by David Lehman
Praise for The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
—Robert Pinsky
“The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman’s ‘state-of-poetry’ forewords and the guest editors’ introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
—Academy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness… in all of these volumes… there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A year’s worth of the very best!”
—People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
—Booklist
“A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
—The Washington Post
“For the small community of American poets, The Best American Poetry is the Michelin Guide, the Reader’s Digest, and the Prix Goncourt.”
—L’Observateur
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DAVID LEHMAN was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years at Clare College, Cambridge, as a Kellett Fellow, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return from England. His recent books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press, 2019), Playlist: A Poem (Pittsburgh, 2019), Poems in the Manner Of (Scribner, 2017), and Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins, 2015). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). In 2010, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). Lehman launched The Best American Poetry series in 1988. A gathering of the forewords he had written for the series appeared in 2015 under the title The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014. A contributing editor of The American Scholar, Lehman lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
by David Lehman
Eleven of the poets who served as guest editors in this series went on to become U.S. Poet Laureate, or had already achieved the distinction, including this year’s editor Tracy K. Smith. Our editors have won Pulitzers, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. Two of them were named poetry editor of The New Yorker, which continues to be the premier periodical in which to place a poem. But not until this year did one win the most coveted prize of all, the Nobel, which Louise Glück (BAP 1993) received in October 2020.
I admire Louise’s immediate response to the news, as reported in Harper’s. Adam Smith, the chief scientific officer of Nobel Media, tried to interview her on the phone. When asked what the Nobel meant to her, Louise said, “I have no idea. My first thought was ‘I won’t have any friends’ because most of my friends are writers.” The interviewer persisted. How important is “lived experience”? “Oh, heavens,” she said, “it’s barely seven o’clock.” Smith pressed on. “But it’s so much a feature of your own writing?” Louise: “Is the two minutes over?”1
In her Nobel acceptance speech, Louise spoke up for the individuality and intimacy of the poetic act; it obeys imperatives that are private and not meant for the grandstand. “In art of the kind to which I was drawn, the voice or judgment of the collective is dangerous,” she said. “The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.” She aligned herself with those poets who “do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”2
Although I have devoted much energy to the project of enlarging the readership for poetry, I tend to agree that poetry is a solitary act, intimate and precarious. (The poet Stephen Paul Miller reminds me of an exchange he had with the late John Ashbery. “Do you think we can expand the audience for poetry?” Stephen asked. “Nah, let’s keep it our little secret,” John replied.) A poem is “a communication from one who is not the writer to one who is not the reader,” Kenneth Koch rather mystically put it, attributing the statement to Paul Valéry. There does seem to be something mystical about the experience of communion with, for example, a poet who died a hundred years ago and wrote in a language you can read only at one remove. Louise Glück’s distrust of the collective has never been less popular than it is at present, which makes the Nobel recognition all the more significant. I am happy to note that Louise continues to write and publish poems of note—such as “Night School,” which the guest editor chose for The Best American Poetry 2021. It was wonderful to have something to celebrate in a year of plague, of anguish and woe without precedent for most of us.
So many died, lost a loved one, lost a job, made a sacrifice, paid a stiff price, or muddled through in a state of maximum uncertainty in 2020. We also went through a stunningly rapid upheaval in consciousness. Though there had been warnings, we were unprepared for a pandemic, perhaps because we have been distracted by such other disasters as forest fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the threat of bombs, missiles, terrorist attacks, volcanic eruptions, nuclear-plant meltdowns, and the geologic fate of the earth. COVID-19 was a killer the likes of which we had not encountered since World War II. By the first of March 2021 we had suffered half a million casualties in the United States alone, a shocking number of them in nursing homes. As the disease raged around the world, respecting no man-made borders, Dante’s line, echoed by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, came to the fore: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Overnight we went into a recession. The unemployment rate climbed to heights not seen since the Depression of the 1930s. In March the stock market collapsed, with the S&P 500 losing 34 percent of its value in just twenty-two trading sessions. Emergency conditions prevailed. Even after a strong mid-year rebound, the economy contracted 3.5 percent in 2020, the largest decline since just after World War II.3 Small stores shut their doors; famous companies sank. Hertz sold its fleet. Brooks Brothers went out of business. Restaurants died: after 157 years, the Cliff House in San Francisco closed its doors for good, as did the 21 Club in NYC. Airline stocks crashed, and conventional energy firms ran out of gas. Worst hit of all were the leisure and hospitality industries and those who work in them.
Not everyone liked the new restrictions imposed to limit the spread of the virus. People were urged—in some cases required—to wear masks in public places
and to practice social distancing, with a mandatory six feet separating any two persons. Morale, shaky from the start, broke. Flagrant cases of police abuse sparked nationwide protests. The presidential election campaign upped the ante while lowering the civility index. Social media exacerbated mob impulses. On the federal, state, and local levels, governments faced unprecedented challenges, which they tried to meet with daily press briefings, massive relief and stimulus packages, the distractions of a permanent floating no-holds-barred political tag-team wrestling match, and Operation Warp Speed, a program to hasten the development of an effective vaccine. It seemed almost miraculous that, by late December, vaccines for a disease unknown twelve months earlier had won the approval of the Federal Drug Administration. A start-up outfit called Moderna was up there with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and other major players in developing the treatment in record time.
The way we conduct our lives and our businesses rapidly changed. Satya Nadella, the highly regarded CEO of Microsoft, commented that “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months… in a world of remote everything.” To the amazement of market watchers, stocks recovered in record time. The shares of disruptive technology firms, from Tesla to Zoom, were the rage. With so many able to work from home, the question was just how lasting will be the revolution in work habits.
Meanwhile the gap between rich and poor isn’t narrowing, and the suffering of people, whether for medical or economic reasons, will persist no matter how massive a relief package Congress approves. The plague has delivered a devastating blow to so much that we value: theater, dance, orchestral and chamber music, cabarets, clubs, the opera. For the people out of work, the people who have had to close their businesses, the people who have lost a family member to the virus, the people who work (or used to work) at airports and hotels, restaurants, theaters, concert halls, and sports arenas—what, I wonder, can I, can any of us, do as poets?
For poets who teach or work at universities, the pandemic will have profound consequences. Some trends have accelerated, and for those of us who love books, not just the contents but the physical object, from cover to colophon, the idea of reading Proust or Henry James on a smartphone remains an incongruity and becomes a more pressing headache.
Many of us kept journals of the plague year. The wisdom of staying at home, restricting my social life and my contact with the world beyond nature, prompted me to renew an old habit and write a poem a day, which I began doing on August 1st. Three months earlier I had begun to struggle with the old subjects of doubt, chance, and gambling as sometimes an impulse, sometimes an imperative, and sometimes, alas, an addiction. I had never before felt so strongly that writing a poem was a gamble—with odds only somewhat better than that of a message in a bottle tossed into the ocean. Nevertheless, the act of writing a poem a day is one way of pushing back against an out-of-control world in which one’s own volition counts for so little, and I keep doing it.
As a native of New York City, I can’t help invoking a special prayer for the beleaguered city. I have in mind a paragraph in “Here is New York,” a piece E. B. White wrote on assignment for Roger Angell, his editor at Holiday magazine, in 1949. “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning,” White wrote. “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”
* * *
The series editor of The Best American Poetry has a multitude of jobs to do, but undoubtedly the most important is selecting the right person to be the year’s guest editor—and getting her or him to say yes. The task of selecting seventy-five poems from the plethora of print and electronic magazines in which poems circulate is far from easy, and I am delighted that Tracy K. Smith agreed to take it on. There are personal reasons beyond the obvious literary ones. Between her undergraduate years at Harvard and her appointment as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Tracy studied at Columbia, and she was a star student in a graduate seminar I gave in spring 1996. The subject was the New York School of poets, and her expert imitation of a Kenneth Koch poem was so good that I sent it on to Richard Burgin, who published it in his magazine Boulevard. So it was and continues to be with particular joy that I have followed the flourishing of Tracy’s career. The Body’s Question (2003) was awarded the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet. Duende appeared four years later, and Life on Mars (2011) won her a Pulitzer. Smith’s most recent book is Wade in the Water (2018). She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015).
In June 2017, Tracy became U.S. Poet Laureate. To accompany her on visits to community centers, she compiled an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (2018), in the hope of reaching readers who have never given poetry a chance. During the pandemic, she was one of four poets who celebrated National Poetry Month (April) by choosing among submissions solicited for All Things Considered on NPR.
Above all else, Tracy K. Smith is a distinguished practitioner of the art. Consider her poem “Ash.” The title is either ominous or ironic or both. Using a loose, irregular rhyme scheme, and the force of repetition, Smith converts the humble “house” from essential domicile to multiple metaphor:
Strange house we must keep and fill.
House that eats and pleads and kills.
House on legs. House on fire. House infested
With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house.
House of trick and suck and shrug.
Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house.
House whose rooms are pooled with blood.
House with hands. House of guilt. House
That other houses built. House of lies
And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone.
House like an engine that churns and stalls.
House with skin and hair for walls.
House the seasons singe and douse.
House that believes it is not a house.4
If the poem is an architectural wonder that could house us all, its fate and ours can, like the piece of paper on which it was written, go up in smoke and leave only ash behind. My friend Jamie Katz, the writer and jazz aficionado, pinned this poem to his refrigerator door after it appeared in print. “I was so struck by this poem,” he said, “written in the present tense but freighted with history, mixing memory and desire, guilt and fear, sex and cruelty—such a visceral poem, concrete and direct, with a strong rhythm pushing it forward, which only adds to its urgent and pleading tone. And yes, why ‘Ash’? Is this a house that has already burned down but remains alive in obsessive recall, or perhaps a place—real or imagined—that Smith wishes she could obliterate but can’t, because her own life is so bound up in it? And who is the ‘we’ in the first line? Are we all implicated?”
Smith says she is “most interested in the marginal or overshadowed perspectives, the stories that sit outside of or beneath the central American narrative, or the accepted myths of American identity.” That editorial philosophy is consistent with an impulse toward inclusiveness, as the contents of this volume confirm. “I know that who I am—a woman, African American, American, born in the late 20th Century and reckoning with life in the early 21st, etc.—has guided me toward the voices, stories, places, possibilities that interest and preoccupy me,” Tracy told an interviewer from Stay Thirsty.5 When asked why she chose to express herself in poetry rather than in prose, Tracy answered: “Poetry feels sacred to me, even when it is playful, secular, gritty. Poetry feels like the syntax of the unconscious mind, or—better still—the soul. I love prose, I write in other forms, but I believe that poetry unites me with my largest, perhaps my eternal self.”
On January 20, 2021, a day filled with speeches and solemn oaths, the youngest inaugural poet in American history
stole the show. Amanda Gorman, twenty-two, who graduated from Harvard in June 2020, boldly and with perfect poise recited her poem “The Hill We Climb.” The better verb would be “performed,” for Amanda knew the poem as well as an actor knows her lines, and she delivered it with a winning confidence, using hip-hop rhythms and rhyme to excellent effect—commanding the audience rather than retreating from it, as some poets instinctively do. In the poem she read, she pictures herself as “a skinny Black girl / descended from slaves and raised by a single mother,” who had (and may still have) a “dream of becoming president.” She gave voice to the theme of unity: “We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, / we must first put our differences aside.” In a reference to the riots at the Capitol on January 6, she wrote, “while democracy can be periodically delayed, / it can never be permanently defeated.” The sentiments were lofty if familiar; the rhymes appealed to the ear, and the presentation won listener’s hearts.
One day later, Penguin Children’s announced that “due to overwhelming demand” it would publish a special hardcover edition of the “The Hill We Climb” with a first printing of 150,000 copies. By the twenty-eighth of January, the publication date was moved up to March 16 and the first printing elevated to one million copies. It was also announced that Oprah Winfrey would write a foreword for the book and that Gorman would write a poem for delivery at the Super Bowl in February. She planned to celebrate the game’s three honorary captains: an educator, a nurse manager, and a Marine Corps veteran.
The emergence of Amanda Gorman as an overnight sensation was without doubt the poetry event of the year. She didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. She introduced Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards, was celebrated by Michelle Obama at the White House, and opened for Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress. How did all this happen for the Los Angeles native? It goes back to 2017, when she was named America’s National Youth Poet Laureate, the first to earn that designation. Growing out of programs on the local and state level, the National Youth Poet Laureate was an initiative undertaken by the Urban Word, a New York outfit headed by Michael Cirelli, himself a talented poet and a pedagogic innovator. Influenced by the spoken-word movement and the idea that performance and presentation are and should be integral to the creative process, Cirelli believes that literary excellence is compatible with political engagement. “We’re still a tiny organization, but we built this huge platform for young poets in their teenage years,” he told me with pride and a trace of awe. To identify “the best poets and the ones most invested in social impact,” the Urban Word employs a group of judges to choose among four finalists aged fourteen to nineteen, who must submit a poetry portfolio, a CV, a video in which they introduce themselves, and an essay stating what they would do if selected. It is an annual appointment. In 2020, the fourth in the series was named: sixteen-year-old Meera Dasgupta of New York, whose commitment to social change—a requisite—is to the causes of gender equality and climate change. As to the success of the first National Youth Poet Laureate, Cirelli jokes that Amanda Gorman’s “bio goes out of date every two weeks,” so swift has been her climb, so charismatic her personality, so fierce her energy and determination.