Scarriet

There is no individual who more publicly stands for public poetry in America than David Lehman.

He loves the poem on the Statue of Liberty. He has discussed the war poems of Homer and Auden and Harvey Shapiro in an essay commissioned by the U.S. government. He’s freelanced for Newsweek and the New York Times. His early travels in academia brought him into contact with Lionel Trilling and John Ashbery. As an author, he’s attacked Paul de Man (when that wasn’t academically fashionable to do), and celebrated the “genius” of Jewish Songwriters.

I don’t know him, but he sounds like a great guy—a New Yorker with a sense of humor; someone to be envied—if he weren’t so nice.

His long-running Best American Poetry Series, launched in the late 80s after he received his PhD at Columbia, has featured Harold Bloom, Billy Collins, and Jorie Graham, and more recently Pulitzer Prize winning poets who no one—except maybe their students and David Lehman—reads.

He is a poet, too—but as a public figure who works more than any person alive for poetry, the Muse has made fatefully certain that no one pays any attention to his poetry.

Did we call him a public figure?

Perhaps we should also call him a pubic figure. Read (if you dare) his poem, “The Road To Help:”

A thong of beauty is a joy forever.
The panty’s over; it’s time to call it a lay.
The shadow of the come of pleasure
and naked shingles of the world
are here, under the bush, with her hair.
For Hamlet and Lear are queer.

Myself am help. Shall I part my bare behind?
God bless the grind! I shall walk softly there.
The paths of Laurie lead but to the grove
of coral babes and amber studs
with black belts in the marital arts.
Of his boners are coral made.

“Dope” is the thing with feathers.
The love of monkey is the root of all evil.
Was she virgin or a waking dream?
“Deaf,” was all she answered.
‘Tis better to seek, to find, and now to yield
than never to have lust at all.

What sort of person would write this?

An extroverted scholar during loose times. David Lehman authoring this is not surprising at all.

In every Best American Poetry volume so far, Lehman, the Series Editor, writes an introduction (a foreword, actually)—and the Guest Editor follows with their introduction. In every case there has never been a hint of disagreement—why should there be?

It would be unseemly if Lehman made negative remarks on the choices made by guest-editor poets.

The public face of American Poetry—as exemplified by the inclusive, all-styles-are-welcome, face of David Lehman—has no cracks.

Harold Bloom edited Best American Poetry’s 10 year anniversary and did not include any poems from the 1996 edition edited by Adrienne Rich.

Lehman was able to eat his cake and have it. He interfered neither with Rich nor Bloom—who attacked Rich.

Lehman privately must have viewed Rich as humorless and exclusive, but he invited Rich as guest editor and gave her free reign—Lehman, the ultimate diplomat, cannot be faulted for that.

Lehman (moderate left) used Harold Bloom (moderate right) to correct Adrienne Rich (far left) while he, David Lehman, friendly and open to all, remained above the fray.

Brilliant.

Harold Bloom is no poet. (All universally lauded American poets are politically left—or apolitical.) But Bloom sure came in handy!

This year, however, in his 2022 Best American Poetry edition, David Lehman seems to have finally snapped.

The discriminating intellect, reading Lehman’s 2022 foreword, cannot help but notice that decades of patience may be coming to an end. Lehman is probably thinking to himself, “This product doesn’t represent me. What am I editing this series for?”

It no doubt has something to do with Matthew Zapruder, this year’s guest editor, something of a David Lehman himself—professor, poet, journalist, editor.

In past volumes, Lehman has more than hinted that selections for any year’s “best” are chosen by the guest editor—but with his (Lehman’s) suggestions very much a part of the mix. In the first volume, one of Lehman’s own poems (a metrical, humorous effort) was included. But none since.

Zapruder surely glanced at the few Lehman 2022 poem suggestions—and responded a little too quickly: “nah.”

There are no songs or metrics in the 2022 volume.

It is all prose.

A hasty check of Zapruder’s own poetry finds poems which are introspective, fact-filled, and often featuring that aggressive prose style which is absent of punctuation. At best: mildly interesting. At worst: soppy and didactic.

Personally, I think it might have been good for the Series if Lehman and his editors had agreed to clash in a friendly way a little. If Lehman had said, “I’m going to get five choices whether you like it or not. And I reserve the right to unveil our disagreements in my introduction if it will add interest.”

Lehman directly addresses the elephant in the room for the first time in this year’s foreword. Always the gentleman, he nonetheless sounds wounded. It begins:

“Years ago the rumor circulated that secretly it was I who picked the poems for the annual Best American Poetry.”

Notice it’s a “rumor” from “years ago” which Lehman has chosen to address now.

“Did anyone seriously believe that I could dictate to Charles Simic, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, Rita Dove, Robert Creeley, et al? On the face of it, the notion was absurd. The guest editor chooses the poems. His or her autonomy is guaranteed as a ground condition, and we go to pains to emphasize this fact.”

Lehman then goes on to heavily quote, and describe at length, a poem he obviously felt Zapruder should have included (“bawdy,” according to Lehman, and “scrupulously rhymed”) by none other than Vladimir Nabokov—published in March of 2021 by the Times Literary Supplement “that previously only a few scholars had read.”

I can only imagine the pleadings on the part of Lehman—who goes on to describe several more poems not included in the 2022 volume—describing pandemic life with (according to Lehman) formalist skill.

Maddening to Lehman must have been the fact that every Zapruder choice for the 2022 edition is retrospective, private, prosaic—exactly the kind of poem Zapruder writes. Countless lovely images, real-life incidents, phrases, ideas—stranded in prose notes for poems which never quite become poems.

The volume itself is what we have come to expect from Best American Poetry—filled with disappointments in the form of poems by better-known poets failing to impress, poems by young and lesser known poets failing to impress (making one ask, “the best? really?”) the best poems in the volume inevitably written by the old and reputable who have learned how to write with ease, at last. An example in this volume is a short poem by Louise Gluck; her humble but striking piece of sarcasm demolishes the very kind of pretense which Best American Poetry seems to embody—despite the fact that Lehman is such a fine fellow.

How often does Best American Poetry introduce a rising star, a new talent? Has it ever? This seems to be a problem; for 25 years, without exception, the Series has reflected a status quo already in place—one never feels a true search has been made for the best poems out there—no matter who wrote them. Names make it—poetry, only accidentally. And even if we give the Series its due and acknowledge that reputations and names do matter (they do) people can still ask that better poems be culled. David Lehman, can’t you fix this?

Zapruder has found a half-dozen, maybe a dozen, good poems—the typical batting average for the “Best” series, even if he didn’t include Vladimir Nabokov.

Zapruder sees everything through a private lens—Lehman through a public one.

Lehman wants that fusion between the public, the historical, and the private, and in some ways this is a greater sin than Zapruder’s, because poetry won’t be editorialized into greatness. Poetry doesn’t need to commemorate 2021, or any year, or any event, to be great, and when one begins to expect this, poetry becomes ignorantly factual or sentimentally public.

Poe, as usual, is the corrective: poems as dreams filled with music. Zapruder and Lehman are similar—they both want poems to be Moby Dick, full of interesting facts; but poems cannot be Moby Dick—and they cannot be dreams filled with music without music.

Prose poems are still the thing. I understand that. This is the path American poetry is on. The near-impossibility of writing good verse is the yapping dog which has herded respectable poets onto the path of prose. “Too prosaic and informational” is the pit poetry in the early 21st century must avoid.

The reconciling figure for the 2022 Best American Poetry volume seems to be Jason Koo and his “The Rest Is Silence,” the longest poem in the book—and thankfully not printed in the small font which mars four of the volume’s poems. “The Rest Is Silence” I imagine both Lehman and Zapruder genuinely liking. The honest and ambitious nature of the poem gets my admiration. Will using a famous line from “Hamlet” be enough to get this poem into the canon? It remains to be seen whether lines like the following will make Jason Koo famous:

17 out of 18 are White. These percentages
are typical. They’ve been so since I started here

***

you to your face you’re asking me a racist question
or explain you’re enjoying a racist innocence

***

LGBTQ interests but I was most interested
in what this man had to say as the lone Black

man in the audience, I assumed he was
going to offer support but then got a lesson

***

this Black Vietnam vet would have to suffer
the loss of his deck, I think she would’ve been

suspicious of any coalition of White interests
advancing upon a Black citizen’s autonomy,

and she definitely would’ve said something,
she would’ve braved the return fire, though

I don’t know if she would’ve said anything
about this bar, if she would’ve thought it worth

the unrest, but maybe calculations like this
prove our difference, my greater alignment

with Whiteness, my ability to choose rest
or unrest, when for her, the rest was silence.

from Copper Nickel

Laura Kasischke’s poem, “When a bolt of lightning falls in love” is another one of the book’s highlights.

For Best 2022 as a whole, it’s nice to see Lehman’s honesty—if it’s only a rather helpless cry from behind the curtains.

In front of the curtain, Zapruder is honest during his otherwise smarmy and dull introduction, which says “hope” is in our “dreaming” (poetry for Zapruder is apparently dream-diary):

“These are dire times. Often the question occurred to me, reading all these poets: What am I doing? Certain poems reminded me that there was possibility in language and thought, which gave me some hope. Yet I often felt convinced that none of this literary activity was going to make the slightest difference.”

Zapruder quickly abandons these confessional remarks—nothing further appears resembling “none of this literary activity was going to make the slightest difference.”

Lehman, too, after letting us see his agitation that poems he wanted were not included, ends his critical invective with: “If I were the guest editor of this volume, I would also pick something by Matthew Zapruder.”

As Napoleon said, “The surest way to remain poor is to be honest.”

Here’s to the best!