The Best American Poetry 1999

by David Lehman

Overview

The 1999 edition of The Best American Poetry will exceed the expectations of the many thousands of readers who eagerly await the annual arrival of this "truly memorable anthology" (Chicago Tribune). Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator — famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, Iron John — has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1999 reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684860039
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	09/08/1999
Series:	Best American Poetry Series
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Read an Excerpt

DICK ALLEN

The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader

Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America

who reads poems

and who walks at night in the suburbs,

calling the moon names.

And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns

a house with bookshelves,

who drives to work without a CD player,

taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.

No one else, in all America,

quotes William Meredith verbatim,

cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;

keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed.

Sometimes I think no other man alive

is changed by poetry, has fought

as utterly as I have over "Sunday Morning"

and vowed to love those difficult as Pound.

No one else has seen a luna moth

flutter over Iowa, or watched

a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,

and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.

This country wide, I'm the only man

who spends his money recklessly on thin

volumes unreviewed, enjoys

the long appraising look of check-out girls.

How could another in America know why

the laundry from a window laughs,

and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck

feels like — and craft?

I think that I'm the only man who speaks

of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;

for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm;

who can't stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest.

The only man, in all America, who feeds

on something darker than his politics,

who writes in margins and who earmarks pages —

in all America, I am the only man.

from The Café Review

JOHN BALABAN

Story

The guy picked me up north of Santa Fe

where the red hills, dotted with piñon,

loop down from the Divide into mesas and plain.

I was standing out there

— just me, my pack, and the gila monsters —

when he hauled his Buick off the road

in a sputter of cinders and dust.

And got out, a gray-bearded, 6-foot, 300-pounder,

who stretched and said, "Do you want to drive?"

So I drove and he told me the story of his life.

How his father was a Russian Jew

who got zapped by the Mob during Prohibition,

how he quit school at fifteen

and got a job as a DJ in Detroit,

how he sold flatware on the road and made a mint,

how he respected his wife, but didn't love her,

how he hit it big in radio and TV, how he fell in love,

how he found himself, at 50, in intensive care

with his wife, his kids, his girlfriend, and rabbi

huddled in silence about his bed

when his doctor came in and whispered

that maybe he ought to ask the wife,

and the girlfriend, to alternate visits

"because it wasn't too good for his heart."

"What about your kids?" I asked. "What do they do?"

"My daughter runs our store. My son is dead."

He studied the Rockies and didn't continue.

"What did he die of?"

"He died of suicide.

No, that's not right....Nixon killed him.

My son was a sweet kid, hated guns and violence

and then, during that fucking war, he hijacked a plane

and flew it to Cuba. He shot himself in Havana."

He watched the road, then grinned and said,

"Brave little fucker, wasn't he?"

from Verse

COLEMAN BARKS

Bill Matthews Coming Along

(1942-1997)

They say the best French wines have terroir, meaning the taste of the lay of the land that works through and gets held in the wine, the bouquet of a particular hillside and of the care of those who work there.

When I see Bill Matthews coming along, I see and taste the culture of the world, a lively city, a university campus during Christmas break, a few friendly straggling scholars and artists. I taste the delight of language and desire and music. I see a saint of the great impulse that takes us out at night, to the opera, to the ballgame, to a movie, to poetry, a bar of music, a bar of friends.

When I see Bill Matthews stopped at the end of a long hall, I see my soul waiting for me to catch up, patient, demanding, wanting truth no matter what, the goofiest joke, the work with words we're here to do, saying how it is with emptiness and changing love, and the unchanging. Now I see his two tall sons behind him.

Bill would not say it this way; he might even start softly humming Amazing Grace if I began my saying, but I go on anyway: god is little g, inside out, a transparency that drenches everything you help us notice: a red blouse, those black kids crossing Amsterdam, braving the cabs, a nun. You sweet theologian, you grew new names for god: gourmet, cleaning woman, jazz, spring snow.

What fineness and finesse. I love Bill Matthews, and I did not have near enough time walking along with him, talking books and ideas, or sitting down to drink the slant and tender face of Provence.

from Figdust

Copyright © 1999 by David Lehman

Foreword copyright © 1999 by David Lehman

Introduction copyright © 1999 by Robert Bly

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword by David Lehman

Introduction by Robert Bly

Dick Allen, "The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader"

John Balaban, "Story"

Coleman Barks, "Bill Matthews Coming Along (1942-1997)"

George Bilgere, "Catch"

Elizabeth Bishop, "Foreign-Domestic"

Chana Bloch, "Tired Sex"

Philip Booth, "Narrow Road, Presidents' Day"

John Brehm, "Sea of Faith"

Hayden Carruth, "Because I Am"

Lucille Clifton, "the mississippi river empties into the gulf"

Billy Collins, "Dharma"

Robert Creeley, "Mitch"

Lydia Davis, "Betrayal"

Debra Kang Dean, "Taproot"

Chard deNiord, "Pasternak"

Russell Edson, "Madam's Heart"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "A Buddha in the Woodpile"

Dan Gerber, "My Father's Fields"

Louise Glück, "Vita Nova"

Ray Gonzalez, "Breastbone"

John Haines, "The Last Election"

Donald Hall, "Smile"

Jennifer Michael Hecht, "September"

Bob Hicok, "What Would Freud Say?"

Jane Hirshfield, "The Envoy"

Tony Hoagland, "Lawrence"

John Hollander, "Beach Whispers"

Amy Holman, "Man Script"

David Ignatow, "The Story of Progress"

Gray Jacobik, "The Circle Theatre"

Josephine Jacobsen, "Last Will and Testament"

Louis Jenkins, "Two Prose Poems"

Mary Karr, "The Patient"

X.J. Kennedy, "A Curse on a Thief"

Galway Kinnell, "Why Regret?"

Carolyn Kizer, "The Erotic Philosophers"

Ron Koertge, "1989"

Yusef Komunyakaa, "Scapegoat"

William Kulik, "The Triumph of Narcissus and Aphrodite"

James Laughlin, "Nunc Dimittis"

Dorianne Laux, "The Shipfitter's Wife"

Li-Young Lee, "The Sleepless Grape"

Denise Levertov, "First Love"

Philip Levine, "The Return"

David Mamet, "A Charade"

Gigi Marks, "The Swim"

William Matthews, "Misgivings"

Wesley McNair, "The Characters of Dirty Jokes"

Czeslaw Milosz, "A Ball"

Joan Murray, From "Sonny's Hands"

Sharon Olds, "What It Meant"

Mary Oliver, "Flare"

Franco Pagnucci, "And Now"

Molly Peacock, "Say You Love Me"

David Ray, "Hemingway's Garden"

Adrienne Rich, "Seven Skins"

Alberto Rios, "Writing from Memory"

Kay Ryan, "That Will to Divest"

Sonia Sanchez, "Last recording session/for papa joe"

Revan Schendler, "The Public and the Private Spheres"

Myra Shapiro, "Longing and Wonder"

Charles Simic, "Barber College Haircut"

Louis Simpson, "A Shearling Coat"

Thomas R. Smith, "Housewarming"

Marcia Southwick, "A Star Is Born in the Eagle Nebula"

William Stafford, "Ways to Live"

Peggy Steele, "The Drunkard's Daughter"

Ruth Stone, "A Moment"

Larissa Szporluk, "Deer Crossing the Sea"

Diane Thiel, "The Minefield"

David Wagoner, "Thoreau and the Crickets"

Richard Wilbur, "This Pleasing Anxious Being"

C.K. Williams, "Archetypes"

Charles Wright, "American Twilight"

Timothy Young, "The Thread of Sunlight"

Contributors' Notes and Comments

Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

People A year's worth of the very best.

From the Publisher

Book of Days

The Best American Poetry series, launched in 1988 by David Lehman, has for the last ten years been a reliable source of hope for those discouraged by reports of the dwindling importance of good poetry in America. Each year, the series presents a surprising number of excellent American poems with an introductory essay by that year's poet-editor, who, after travelling through 12 months of the country's journals and magazines, returns with an evangel as promising as it is temperate. This year's messenger is Robert Bly, and his tidings are glad.

Bly is no stranger to the role. As founding editor of the literary journal The Fifties (and, in due time, The Sixties and The Seventies) he spent many crucial years monitoring the progress of the written word. In recent years Bly has achieved some fame with his book Iron John, which quickly became a classic of the men's movement, but his true place in American literature is as a poet, translator, editor, and defender of poetic style amidst its slow deconstruction by forces vast and unseen.

Style is where Bly begins. In his introduction, he writes that, "It's possible that...style amounts to recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which one became an adult." Bly's own maturation (he was born in 1926) took place in the 1950s, when he discovered the poets Pablo Neruda, Caesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, and others. His translations of these poets and others are among the best and, collected, along with several of his essays in Leaping Poetry, introduced many an American poet to what Bly called the "leaping" style of international modernism. Formed as they were by apprenticeship to these masters (the South Americans in particular), Bly's tastes run to the simplicity of phrase and complexity of thought characteristic of their poetry.

Bly calls this quality "heat" and finds a wave of it in the current American poetry. There is the heat of arrival, the heat that comes from placing formal demands upon language, the heat of wit, the heat of nature. Heat, by Bly's definition, is a property of poets that are able to deliver unto the souls of their readers the things of their poems. Environmental developments have threatened this poetic grain, since, unlike the world it describes, the word is plagued by global cooling. Says Bly, "My main thought is that we, in 1999, being so worldly, so informed, so flooded with motifs from the past, find it more and more difficult to allow any object, whether a snowstorm or a toad or a painting, to pass through our subtle chambers to reach the soul." The best writing happens when the poet is able to struggle past these seductions and plunge the reader directly into contact with the object. A tall order, but one that the poets in this volume fill again and again. All in all, it seems to have been a very hot year.

Accepting Bly's idea about heat, and noticing the appropriateness of the late-August publication date, I came to see the volume as a compendium of high temperatures, a Summer of a collection -- the poems corresponding to the dog days themselves, the gradual march through the alphabet of poets' names to the humid passage from month to month. Lehman's preface and Bly's introduction stand as early-May forecasts; then the summer begins. Chana Bloch's "Tired Sex" has the feel of a day hot enough to suspend all faculties but the speaker's wry, tired wit, which, left alone, delivers a concise perception:

           Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --
           You ought to read it, she said.
           It's great literature.

Ruth Stone's "A Moment" is another hot day. Though the poem describes a day in late winter, it has all the languid heat of a midsummer afternoon. The speaker and her daughter are sitting in a parking lot. "Across the highway a heron stands / in the flooded field. It stands / as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless, / as if the field belonged to herons." The poem swells with heat. Each short sentence seems to bulge into the silence of the poem like the hours of a hot, listless day. The poem finishes with

           For a moment the wall between us
           opens to the universe;
           then closes.
           And you go on saying
           you do not want to repeat my life.

Bly says that this poem has the "heat of arrival," by which he means that it gets us somewhere and wastes no time doing so. Every sentence bears down on that last line.

Phillip Levine's "The Return" is another poem that has this heat of arrival. After reading his father's journal for the first time, the 70-year-old Levine flies to Detroit, rents a car, and goes in search of a grove of apple trees mentioned in the journal. He finds it, steps inside, and the poem ends with these four lines:

           I took off my hat, a mistake in the presence
           of my father's God, wiped my brow with what I had,
           the back of my hand, and marveled at what was here:
           nothing at all except the stubbornness of things.

Levine's arrival is a disappointment of sorts, but a marvelous one. The heat in his poem may be more aptly described as a friction of the mind that wants to know moving against the unwillingness of objects to reveal themselves. Paramount, of course, is the friction of the son trying to know his dead father.

Objects are stubborn; words are stubborn, too. Here we have an excellent collection of poems that struggle against this stubbornness of words. Other scorchers include a previously unpublished, and rhetorically lovely, poem by Elizabeth Bishop; John Brehm's funny and inspiring "Sea of Faith"; Czeslaw Milosz's "A Ball"; Charles Simic's "Barber College Haircut"; William Stafford's posthumous "Ways to Live," a poem that seems to confirm Stafford's practice of writing before dawn; and Richard Wilbur's finely-wrought "This Pleasing Anxious Being."

—Jacob Silverstein

bn.com

Now in its 12th year, the Best American franchise is perhaps the biggest-selling in poetry. Each year, poet and critic Lehman taps a different gray (or graying) eminence to help choose 75 or so poems from the nation's literary magazines. This year's guest editor, Iron John author and midwestern surrealist Robert Bly (Eating the Honey of Words; Forecasts, Mar 29), has followed his predecessors in the series--John Hollander, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom, to name a few--by choosing poems that complement his own style and tendencies. Short, crypto-surreal works by Franco Pagnucci, Thomas R. Smith and Peggy Steele strongly recall Bly's work from the '60s, while Charles Wright, Lydia Davis, Gray Jacobik, and John Balaban turn in halcyon tableaux and wistful vignettes worthy of the superlative in the title. The rest of the book is mainly divided between the academic--many of the poems are tributes to well-established literary men (Thoreau, Hemingway, Pasternak, Lawrence, Kierkegaard, Freud)--the poor-spirited (Dick Allen's unfunny "The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader"; John Brehm's half-apologetic account of hating his students in "Sea of Faith") and the (more or less probingly) self-involved. As with many anthologies, the Table of Contents and Contributors' Notes make significant reading on their own. Forty percent of this year's contributors are women; at least 45% were born before the U.S. entered World War II; one could further break things down by race, class or region, and find the collection thoughtfully put together. But Bly's test for best-ness, he notes in his preface, was "heat" ("heat of friendship"; "heat of form"; "heat of the blues"; etc.), which excludes, for example, Language-oriented writing, because "those poets work very hard to drain all the meaning out of the words they use." No matter how well-constructed or demographically correct the poems included may be, these empty categories and dismissals don't justify the bland, predictable self-affirmation Bly's choices finally reflect. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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