Best Two Out of Three

Why is it that fashions in poetry tend to be more arbitrary and rigid than fashions in other genres? This time that question is provoked by the current Best American Poetry (2007), which is probably the slimmest volume in that series and surely the narrowest in terms of selectivity. Anyone who has had occasion in the course of a year to leaf through a random sampling of the dozen or so best American literary magazines will know that our poetry landscape is not nearly so arid as the compilation at hand might lead one to conclude. One of the potential problems with this whole “Best” procedure (in addition to the ones reviewed here, there are now perhaps a dozen titles: Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Science and Nature Writing, etc.) is that the editors who are obliged to read thousands of works in the same genre will begin to value oddity for its own sake. Why that should be a greater temptation with poems than with stories or essays, I don’t know—but it certainly seems to have been the case for 2007. Indeed it is difficult to avoid the impression that the poetry editors’ governing criterion was quirkiness, especially formal and neologistic quirkiness. Heather McHugh is a self-confessed sucker for poems that contain words such as wrunkled, maudit, parlando, sparged, anhedonian, shtupfdin, seeched, jherricurls, obol, foogas, perilune, tsim tsum. “Jabberwocky” must be one of her all-time favorite poems.

In all three of these Best volumes, two editors means two introductions. David Lehman, the series editor, writes about poetry and parodies of poems, and reprints as central to his argument Matthew Arnold’s much parodied “Dover Beach”; he also quotes the poet Edward Dorn, who has called it “the greatest single poem ever written in the English language.” McHugh in her briefer introductory comments reprints “for sheer perspective” Emily Dickinson’s “Fame is the one that does not stay—.” Perhaps the “Best” poets of 2007 are further honored to share the same volume with Arnold and Dickinson; but the sad fact is that most of these new poems wither in the shadow of greatness. That is partly because only a few of the poems offer the pleasures traditionally associated with poetry. I am not at all inclined to disdain departures from tradition—as long as one has some notion of where she or he is going and does not blindly follow the current well-publicized pied piper or end up wandering around in a wilderness of her own making, living on roots, bark, and berries. On the other hand, not knowing or caring where one is going (as one begins a poem, a story, a novel) may be one of the defining qualities of postmodernism, along with quirkiness, intertextuality, playfulness, and form disguised as formlessness—all of which are in evidence here. In fairness there is occasional allegiance to tradition: several sonnets (if the term is loosely defined), a series of haiku, even an honest-to-god ghazal. There are also half-a-dozen poems that rhyme, which I was happy to see, having assumed that nowadays one had to be Stephen Sondheim or a rap-per to get away with such archaic behavior. Yet those rhyming poems do not seem to add up to much more than exercises in playfulness.

Play is a tricky concept. Johan Huizinga taught us long ago that it is fundamental, complex, and necessary; it is also a quality less respected in modern poetry than in modern prose and is less respected in either than in the visual arts. Is there a modern playful poet whose reputation ranks with that of Klee, Calder, Cornell, Steinberg? The virtual disappearance of light verse is one indication of how seriously poets take themselves at present (“virtual” by virtue of X. J...