The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997
384
The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997
384eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781439106068 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 04/02/1998 |
| Series: | Best American Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He has written more than sixty books, including Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air, Falstaff: Give Me Life, The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and Why. He is a MacArthur Prize fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Criticism. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Hometown:
New York, New York and New Haven, ConnecticutDate of Birth:
July 11, 1930Date of Death:
October 14, 2019Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
JONATHAN AARON
Dance Mania
In 1027, not far from Bernburg,
eighteen peasants were seized
by a common delusion.
Holding hands, they circled for hours
in a churchyard, haunted by visions,
spirits whose names they called in terror or welcome,
until an angry priest cast a spell on them
for disrupting his Christmas service,
and they sank into the frozen earth
up to their knees. In 1227
on a road to Darmstadt, scores of children
danced and jumped in a shared delirium.
Some saw devils, others the Savior enthrone
d
in the open heavens. Those who survived
remained palsied for the rest of their days.
And in 1278, two hundred fanatics raved on a bridge
that spanned the Mosel near Koblenz.
A cleric passed carrying the host
to a devout parishioner, the bridge collapsed,
and the maniacs were swept away.
A hundred years later, in concert with
The Great Mortality, armies of dancers
roved in contortions all over Europe.
The clergy found them immune to exorcism,
gave in to their wishes and issued
decrees banning all but square-toed shoes,
the zealots having declared they hated
pointed ones. They disliked even more
the color red, suggesting
a connection between their malady
and the condition of certain infuriated
animals. Most of all they could not endure
the sight of people weeping.
The Swiss doctor Paracelsus was the first to call
the Church's theories of enchantment
nonsensical gossip. Human life is inseparable
from the life of the universe, he said.
Anybody's mortal clay is an extract
of all beings previously created. Illness
can be traced, he said,
to the failure of the Archaeus, a force
residing in the stomach and whose function
is to harmonize the mystic elements (salt,
sulphur, mercury) on which vitality depends.
He advocated direct measures, proposed remedies
fitting the degree of the affliction.
A patient could make a wax doll of himself,
invest his sins and blasphemies within the manikin,
then burn it with no further ceremony.
He could subject himself to ice-water baths,
or submit to starvation in solitary confinement.
Noted for his arrogance, vanity
and choler (his real name was Theophrastus Bombast
von Hohenheim), Paracelsus made enemies.
They discovered he held no academic degree
and caused him to be banished from Basle,
to become a wanderer who would die mysteriously
at the White Horse Inn in Salzburg in 1541.
After a drunken orgy, said one report.
The victim of thugs hired by jealous apothecaries,
said another. And the dance mania
found its own way through time to survive
among us, as untouched as ever by the wisdom of science.
Think of the strange, magnetic sleep
whole populations fall into every day,
in gymnasiums full of pounding darkness,
in the ballrooms of exclusive hotels,
on verandahs overlooking the ocean and played upon
by moonlight, in backyards, on the perfect lawns
of great estates, on city rooftops, in any brief field
the passing tourist sees as empty --
how many millions of us now, the living
and the dead, hand in hand as always,
approaching the brink of the millennium.
1992
A. R. AMMONS
Anxiety Prosody
Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth
filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the
open anxiety breezes through thick conceits, surface congestions
(it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting
up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences),
it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush
clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires
level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation
matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.
1989
A. R. AMMONS
Garbage
I
Creepy little creepers are insinuatingly
curling up my spine (bringing the message)
saying, Boy!, are you writing that great poem
the world's waiting for: don't you know you
have an unaccomplished mission unaccomplished;
someone somewhere may be at this very moment
dying for the lack of what W. C. Williams says
you could (or somebody could) be giving: yeah?
so, these messengers say, what do you
mean teaching school (teaching poetry and
poetry writing and wasting your time painting
sober little organic, meaningful pictures)
when values thought lost (but only scrambled into
disengagement) lie around demolished
and centerless because you (that's me, boy)
haven't elaborated everything in everybody's
face, yet: on the other hand (I say to myself,
receiving the messengers and cutting them down)
who has done anything or am I likely to do
anything the world won't twirl without: and
since SS's enough money (I hope) to live
from now on on in elegance and simplicity --
or, maybe,just simplicity -- why shouldn't I
at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of
leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way
from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed
and in need of an hour's simmering boil
to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, 65¢ lb. dry: they
have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours -- but
they're welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more
calcium than milk, more lecithin than eggs,
and somewhere in there the oil that smoothes
stools, a great virtue: I need time and verve
to find out, now, about medicare/medicaid,
national osteoporosis week, gadabout tours,
hearing loss, homesharing programs, and choosing
good nutrition! for starters! why should I
be trying to write my flattest poem, now, for
whom, not for myself, for others?, posh, as I
have never said: Social Security can provide
the beans, soys enough: my house, paid for for
twenty years, is paid for: my young'un
is raised: nothing one can pay cash for seems
very valuable: that reaches a high enough
benchmark for me -- high enough that I wouldn't
know what to do with anything beyond that, no
place to house it, park it, dock it, let it drift
down to: elegance and simplicity: I wonder
if we need those celestial guidance systems
striking mountaintops or if we need fuzzy
philosophy's abstruse failed reasonings: isn't
it simple and elegant enough to believe in
qualities, simplicity and elegance, pitch in a
little courage and generosity, a touch of
commitment, enough asceticism to prevent
fattening: moderation: elegant and simple
moderation: trees defined themselves (into
various definitions) through a dynamics of
struggle (hey, is the palaver rapping, yet?)
and so it is as if there were a genetic
recognition that a young tree would get up and
through only through taken space (parental
space not yielding at all, either) and, further:
so, trunks, accommodated to rising, to reaching
the high light and deep water, were slender
and fast moving, and this was okay because
one good thing about dense competition is that
if one succeeds with it one is buttressed by
crowding competitors; that is, there was little
room for branches, and just a tuft of green
possibility at the forest's roof: but, now,
I mean, take my yard maple -- put out in the free
and open -- has overgrown, its trunk
split down from a high fork: wind has
twisted off the biggest, bottom branch: there
was, in fact, hardly any crowding and competition,
and the fat tree, unable to stop pouring it on,
overfed and overgrew and, now, again, its skin's
broken into and disease may find it and bores
of one kind or another, and fungus: it just
goes to show you: moderation imposed is better
than no moderation at all: we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go
as theirs go; their pain we can't shake off;
their choices, often harming to themselves,
pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams; we rise several times
in a night to walk about; we rise in the morning
to a crusty world headed nowhere, doorless:
our chests burn with anxiety and a river of
anguish defines rapids and straits in the pit of
our stomachs: how can we intercede and not
interfere: how can our love move more surroundingly,
convincingly than our premonitory advice
II
garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation
to trashlessness, that is too far off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic: I'm a
hole puncher or hole plugger: stick a finger
in the dame (dam, damn, dike), hold back the issue
of creativity's flood, the forthcoming, futuristic,
the origins feeding trash: down by I-95 in
Florida where flatland's ocean- and gulf-flat,
mounds of disposal rise (for if you dug
something up to make room for something to put
in, what about the something dug up, as with graves:)
the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,
as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls
and garbage keep alive, offerings to the gods
of garbage, of retribution, of realistic
expectation, the deities of unpleasant
necessities: refined, young earthworms,
drowned up in macadam pools by spring rains, moisten
out white in a day or so and, round spots,
look like sputum or creamy-rich, broken-up cold
clams: if this is not the best poem of the
century, can it be about the worst poem of the
century: it comes, at least, toward the end,
so a long tracing of bad stuff can swell
under its measure: but there on the heights
a small smoke wafts the sacrificial bounty
day and night to layer the sky brown, shut us
in as into a lidded kettle, the everlasting
flame these acres-deep of tendance keep: a
free offering of a crippled plastic chair:
a played-out sports outfit: a hill-myna
print stained with jelly: how to write this
poem, should it be short, a small popping of
duplexes, or long, hunting wide, coming home
late, losing the trail and recovering it:
should it act itself out, illustrations,
examples, colors, clothes or intensify
reductively into statement, bones any corpus
would do to surround, or should it be nothing
at all unless it finds itself: the poem,
which is about the pre-socratic idea of the
dispositional axis from stone to wind, wind
to stone (with my elaborations, if any)
is complete before it begins, so I needn't
myself hurry into brevity, though a weary reader
might briefly be done: the axis will be clear
enough daubed here and there with a little ink
or fined out into every shade and form of its
revelation: this is a scientific poem,
asserting that nature models values, that we
have invented little (copied), reflections of
possibilities already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the
black-chuffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling
a common height, alighting to the meaty steaks
and puffy muffins (puffins?): there is a mound
too, in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and
shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strengthened by what it strengthens for
where but in the very asshole of come-down is
redemption: as where but brought low, where
but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:
where but in the arrangements love crawls us
through, not a thing left in our self-display
unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes: but we are natural: nature, not
we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though
natural, divorced from higher, finer configurations:
tissues and holograms and energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves
outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling
and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,
right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of
the pole where matter's forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except
as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,
until it turns into another pear or sunfish,
that momentary glint in the fisheye having
been there so long, coming and going, it's
eternity's glint: it all wraps back round,
into and out of form, palpable and impalpable,
and in one phase, the one of grief and love,
we know the other, where everlastingness comes to
sway, okay and smooth: the heaven we mostly
want, though, is this jet-hoveled hell back,
heaven's daunting asshole: one must write and
rewrite till one writes it right: if I'm in
touch, she said, then I've got an edge: what
the hell kind of talk is that: I can't believe
I'm merely an old person: whose mother is dead,
whose father is gone and many of whose
friends and associates have wended away to the
ground, which is only heavy wind, or to ashes,
a lighter breeze: but it was all quite frankly
to be expected and not looked forward to: even
old trees, I remember some of them, where they
used to stand: pictures taken by some of them:
and old dogs, specially one imperial black one,
quad dogs with their hierarchies (another archie)
one succeeding another, the barking and romping
sliding away like slides from a projector: what
were they then that are what they are now:
III
toxic waste, poison air, beach goo, eroded
roads draw nations together, whereas magnanimous
platitude and sweet semblance ease each nation
back into its comfort or despair: global crises
promote internationalist gettings-together,
problems the best procedure, whether they be in the
poet warps whose energy must be found and let
work or in the high windings of sulfur dioxide:
I say to my writing students -- prize your flaws,
defects, behold your accidents, engage your
negative criticisms -- these are the materials
of your ongoing -- from these places you imagine,
find, or make the ways back to all of us, the figure,
keeping the aberrant periphery worked
clear so the central current may shift or slow
or rouse adjusting to the necessary dynamic:
in our error the defining energies of cure
errancy finds: suffering otherwises: but
no use to linger over beauty or simple effect:
this is just a poem with a job to do: and that
is to declare, however roundabout, sideways,
or meanderingly (or in those ways) the perfect
scientific and materialistic notion of the
spindle of energy: when energy is gross,
rocklike, it resembles the gross, and when
fine it mists away into mystical refinements,
sometimes passes right out of material
recognizability and becomes, what?, motion,
spirit, all forms translated into energy, as at
the bottom of Dante's hell all motion is
translated into form: so, in value systems,
physical systems, artistic systems, always this
same disposition from the heavy to the light,
and then the returns from the light downward
to the staid gross: stone to wind, wind to
stone: there is no need for "outside," hegemonic
derivations of value: nothing need be invented
or imposed: the aesthetic, scientific, moral
are organized like a muff along this spindle,
might as well relax: thus, the job done, the
mind having found its way through and marked
out the course, the intellect can be put by:
one can turn to tongue, crotch, boob, navel,
armpit, rock, slit, roseate rearend and
consider the perfumeries of slick exchange,
heaving breath, slouchy mouth, the mixed
means by which we stay attentive and keep to
the round of our ongoing: you wake up thrown
away and accommodation becomes the name of your
game: getting back, back into the structure
of protection, caring, warmth, numbers: one
and many, singles and groups, dissensions and
cooperations, takings and givings -- the dynamic
of survival, still the same: but why thrown
out in the first place: because while the
prodigal stamps off and returns, the father goes
from iron directives that drove the son away
to rejoicing tears at his return: the safe
world of community, not safe, still needs
feelers sent out to test the environment, to
bring back news or no news; the central
mover, the huge river, needs, too, to bend,
and the son sent away is doubly welcomed home:
we deprive ourselves of, renounce, safety to seek
greater safety: but if we furnish a divine
sanction or theology to the disposition, we
must not think when the divine sanction shifts
that there is any alteration in the disposition:
the new's an angle of emphasis on the old:
new religions are surfaces, beliefs the shadows
of images trying to construe what needs no
belief: only born die, and if something is
born or new, then that is not it, that is not
the it: the it is the indifference of all the
differences, the nothingness of all the poised
somethings, the finest issue of energy in which
boulders and dead stars float: for what
if it were otherwise and the it turned out to
be something, damning and demanding, strict and
fierce, preventing and seizing: what range of
choice would be given up then and what value
could our partial, remnant choices acquire then:
with a high whine the garbage trucks slowly
circling the pyramid rising intone the morning
and atop the mound's plateau birds circling
hear and roil alive in winklings of wings
denser than windy forest shelves: and meanwhile
a truck already arrived spills its goods from
the back hatch and the birds as in a single computer
formed net plunge in celebrations, hallelujahs
of rejoicing: the driver gets out of his truck
and wanders over to the cliff on the spill and
looks off from the high point into the rosy-fine
rising of day, the air pure, the wings of the
birds white and clean as angel-food cake: holy, holy,
holy, the driver cries and flicks his cigarette
in a spiritual swoop that floats and floats before
it touches ground: here, the driver knows,
where the consummations gather, where the disposal
flows out of form, where the last translations
cast away their immutable bits and scraps,
flits of steel, shivers of bottle and tumbler,
here is the gateway to beginning, here the portal
of renewing change, the birdshit, even, melding
enrichingly in with debris, a loam for the roots
of placenta: oh, nature, the man on the edge
of the cardboard-laced cliff exclaims, that there
could be a straightaway from the toxic past into
the fusion-lit reaches of a coming time! our
sins are so many, here heaped, shapes given to
false matter, hamburger meat left out
IV
scientists plunge into matter looking for the
matter but the matter lessens and, looked too
far into, expands away: it was insubstantial all
along: that is, boulders bestir; they
are "alive" with motion and space: there is a
riddling reality where real hands grasp each
other in the muff but toward both extremes the
reality wears out, wears thin, becomes a reality
"realityless": this is satisfactory, providing
permanent movement and staying, providing the
stratum essential with an essential air, the
poles thick and thin, the middles, at interchange:
the spreader rakes a furrow open and lights a
drying edge: a priestly plume rises, a signal, smoke
like flies intermediating between orange peel
and buzzing blur: is a poem about garbage garbage
or will this abstract, hollow junk seem beautiful
and necessary as just another offering to the
high assimilations: (that means up on top where
the smoke is; the incinerations of sin,
corruption, misconstruction pass through the
purification of flame:) old deck chairs,
crippled aluminum lawn chairs, lemon crates
with busted slats or hinges, strollers with
whacking or spinningly idle wheels: stub ends
of hot dogs: clumps go out; rain sulls deep
coals; wind slams flickers so flat they lose
the upstanding of updraft and stifle to white
lingo -- but oh, oh, in a sense, and in an
intention, the burning's forever, O eternal
flame, principle of the universe, without which
mere heaviness and gray rust prevail: dance
peopling the centers and distances, the faraway
galactic slurs even, luminescences, plasmas,
those burns, the same principle: but here on
the heights, terns and flies avoid the closest
precincts of flame, the terrifying transformations,
the disappearances of anything of interest,
morsel, gobbet, trace of maple syrup, fat
worm: addling intensity at the center
where only special clothes and designated
offices allay the risk, the pure center: but
down, down on the lowest appropinquations, the
laborsome, loaded vessels whine like sails in
too much wind up the long ledges, the whines
a harmony, singing away the end of the world
or spelling it in, a monstrous surrounding of
gathering -- the putrid, the castoff, the used,
the mucked up -- all arriving for final, assessment,
for the toting up in tonnage, the separations
of wet and dry, returnable and gone for good:
the sanctifications, the burn-throughs, ash free
merely a permanent twang of light, a dwelling
music, remaining: how to be blessed are mechanisms,
procedures that carry such changes! the
garbage spreader gets off his bulldozer and
approaches the fire: he stares into it as into
eternity, the burning edge of beginning and
ending, the catalyst of going and becoming,
and all thoughts of his paycheck and beerbelly,
even all thoughts of his house and family and
the long way he has come to be worthy of his
watch, fall away, and he stands in the presence
of the momentarily everlasting, the air about
him sacrosanct, purged of the crawling vines
and dense vegetation of desire, nothing between
perception and consequence here: the arctic
terns move away from the still machine and
light strikes their wings in round, a fluttering,
a whirling rose of wings, and it seems that
terns' slender wings and finely tipped
tails look so airy and yet so capable that they
must have been designed after angels or angels
after them: the lizard family produced man in
the winged air! man as what he might be or might
have been, neuter, guileless, a feathery hymn:
the bulldozer man picks up a red bottle that
turns purple and green in the light and pours
out a few drops of stale wine, and yellow jackets
burr in the bottle, sung drunk, the singing
not even puzzled when he tosses the bottle way
down the slopes, the still air being flown in
in the bottle even as the bottle dives through
the air! the bulldozer man thinks about that
and concludes that everything is marvelous, what
he should conclude and what everything is: on
the deepdown slopes, he realizes, the light
inside the bottle will, over the weeks, change
the yellow jackets, unharmed, having left lost,
not an aromatic vapor of wine left, the air
percolating into and out of the neck as the sun's
heat rises and falls: all is one, one all:
hallelujah: he gets back up on his bulldozer
and shaking his locks backs the bulldozer up
V
dew shatters into rivulets on crunched cellophane
as the newly started bulldozer jars a furrow
off the mesa, smoothing and packing down:
flattening, the way combers break flat into
speed up the strand: unpleasant food strings down
the slopes and rats' hard tails whirl whacking
trash: I don't know anything much about garbage
dumps: I mean, I've never climbed one: I
don't know about the smells: do masks mask
scent: or is there a deodorizing mask: the
Commissioner of Sanitation in a bug-black caddy
hearse-long glisters creepy up the ziggurat: at
the top his chauffeur pops out and opens the
big back door for him: he goes over a few feet
away, puts a stiff, salute-hand to his forehead
and surveys the distances in all depths: the
birds' shadows lace his white sleeve: he
rises to his toes as a lifting zephyr from the
sea lofts a salt-shelf of scent: he approves: he
extends his arm in salute to the noisy dozer's
operator, waves back and forth canceling out
any intention to speak, re-beholds Florida's
longest vistas, gets back into the big buggy
and runs up all the windows, trapping, though,
a nuisance of flies: (or, would he have run
the windows down: or would anyone else have:
not out there: strike that:) rightness, at
any rate, like a benediction, settles on the
ambiance: all is proceeding: funding will be
continued: this work will not be abandoned:
this mound can rise higher: things are in order
when heights are acknowledged; the lows
ease into place; the wives get back from the laundromat,
the husbands hose down the hubcaps; and the
seeringly blank pressures of weekends crack
away hour by hour in established time: in your
0 end is my beginning: the operator waves back
to the Commissioner, acknowledging his understanding
and his submission to benign authority, and falls
to thinking of his wife, née Minnie Furher, a woman
of abrupt appetites and strict morals, a woman
who wants what she wants legally, largely as a
function of her husband's particulars: a closet
queen, Minnie hides her cardboard, gold-foiled
crown to wear in parade about the house when
nobody's home: she is so fat, fat people
like to be near her: and her husband loves
every bit of her, every bite (bit) round enough to get
to: and wherever his dinky won't reach, he finds
something else that will: I went up the road
a piece this morning at ten to Pleasant Grove
for the burial of Ted's ashes: those above
ground care; those below don't: the sun was
terribly hot, and the words of poems read out
loud settled down like minnows in a shallows
for the moment of silence and had their gaps
and fractures filled up and healed quiet: into
the posthole went the irises and hand-holds of dirt:
spring brings thaw and thaw brings the counterforce
of planted ashes which may not rise again,
not as anything recognizable as what they leach
away from: oh, yes, yes, the matter goes on,
turning into this and that, never the same thing
twice: but what about the spirit, does it die
in an instant, being nothing in an instant out of
matter, or does it hold on to some measure of
time, not just the eternity in which it is not,
but does death go on being death for a billion
years: this one fact put down is put down
forever, is it, or forever, forever to be a
part of the changes about it, switches in the
earth's magnetic field, asteroid collisions,
tectonic underplays, to be molten and then not
molten, again and again: when does a fact end:
what does one do with this gap from just yesterday
or just this morning to fifty-five billion
years -- to infinity: the spirit was forever
and is forever, the residual and informing
energy, but here what concerns us is this
manifestation, this man, this incredible flavoring and
building up of character and éclat, gone,
though forever, in a moment only, a local
event, infinitely unrepeatable: the song of
the words subsides, the shallows drift away,
the people turn to each other and away: motors
start and the driveways clear, and the single
fact is left alone to itself to have its first
night under the stars but to be there now
for every star that comes: we go away who must
ourselves come back, at last to stay: tears
when we are helpless are our only joy: but
while I was away this morning, Mike, the young
kid who does things for us, cut down the
thrift with his weedeater, those little white
flowers more like weedsize more than likely:
sometimes called cliff rose: also got the grass
out of the front ditch now too wet to mow, slashed:
the dispositional axis is not supreme (how tedious)
and not a fiction (how clever) but plain (greatness
flows through the lowly) and a fact (like as not) 1993
Copyright © 1998 by David Lehman
Table of Contents
CONTENTSForeword by David Lehman
Introduction by Harold Bloom
Jonathan Aaron, "Dance Mania"
A. R. Ammons, "Anxiety's Prosody"
A. R. Ammons, "Garbage"
A. R. Ammons, "From Strip"
John Ashbery, "Baked Alaska"
John Ashbery, "Myrtle"
John Ashbery, "The Problem of Anxiety"
Elizabeth Bishop, "It Is Marvellous..."
George Bradley, "The Fire Fetched Down"
Lucie Brock-Broido, "Inevitably, She Declined"
Anne Carson, "The Life of Towns"
Amy Clampitt, "My Cousin Muriel"
Douglas Crase, "True Solar Holiday"
Carolyn Creedon, "litany"
Thomas M. Disch, "The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play in One Act"
Irving Feldman, "Terminal Laughs"
Aaron Fogel, "The Printer's Error"
Alice Fulton, "Powers of Congress"
Allen Ginsberg, "Salutations to Fernando Pessoa"
Louise Glück, "Celestial Music"
Louise Glück, "Vespers"
Jorie Graham, "Manifest Destiny"
Jorie Graham, "What the Instant Contains"
Allen Grossman, "The Piano Player Explains Himself"
Donald Hall, "Prophecy"
Donald Hall, "The Porcelain Couple"
Vicki Hearne, "St. Luke Painting the Virgin"
Anthony Hecht, "Prospects"
Edward Hirsch, "Man on a Fire Escape"
John Hollander, "Kinneret"
John Hollander, "An Old-Fashioned Song"
John Hollander, "The See-Saw"
Richard Howard, "Like Most Revelations"
Donald Justice, "Nostalgia of the Lakefronts"
Donald Justice, "Invitation to a Ghost"
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery"
Jane Kenyon, "Three Songs at the End of Summer"
Galway Kinnell, "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone"
Karl Kirchwey, "Sonogram"
Kenneth Koch, "One Train May Hide Another"
Yusef Komunyakaa, "Facing It"
Ann Lauterbach, "Psyche's Dream"
Philip Levine, "Scouting"
Harry Mathews, "Histoire"
J. D. McClatchy, "An Essay on Friendship"
James Merrill, "A Room at the Heart of Things"
James Merrill, "The 'Ring' Cycle"
James Merrill, "Family Week at Oracle Ranch"
W. S. Merwin, "The Stranger"
Susan Mitchell, "Havana Birth"
A. F. Moritz, "Protracted Episode"
Thylias Moss, "The Warmth of Hot Chocolate"
Brighde Mullins, "At the Lakehouse"
Molly Peacock, "Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?"
Bob Perelman, "Movie"
Carl Phillips, "A Mathematics of Breathing"
Kay Ryan, "Outsider Art"
Grace Schulman, "The Present Perfect"
David Shapiro, "The Seasons"
rdCharles Simic, "Country Fair"
Charles Simic, "The Something"
Gary Snyder, "Ripples on the Surface"
Mark Strand, "Reading in Place"
Mark Strand, "From Dark Harbor"
Mark Strand, "Morning, Noon and Night"
May Swenson, "Sleeping with Boa"
Derek Walcott, "Omeros"
Rosanna Warren, "The Cormorant"
Rosanna Warren, "Diversion"
Susan Wheeler, "What Memory Reveals"
Richard Wilbur, "Lying"
Richard Wilbur, "A Wall in the Woods: Cummington"
Charles Wright, "Disjecta Membra"
Jay Wright, "Madrid"
Jay Wright, "The Cradle Logic of Autumn"
Contributors' Notes and Comments
Excerpts from the Introductions with Headnotes by David Lehman
John Ashbery
Donald Hall
Jorie Graham
Mark Strand
Charles Simic
Louise Glück
A. R. Ammons
Richard Howard
Adrienne Rich
James Tate
David Lehman
Acknowledgments
Cumulative Series Index
Interviews
On Tuesday, April 30th, the barnesandnoble.com Live Events Auditorium concluded its celebration of National Poetry Month by welcoming yet another brilliant poet in his own right and the editor responsible for drawing attention to some of America's most beautiful words for the past ten years, David Lehman, the series editor of the Best American Poetry books. He joined us to chat about the greatest poems from some of the most gifted voices of the past decade, collected in THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY: 1988-1997.
Moderator: Welcome, David Lehman, and thank you so much for joining us to bring such a wonderful close to National Poetry Month. Before we begin, do you have any opening comments for our online audience?
Harold Bloom: It's wonderful to be here as National Poetry Month the Third comes to its close.
Arthur Gabe from Fresno, CA: In the last two years we've lost two heavyweights in the poetry world: Joseph Brodsky and Octavio Paz. How will each of them be remembered?
Harold Bloom: Not only Brodsky and Paz; also a number of other brilliant poets have passed away. James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Jane Kenyon, William Matthews, James Laughlin: a sad list. They will be remembered, all; their works will continue to be read.
Melissa from Rutgers U.: In your opinion, what's the best method of teaching poetry? Joseph Brodsky used to make his students memorize every poem they studied and then analyze the poem word by word. Does that work for you?
Harold Bloom: I think memorization is a great way to study poetry. There's no substitute for it, in fact. Poems memorized when one is young stay on in one's consciousness forever, it seems. How nice to be able to walk past a field of daffodils and recite the last stanza of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" to your companion.
Tim Green from Virginia: How closely do you work with each editor of the series? By the way, I liked your story about Louise Gluck -- what were the two of you betting on?
Harold Bloom: Glad you liked the story about Louise's wager. I loved having her poem -- and knowing that I was responsible for stimulating it into existence. I have been sworn to secrecy regarding the circumstances of the wager.
Robert Axler from California: You write in the introduction that you never expected this series to last. Why do you think it has lasted for 10 years?
Harold Bloom: Because there is, in fact, an audience for American poetry. It's just that we need to employ as much imagination to find and reach that audience as we use in writing our poems. BEST AMERICAN POETRY seems to have a lot of features readers like -- such as the poets' comments on their poems, and the addresses of the magazines from which the poems were culled, and the editor's introduction, and so forth, all of which help render the poetry more accessible to the reader.
Jean T. from Ft. Lauderdale, FL: The title of your book seems to elicit strong responses. What is it about the word "best" that gets poets going?
Harold Bloom: The word "best" brings out a dirty little secret (or not so little): That poets are just like everyone else in being competitive -- in wanting to be the best. But there is also this notion of false modesty; the poet isn't supposed to let on that he or she is striving for immortal glory and worldly fame. So the anthologist may be tempted to fudge things a little. BEST AMERICAN POETRY can accommodate the guest editor who is suspicious of superlatives. But I think the fact that we unabashedly declare this volume each year to be America's best -- I think that's a gutsy thing to do. It gets everyone excited, and I think that's a good thing.
Mspinner@aol.com from NY: What was it like working with Harold Bloom? Is his scholarship as intense as rumored?
Harold Bloom: Harold is a genius. He has a prodigious memory and, in his words, a scandalously rapid reading rate. In some ways he resembles a combination of Oscar Wilde, Zero Mostel, and an Old Testament prophet. His commitment to poetry, his love of it, is so intense and so passionate that it seems he can't express himself in moderate tones -- as the intro he wrote for BEST OF THE BEST surely demonstrates.
Effie Darlington from Darien, CT: Poetry is slowing seeping into the collective American consciousness -- National Poetry Month, Poetry in Motion, volumes of love sonnets left on Amtrak trains...Maya Angelou -- to name a few. How do you account for the craze?
Harold Bloom: Not sure it's a craze, but unquestionably poetry has been having a great decade. One reason: the widening of the audience thanks to such new developments as Poetry Slams. We've had a proliferation of poetry readings -- at Barnes & Noble superstores, on college campuses, at high-brow literary centers like the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and at hip downtown divey bars like KGB on East Fourth Street. Our Poets Laureate have been activists. Maya Angelou's inaugural ode didn't hurt either.
Janine from Park Slope, NY: I have admired your work, both your poetry, and for tackling the task of putting together THE BEST OF THE BEST through all these years. Has your idea of the way the anthology should take shape changed over the past decade? If so, how has the development of the project shown itself in the different anthologies?
Harold Bloom: Thanks for the compliments. Check out www.poems.com -- it's a web site devoted to poetry that has been posting my daily poems this month. (I've been writing a poem a day as an experiment.) Each year's anthology revises the Platonic notion of the anthology in some subtle but significant way. Or so it seems.
Anne Daneker from Swarthmore, PA: What does it take to make it into THE BEST OF THE BEST?
Harold Bloom: With this volume, as with all previous volumes, the guest editor's decisions are final. I can argue until I'm blue in the face. Sometimes I do. In the end, it's the guest editor's criteria that are decisive.
Shoshana from Albany, NY: I wonder if you could tell us how working on the series feeds your own work as a poet (which is wonderful -- I love VALENTINE PLACE and have been reading your daily poems on the web site) and if you could tell us about your forthcoming book about the New York poets.
Harold Bloom: Several of my poems were written for the anthology; in 1997 I wasn't sure how to conclude my foreword to Jim Tate's book when it occurred to me to write a conclusion in the form of an abecedarium -- a poem of 26 lines whose first letters recapitulate the alphabet from A to Z. I guess I'm the sort of writer who needs to juggle three projects or so to feel really alive. I've just finished my book about the New York School of poets that you allude to. It's called THE LAST AVANT-GARDE, and Doubleday will publish it in the fall. And sometimes while working on prose, or on editing an anthology, the greatest thing is to steal 10 minutes to write a poem. It's like a holiday. For some writers absolute tranquillity is needed. But I like noise, and activity, and pressure, and even deadlines.
Elise from New York City: I am interested in your Daily Poem project on www.poems.com. How did that project come about, and what is it like to write a poem a day? Are you in the middle of a-poem-a-day streak now? If so, how far into the streak are you?
Harold Bloom: The streak is up to 32, I think. My longest streak was about 140 or so poems in 1996. I wrote a poem every day between February 20th or so and July 17th that year. It can't be a coincidence that I started doing these at the same time as I was working on a book about the New York poets, because some of them -- Frank O'Hara in particular, but also James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, and others -- experimented in this vein. You know O'Hara's LUNCH POEMS, for example, written on his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art. I had just completed VALENTINE PLACE, and I suppose my imagination was fired up by the possibility of doing something very different. And then along came Robert Bly -- he came to lecture at Bennington College, where I teach in the low-residency MFA writing program twice a year, and told us about his daily poems. He had gotten the idea from William Stafford. So I began doing mine, and I think I've never enjoyed writing poetry as much as I have done during this period.
Lisa from Oklahoma: Can you write a poem, right now, on the spot?
Harold Bloom: I probably could.
You probably would.
He possibly should.
She peremptorily did.
We weren't amused.
You weren't refused.
They didn't feel used.
The nouns decline
in verbal abuse
but do I pine
for an Oklahoman muse?
Dave from Arlington: Can you tell us three poets we should keep our eyes on for the next century?
Harold Bloom: There's a wonderful Polish poet named Adam Zagajewski. There are terrific American poets whose distinguishing feature is their wonderful comic energy -- poets such as Billy Collins, Paul Violi, Denise Duhamel, Nin Andrews, Amy Gerstler, Catherine Bowman. Just to name a few.
Madison from Clinton, NY: Of all the guest editors, who do you think came closest to your own vision of what THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY should be?
Harold Bloom: A great question, but one that I would find it very difficult to answer. I've been very lucky to have had the experience of collaborating with an amazing sequence of poets: Ashbery, Hall, Graham, Strand, Simic, Gluck, Ammons, Howard, Rich, Tate -- I name them the way Yeats names his heroes in a poem.
Matt from New York: What was the first poem you ever memorized? Can you recite it right now??
Harold Bloom: I can still recite from memory several of Antony's speeches from "Julius Caesar," which I and all other ninth graders of my generation were supposed to read.
Kalle from Georgia: Does anything go when writing poetry today? Do accomplished poets need to abide by the rigid standards set by the PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS?
Harold Bloom: I like a distinction Ashbery once made: not that "anything goes," but that "anything can come out."
Paul from AOL: Who, in your opinion, has displayed the most comprehensive and thought-provoking poetry analysis in this decade?
Harold Bloom: Most of the best writing on poetry this decade has been done by poets themselves. Professors, who once were expected to write practical criticism, have -- with a few cherished exceptions -- shirked the task. It seems clear that of all critics who are not themselves poets two with the greatest influence are Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler.
Greg from Montreal: How does one teach poetry? I'm a seventh-grade teacher looking for innovative ways to communicate poetry's wealth to my students.
Harold Bloom: Have them write poems. Give them specific assignments -- such as the ones Kenneth Koch came up with in his books ROSE, WHERE DID YOU GET THAT RED? and WISHES, LIES, AND DREAMS. Do a group poem. Have everybody write a poem in which each line includes a color, the name of a famous person, and a game. Have them write poems in imitation of specific writers. All of these are ways of going about it. There are lots of ways to do it. Just be sure to give them the freedom not to be pious or sentimental. Make them see that poetry is continuous with being a kid.
Phil from Harvard: How do you choose your guest editorship?
Harold Bloom: I agonize over the decision. I discuss possible candidates with my agent, with a few trusted friends, with my editor at Scribner, and with the previous guest editors (who form a sort of advisory editorial board).
Joe from Detroit, MI: Although the written poem is a great art form and does leave much to interpretation and imagination, don't you think that the spoken poem is also a vital part of advancing interest in poetry?
Harold Bloom: I do!
Cecilia from Salto, Uruguay: Do you include any "best of the best" American writers that write in native Spanish?
Harold Bloom: One rule of the series is that the poems must be in English. We have had a couple of poems that have included vast chunks of Spanish in them. Take a look at THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich, for example.
ALK from Cyberspace: Adrienne Rich's choices for the volume of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1996 deviated quite a bit from what readers of this series are used to. What was the response to her selections in the highly sensitive poetry community? Did normal shoo-ins feel left out?
Harold Bloom: Her book was hotly debated. But then it seems that each year's anthology arouses plenty of debate, some passionate admiration, a bit of ire, and even a test tube of love.
Joe from Detroit, MI: Aside from its obvious artistic value, what importance does poetry have in an age of technology over tradition?
Harold Bloom: Poetry is marvelously compatible -- as few people would have predicted -- with electronic forms of technology such as email. I know that email has affected my own writing; and in general I believe that poetry is conditioned, to some extent, by the fastest means of communication available at the time. The typewriter had a big effect on poetry (consider e. e. cummings) and so did the telephone (think of Frank O'Hara's "Personism") and now comes the Internet with the possibility, or the illusion, of instant transmission. It's very exciting. It has incited a few poems out of me, I know that.
Dave from Washington, D.C.: Did you attend the poetry slam at the White House last week?
Harold Bloom: No, I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, giving a reading, a lecture, and two workshops. I have talked to a dozen people who were at the White House, and I've read the transcript. James Tate went, and so did Jorie Graham and John Ashbery and Bill Wadsworth and Jaye McCulloch. On the other hand, among the absentees were Mark Strand, Charlie Simic, and Charles Wright.
Daniel Fitzgerald from Framingham, MA: What's the best way to get to know a poem?
Harold Bloom: Reading it over and over until you've almost involuntarily memorized it.
Marlene from Baton Rouge, LA: Robert Frost said that "the aim was song" when writing poetry. Is that still the case for poets at the end of the 20th century?
Harold Bloom: Sound and sense, sound and sense: You can't have one without the other any more than you can have a horse without a carriage, to use a charming if obsolete simile.
Jennifer Giore from Albuquerque, NM: Simple question -- who is your favorite poet of all time. Of today?
Harold Bloom: My favorite contemporary poet is John Ashbery. But I do love so many...
Shoshana from Albany, NY: I wonder if you could tell us how working on the series feeds your own work as a poet (which is wonderful -- I love VALENTINE PLACE and have been reading your daily poems on the Poetry Daily web site) and if you could tell us about your forthcoming book about the New York poets.
Harold Bloom: Thanks for the repeat question. THE LAST AVANT-GARDE, about the New York poets, is nearing completion. I'm just writing captions for the photographs in the pictorial insert.
D from Bradenton, FL: What is the image on the cover of the latest BEST OF THE BEST?
Harold Bloom: The cover picture is by Saul Steinberg, the great New Yorker cartoonist. I wanted some all-American images, and here were a pair of them: the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. flag. The whole composition seemed irresistible, and I've long admired Mr Steinberg's work. He is leery of having it reproduced on book jackets, and I, my editor at Scribner, and my friend the poet John Hollander (who's friends with Steinberg) all put in our hours persuading him to give us permission to reprint it. The picture is called "Allegory" and is dated 1982.
James from Rochester, NY: When you were on your 140-day poem-a-day streak, what caused you to stop?
Harold Bloom: Fatigue.
Terry from Maine: In his essay in THE BEST OF THE BEST, Harold Bloom takes issue with the 1996 edition of the series. Were you surprised by this? Where do you think his animosity comes from?
Harold Bloom: I knew that Bloom's idea of poetry was bound to conflict with Adrienne's. But I had no idea that his opposition to her volume would be so vehement. I think that some people involved with poetry are so passionate about their predilections that they are, in a way, gladiators championing their heroes and heroines. They are fated to joust with anyone who disagrees. In a sense Adrienne and Harold have this in common -- only that they happen to be at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Paul W. from Tulsa: Will there be a Best American Poetry volume of the century? The millennium is coming, ya know...
Harold Bloom: The 1998 edition of BEST AMERICAN POETRY, with choices made by John Hollander, is in galleys right now. Copies should be in bookstores in late August. I am currently reading toward BAP 1999 with that year's appointed guest editor. The guest editor of BAP 2000 is in place and will begin work on that volume as this year comes to a close.
Teresa from Greenwich Village: Having interviewed poets for this series as well as for your book ECSTATIC OCCASIONS, EXPEDIENT FORMS, would you say that poets are pretty open to discussing their work?
Harold Bloom: Yes, I think so. Of course you can tell a lot about a poet not only from the substance of what he or she says but also from the way in which it is said. Some are reticent, some verbose; some highly personal, some quite abstract. For the most part, however, I would say that poets are very eager to help prepare their readers -- to help, as Wordsworth put it, create the taste by which they (the poets) shall be enjoyed.
Nora from Tulsa, OK: How is the biographical information on poets and commentary on the poetry accumulated? Do you interview each poet?
Harold Bloom: After the guest editor chooses the 75 best poems of the year, we track them down and ask them to give us biographical information and a comment on the chosen poem. Sometimes poets are too busy to oblige or are disinclined to do so, and if I know the poet, I might make an extra effort. I have taken comments over the phone, the fax, by email, you name it. I'm a pretty persistent person, and if I think it'll help the book I'll go for it.
Suzanne G. from Los Angeles: When will your next book of poems come out?
Harold Bloom: My next book of poems will probably be a collection of my daily poems under the title THE DAILY MIRROR. It will begin with January 1st and end with December 31st. Right now there are about 300 candidates. I doubt I'll include them all. I'll probably submit the manuscript to my editor at Scribner next winter. But that's just a guess.
Quietpleze@aol.com from Louisiana: Where are you teaching right now?
Harold Bloom: I teach at NYU ("Great Poems") in the fall; at the New School's graduate writing program, fall and spring; and in Bennington College's low-residency MFA program year-round.
James from America Online: Do you have a favorite edition of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY series?
Harold Bloom: Ask a mother which of her kids she loves the best and you'll get my answer to this question.
Ellie Baxter from New York City: I know you've been writing a daily poem for www.poems.com. Where does your inspiration come from to write these poems?
Harold Bloom: Inspiration isn't like lightning that you have to wait for. You can generate your own inspiration, I find. That's what poetry is, or one thing that poetry is: a means of conjuring up inspiration, or getting in touch with the inspiration that should come as naturally as breathing.
Ray Gold from North Dakota: Where do you find all of the poetry that you include in the yearly volumes? What are your sources?
Harold Bloom: We, the year's guest editor and I, read as many magazines as we can get our hands on. There's a lot of great work out there, and no team of readers can really keep pace with it all. But we do our best. The magazines that serve as our sources are listed toward the back of each year's edition.
Miriam from Boston, MA: When you are teaching poetry, is there a poem you find you always begin with or return to?
Harold Bloom: It changes all the time. In Tulsa last week I found myself returning obsessively to Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, a certain John Donne poem ("The Canonization"), Ted Berrigan (probably because he spent five years in Tulsa), and others. I happen to be in an Emily Dickinson mode these days -- reading her last summer, I found that she was tearing the top of my head off, to quote her own criterion for judging a poem's excellence.
Amy from Las Vegas, NE: In choosing the poems for each year, what are your criteria?
Harold Bloom: That's a fine question; I could easily devote 10,000 words to the answer!
Moderator: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer all of our questions, David Lehman. We are pleased you could spend the last evening of National Poetry Month with us discussing THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY. Do you have any final comments for the online audience?
Harold Bloom: It's been a pleasure -- I hope as much for the online audience as for me. Watch out for BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1998: There will be some surprises in it. Thank you all.