Best American Poetry 2005

9780743257589

0743257588

Foreword by David Lehman There are many reasons for the surge in prestige and popularity that American poetry has enjoyed, but surely some credit has to go to the initiatives of poets and other interested parties. Some of these projects involve a media event or program; just about all of them end in an anthology. Catherine Bowman had the idea of covering poetry for NPR's All Things Considered, and the book of poems culled from her radio reports, Word of Mouth (Vintage, 2003), makes a lively case for the art. The Favorite Poem Project launched by Robert Pinsky when he was U.S. Poet Laureate -- in which ordinary citizens recite favorite poems for an archive and sometimes for a live TV audience -- has generated two anthologies, most recently An Invitation to Poetry (edited by Pinsky, Maggie Dietz, and Rosemarie Ellis; W. W. Norton, 2004). Billy Collins, when he was Poet Laureate, campaigned to get the high school teachers of America to read a poem aloud each school day, and selected an academic year's worth for Poetry 180 (Random House, 2003) and an equal amount for 180 More (Random House, 2005). The success of the Poetry Daily website led Diane Boller, Don Selby, and Chryss Yost to organize Poetry Daily on the model of a calendar (Sourcebooks, 2003). The calendar is also a driving principle for Garrison Keillor, whose Good Poems (Penguin, 2003) collects poems he has read on his Writer's Almanac show, which airs on public radio five (in some areas seven) days a week.The last several years have given us, in addition, high-quality anthologies organized around themes (Isn't It Romantic, eds. Aimee Kelley and Brett Fletcher Lauer; Verse Press, 2004); genres (Blues Poems, ed. Kevin Young; Everyman's Library, 2003), and historical periods (Poets of the Civil War, ed. J. D. McClatchy; Library of America, 2005). The number and variety of these (and yet other) anthologies make a double point about the poetry-reading public: it is larger than critics grant though smaller than many of us would like it to be; it reflects a period of eclectic taste rather than one dominated by an orthodoxy, as American poetry fifty years ago seemed dominated by the T. S. Eliot-inflected New Criticism.As a rule, poetry anthologies receive even less critical attention than individual collections, but Keillor's Good Poems had a curious fate. Two reviews of the book appeared in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, the venerable Chicago-based magazine that inherited more than $100 million from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly in 2002. Both reviews were written by respected poets. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia wrote a courtly piece, employing a familiar book-reviewing strategy: begin with advance doubts (anticipation of "good poems, but probably not good enough"), acknowledge relief (pleasure in Keillor's "high spirits and determination to have fun, even when talking about poetry"), and progress to appreciation of the finished product. Gioia complimented the anthologist on "the intelligent inclusion of neglected writers" and praised Keillor for his Writer's Almanac show. Keillor "has probably done more to expand the audience of American poetry over the past ten years than all the learned journals of New England," Gioia wrote. He "has engaged a mass audience without either pretension or condescension."When you turned the page to August Kleinzahler's critique of Keillor's anthology, your eyebrows had to go up. It was less a review than an attack on the Minnesota-based creator of public radio's long-running Prairie Home Companion, a weekly variety show with skits, songs, a monologue from the host, and occasionally poems from a visiting poet. Kleinzahler called the Companion "comfort food for the philistines, a contemporary, bittersweet equivalent to the Lawrence Welk Show of years past." Tha