The Best American Poetry 2001

by David Lehman; Robert Hass

• ISBN13: 9780743203838
• ISBN10: 0743203836
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-21
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

The annual publication of The Best American Poetry is an eagerly awaited event among poetry fans across the country. This year's volume in the critically acclaimed series presents American poetry in all its dazzling variety at a moment of extraordinary richness and originality.Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to The Best American Poetry 2001. In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way and have only their excellence in common. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, the book features important new poems from Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich; rare posthumous works by Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler; and poems by marvelous newcomers like Amy England, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Rachel Zucker.With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2001 is a book every reader of poetry will want to have.

Table of Contents

Foreword	9	(8)
David Lehman
Introduction	17	(14)
Robert Hass
``Notes for a Sermon on the Mount''	31	(1)
Nin Andrews
``The Plan''	32	(2)
Rae Armantrout
``Crossroads in the Past''	34	(2)
John Ashbery
``Jazz''	36	(1)
Angela Ball
``Crossed-Over, Fiend-Snitched, X-ed Out''	37	(2)
Mary Jo Bang
``When the Gods Put on Meter''	39	(4)
Cal Bedient
``Vague Poem''	43	(2)
Elizabeth Bishop
``The French Generals''	45	(1)
Robert Bly
``Sonnet Around Stephanie''	46	(1)
Lee Ann Brown
``Notes About My Face''	47	(6)
Michael Burkard
``Heartland''	53	(2)
Trent Busch
``Blouse of Felt''	55	(2)
Amina Calil
``Longing, a documentary''	57	(2)
Anne Carson
``Ceriserie''	59	(2)
Joshua Clover
``Snow Day''	61	(2)
Billy Collins
``En Famille''	63	(4)
Robert Creeley
``A Mown Lawn''	67	(1)
Lydia Davis
``Ma Ramon''	68	(2)
R. Erica Doyle
``The Cloud of Unknowing''	70	(2)
Christopher Edgar
``T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.''	72	(4)
Thomas Sayers Ellis
``The Art of the Snake Story''	76	(6)
Amy England
``Contemporary American Poetry''	82	(3)
Alan Feldman
``Little Dantesque''	85	(2)
James Galvin
``Time''	87	(2)
Louise Gluck
``My Chakabuku Mama: a comic tale''	89	(2)
Jewelle Gomez
``Gulls''	91	(4)
Jorie Graham
``Waterborne''	95	(3)
Linda Gregerson
``The Singers Change, The Music Goes On''	98	(1)
Linda Gregg
``Enough rain for Agnes Walquist''	99	(5)
Allen Grossman
``Her Garden''	104	(1)
Donald Hall
``Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven''	105	(2)
Anthony Hecht
``Nights''	107	(4)
Lyn Hejinian
``The Formation of Soils''	111	(2)
Brenda Hillman
``In Praise of Coldness''	113	(1)
Jane Hirshfield
``What the Lovers in the Old Songs Thought''	114	(1)
John Hollander
``After 65''	115	(2)
Richard Howard
``Doubt''	117	(4)
Fanny Howe
``Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled''	121	(3)
Olena Kalytiak Davis
``The Emperor of China''	124	(4)
Shirley Kaufman
``The Quick and the Dead''	128	(4)
Galway Kinnell
``Dear Derrida''	132	(5)
David Kirby
``The Ashes''	137	(2)
Carolyn Kizer
``To World War Two''	139	(3)
Kenneth Koch
``Consolations Before an Affair, Upper West Side''	142	(1)
Noelle Kocot
``Songs of the Valley''	143	(2)
John Koethe
``Seven Deadly Sins''	145	(5)
Yusef Komunyakaa
``Wedding Day''	150	(3)
Mark Levine
``The Rider''	153	(1)
Sarah Manguso
``Tattoos''	154	(10)
J. D. McClatchy
``Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith''	164	(2)
Colleen J. McElroy
``My One''	166	(1)
Heather McHugh
``Music for Homemade Instruments''	167	(1)
Harryette Mullen
``Our Kitty''	168	(2)
Carol Muske Dukes
``Where Leftover Misery Goes''	170	(5)
Alice Notley
``His Costume''	175	(2)
Sharon Olds
``The Nature of Things''	177	(1)
Kathleen Ossip
``Here''	178	(1)
Grace Paley
``Untitled (February 2000)''	179	(2)
Michael Palmer
``A Metal Denser Than, and Liquid''	181	(4)
John Peck
``The Ghost Shirt''	185	(7)
Lucia Perillo
``The Clearing''	192	(2)
Carl Phillips
``Jersey Rain''	194	(2)
Robert Pinsky
``A short narrative of breasts and womb in service of Plot entitled''	196	(2)
Claudia Rankine
``Architect''	198	(2)
Adrienne Rich
``Vectors: Forty-five Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays''	200	(7)
James Richardson
``What We Heard About the Japanese'' and ``What the Japanese Perhaps Heard''	207	(3)
Rachel Rose
``Furtherness''	210	(2)
Mary Ruefle
``Along Overgrown Paths''	212	(1)
James Schuyler
``Night Picnic''	213	(1)
Charles Simic
``Apple''	214	(4)
Susan Stewart
``Meteor''	218	(2)
Larissa Szporluk
``The Diagnosis''	220	(1)
James Tate
``I stopped writing poetry...''	221	(6)
Bernard Welt
``Sources of the Delaware''	227	(3)
Dean Young
``In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger''	230	(3)
Rachel Zucker
Contributors' Notes and Comments	233	(46)
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published	279	(4)
Acknowledgments	283

Excerpts

Foreword by David LehmanA curious thing has happened. While American poetry continues to flourish, this has occurred in an inverse relationship to the prestige of high culture as traditionally understood and measured. High culture has taken a beating. At regular intervals journalists announce the demise of the "public intellectual." Stories circulate about dysfunctional English departments (Duke, Columbia). Outrageous hoaxes bamboozle the faculty's talking heads, whose peculiar patois and preference for theory over practice provoke savage indignation in some corners and satirical merriment in others. A respected professor at a major university told me that the only thing unifying the warring factions in the English department there is "a common hatred of literature." In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the journal's editor, Herbert Leibowitz, laments the dwindling of "the audience for belletristic criticism -- as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety." Leibowitz regards poetry criticism as an art, an art in crisis because of bad academic habits on the one side and the timidity of poets on the other ("the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers"). He surely has a point and is in an excellent position to know. Yet what is equally noteworthy is that the virus afflicting poetry criticism has left poetry itself uncontaminated.In the last decade the audience for poetry has grown; enthusiasts keep turning up in unexpected quarters, and the media are paying attention and magnifying the effect. Poetry readings, fairs, and festivals have proliferated. National Poetry Month has raised April sales (without lowering those of other months). Initiatives ranging from "Poetry in Motion" posters in buses and subways to Robert Pinsky's "favorite poem project" have helped bridge the gap between poetry and the ordinary citizen. The radio voice of Garrison Keillor reads a Shakespeare sonnet in drive time, and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that evening a retired Air Force officer tearfully recites Yusef Komunyakaa's poem about the Vietnam Memorial, "Facing It." Are these things causes or effects of the poetry boom? Probably both, as are Bill Moyers's PBS documentaries, The Language of Life in 1995 and Fooling with Words four years later. Moyers's efforts have met with highbrow derision, but that is true of many efforts to popularize a cultural phenomenon with a reputation for difficulty. One critic has called Moyers the "Bob Costas of the American poetry world," the "ultimate fan," which may be one of those left-handed insults that conveys something of a compliment despite its contemptuous intent. Quarrel with Moyers's taste and judgment all you want; there is no denying the value of his TV programs in building an audience for the poets lucky enough to get air time.More popular than ever, creative writing programs have helped make up for the neglect of literature elsewhere on campus. It is an argument for the health and vitality of contemporary poetry that so many talented young people devote two graduate years to its study despite knowing that "there's nothing in it" (as Ezra Pound's Mr. Nixon warns in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"). It is, of course, easy to mock the locutions of the universal workshop, though I find not only humor but a sort of charm in them. One day in a workshop last February, somebody said, "I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, too," and off went that little mental explosion that tells me a poem, in the case at hand a villanelle, was on the way. I called it "Issues": I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, too.It started to kick in for me with the part about the war.Did what I say make sense to you?I wondered whether what "you" said was true,Which may have been what "you" were aiming for.I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, to