshua Clover, puts us smack in the middle of a sensuous, hallucinatory, multidimensional Paris. And then there is the simultaneously formal and wild poem by Thomas Sayers Ellis, with the cumbersome title “T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Memory)” — an homage in funky quatrains to creative friendship, black foremothers and fathers, and way-out African-diasporic futurity and solidarity:
Memory, Walcott says, moves backwards.
If this is true, your memory is a mothership
minus the disco-sadistic silver
all stars need to shine. Tell the world.
A positive nuisance. Da bomb.
In his deliciously insouciant author’s note, Ellis writes:
“In the poem, I am working on my own brand of literary activism, which I call Genuine Negro Heroism. Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.”
The “Contributors’ Notes and Comments” are, incidentally, a regular feature of this series, and they are often good reads in their own right; there the poets also sometimes give notices of their forthcoming books.
The intricate movements of the inner life, the special province of lyric, are registered not only in poems by Glueck, Sharon Olds and Carl Phillips but in prosier works by Fanny Howe and Alice Notley. Howe’s poem, “Doubt,” which could be called a lyrical essay or a philosophical meditation, is one of the most rewarding here. Reflecting on the life, thought and religious conversion to Catholicism of Simone Weil, Howe echoes (or anticipates) Hass’ own misgivings about the seductions of charm. “According to certain friends,” Howe writes, “Simone Weil would have given everything she wrote to be a poet. It was an ideal but she was wary of charm and the inauthentic.”
Hass has captured in this anthology the interest many poets have in cognition. Hejinian’s “Nights” presents something like the rhyming, associative mind at work:
I saw a juxtaposition
It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation
Pure poetry.
The experimental writing of the past 30 years has addressed itself to the problem of consciousness, to language as a medium and to the workings of perception. In that vein Hass has chosen several poems, including Jorie Graham’s “Gulls” — a virtual transcription of sensory data seized upon by the alert mind — and Michael Palmer’s elegant, unusually accessible “Untitled (February 2000).” And then there is the haunting, politically charged linguistic and conceptual metamorphosis conducted by Lydia Davis’ prose poem, “A Mown Lawn,” in which the premise — “She hated a mown lawn” — mutates: “. . . a mown lawn made a long moan. . . . Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? . . . All of America might be one long mown lawn.”
The high level of work in this anthology resists any summary description or reduction. It is true that the most accomplished formalists represented here tend to be older than 60; it is not yet clear who, if anyone, will be their heirs. There is in this volume evidence of a pervasive ethical and political inquiry — in Howe’s meditations on Weil, in Hillman’s geological/ecological perspective, in the wonderful double piece by the young poet Rachel Rose, “What We Heard About the Japanese” and “What the Japanese Perhaps Heard.” In that delicate “perhaps” we see the trace of the poet’s refining, sympathetic imagination, her self-control, her avoidance of premature conclusions about the Japanese and their thought even as she thinks her way into that problem.
As always, sex and death are the tutelary spirits of many poems, whatever stylistic province they hail from. David Kirby’s “Dear Derrida” — an elegy, we come to realize, for a friend who killed himself — is the most winning defense of deconstruction I have yet read. And Jewelle Gomez, Noelle Kocot and Grace Paley have all contributed wonderful poems of love lasting and blasted. The sexiest poem here is by Elizabeth Bishop, not usually noted for her erotic explicitness, who died in 1979 and whose posthumous “Vague Poem” Hass decided to include, along with one by James Schuyler, also deceased. It was a wonderful decision. The book resonates beyond the immediate horizon of the year, making us rethink 2001 as a year of strange emergences: new poems by dead poets living again in their words.
Hass has boldly selected some things that hover on the very cusp of intelligibility. For some readers, these poems will make it over the border; for others, they will stay this side of confusing. There were several poems here I liked without knowing why or what they were “about”; their rhythms, their flash, their insinuations got under my skin before I could understand them — and some I still don’t understand. Work by Clover, Ellis, Cal Bedient, Robert Bly, Michael Burkard and Claudia Rankine (among others) provoked in me the response art critic and writer Dave Hickey has characterized as, “Wow! Huh?” (as opposed to “Huh? Wow!”). I have returned to many of these poems, and it is perhaps not inappropriate to note that rarely have I felt compelled to do that with a “Best American Poetry” anthology, however much I liked some of them.
To those familiar with contemporary American poetry, this anthology should introduce at least a few new poets as well as new poems by old familiars; to those who haven’t read a poem in years, this anthology should offer a challenging but rewarding foray into new territory. Because few of us have the time or inclination to read little magazines and poetry journals alongside, say, The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly, we should be grateful to Lehman and Hass for continuing this project and more specifically for the generous and tough-minded work that has yielded such a rich and sometimes strange book.
