The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman (The Best American Poetry series) - Hardcover

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9780743299763: The Best American Poetry 2009: Series Editor David Lehman (The Best American Poetry series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743299760 ISBN 13: 9780743299763

Publisher: Scribner, 2009

A twenty-second edition of the prestigious anthology combines pieces by established poets including Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, and Mark Doty with works by leading newcomers, in a volume that offers literary insight into the current state of contemporary poetry.

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About the Author:

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Foreword

by David Lehman

What is a poet? In his "Defense of Poetry," Shelley writes, "A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why." The solitude and sweet darkness, the emphasis on the unseen, the nightingale as the image of the poet, the listeners entranced but bewildered: how romantic this formulation is -- and how well it fits its author. Matthew Arnold alters the metaphor but retains something of its tone when he calls Shelley "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Kierkegaard in Either/Or goes further than either Shelley or Arnold in accentuating the negative. In a passage I've long admired, Kierkegaard identifies the poet as one whose heart is full of anguish but whose lips transform all sighs and groans into beautiful music. Kierkegaard likens the fate of this "unhappy" individual to the cruel and unusual punishment meted out by the tyrant Phalaris, whose unfortunate victims, "slowly roasted by a gentle fire" in a huge copper bull, let out shrieks that turn into sweet melodies by the time they reach the tyrant's ears. The success of the poet, then, corresponds to the amount of agony endured. Readers clamor for more, for they are aware only of the music and not of the suffering that went into it. The critics, too, stand ready to applaud -- if, that is, the poet's work meets the requirements of the immutable "laws of aesthetics." And here Kierkegaard's parable acquires an extra layer of irony, the better to convey his contempt for critics. "Why, to be sure," he writes, "a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips." And therefore, Kierkegaard concludes with a flourish, sooner would he be a swineherd understood by the swine than a poet misunderstood by men.

Kierkegaard's argument proceeds by the logic of his similes -- the sweet music, the barbaric torture, the prosaic peas in the pod, the swineherd as an honorable profession -- and the abrupt tonal shift at the end from sarcasm to defiance. If, as Wallace Stevens asserted, "poetry is almost incredibly one of the effects of analogy," here is a gorgeous example. The passage has the virtue, moreover, of raising questions about the occupational hazards that poets face and about their relation to a world of readers and reviewers.

In one way, at least, Kierkegaard's parable is untrue to the experience of American poets, who rarely have to fend off legions of avid admirers. But the notion that the job of the critic is to find fault with the poetry -- that the aims of criticism and of poetry are opposed -- is still with us or, rather, has returned after a hiatus. It was once erroneously thought that devastating reviews caused John Keats's untimely death in his twenty-sixth year. Lord Byron in Don Juan had Keats and his reviewers in mind when he wrote, "Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article." In reality, however, it was not criticism but consumption that cut short Keats's life.1 Many of us delight in Oscar Wilde's witty paradoxes that blur the identities of artist and critic.2 The critical essays of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden are continuous with their poems and teach us that criticism is a matter not of enforcing the "laws of aesthetics" or meting out sentences as a judge might pronounce them in court. Rather, the poet as critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them. Yet today more than a few commentators seem intent on punishing the authors they review. It has grown into a phenomenon. In the March 2009 issue of Poetry, the critic Jason Guriel defends "negativity" as "the poetry reviewer's natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line." The title of Guriel's piece sums it up: "Going Negative."

The romantic image of the poet as a vulnerable personage in a hostile universe has not gone out of currency. The poet is doomed to go unrecognized and to pay dearly for his music-making powers. The gift of poetry comes not as an unalloyed blessing but as the incidental virtue of a defect or as compensation for a loss, an injury, an ailment, a deficiency. Edmund Wilson coined the phrase that readily comes to mind for this dynamic of compensatory balance: "the wound and the bow." Before it served Wilson as the title of a collection of his essays (1941), the phrase headed his study of the myth of Philoctetes, which the critic took as paradigmatic of the artist's situation. Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles treated the myth in plays; the Philoctetes of Sophocles survives. The hero, who excels even Odysseus at archery, possesses the invincible bow that once belonged to Hercules. Philoctetes joins the Greeks in their assault on Troy but is bitten by a poisonous snake, and the suppurating wound emits so foul an odor that his comrades-in-arms abandon him on the island of Lemnos. There he is stranded for ten miserable years. But when a Trojan prophet is forced to reveal that the Greeks will fail to conquer Troy without the unerring bow of Philoctetes, a platoon is dispatched to reenlist the archer -- who is understandably reluctant to return to the fray -- and to recover his arms by any means necessary. In Sophocles, Philoctetes is cured at Troy. He goes on to kill Paris, the Trojan prince whose abduction of Helen precipitated the epic conflict, and he becomes one of the heroes of the Greek victory. One lesson, according to Wilson, is that "genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together." In the most speculative and provocative sentence in the essay, Wilson ventures that "somewhere even in the fortunate Sophocles there had been a sick and raving Philoctetes."

1. Not that the critics were blameless. The anonymous reviewer writing for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (August 1818) called Keats's Endymion "imperturbable driveling idiocy." Endymion was supposed to be "a Greek shepherd loved by a Grecian goddess," but in Keats's hands, he was "merely a young Cockney rhymester."

2. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde radically revises Matthew Arnold on the function of criticism. According to Arnold, the endeavor is "to see the object as in itself it really is." According to Wilde, the aim is "to see the object as in itself it really is not."

W. H. Auden's early prose poem, "Letter to a Wound" (1931), is a powerful modern statement of the theme: "You are so quiet these days that I get quite nervous, remove the dressing. I am safe, you are still there." Addressing the wound as "you" is not merely a grammatical convenience but the vehicle of a linguistic transformation; the ailment becomes an active, willful muse and companion -- albeit one whose traits include "insane jealousy," "bad manners," and a "passion for spoiling things." The letter writer has learned to live with his incurable condition as with a secret partner, an illicit lover. They have even gone through a "honeymoon stage" together. "Thanks to you," Auden writes, "I have come to see a profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before, an old lady's affection for a small boy, the Waterhouses and their retriever, the curious bond between Offal and Snig, the partners in the hardware shop in the front." The wound is not named, though we read of a visit to a surgeon, who begins a sentence, "I'm afraid," and need not add a word. The particular virtue of this epistolary prose poem is that "I" and "you," a pair of pronouns, are raised to the level of a universal duality and are therefore greater than any specific duality that seems appropriate -- whether "artist" and "wound," or "self" and "soul," or "ego" and "id," or "lover" and "beloved."

It is difficult not to fall under the spell of Wilson's wound and bow or of the corresponding myth in the Hebraic tradition. In the thirty-second chapter of Genesis, Jacob -- who twice in the past had got the better of his brother Esau, both times by cunning or deceit -- must wrestle with "a man" who will not reveal his name and who must flee the scene at daybreak. The struggle takes place on the eve of his first encounter with Esau after many years, in the deep darkness of the night, and it is physical combat of a kind not associated with Jacob. When he fights the angel to a standstill, he receives a blessing and a new name, Israel (because he has "contended with God and men and has prevailed"). But he has also suffered a wound "in the hollow of his thigh" that causes him to limp thereafter. The story is rich and mysterious in inverse proportion to its length: nine biblical verses. Though each is said to be a source of power, the Hebrew blessing bestowed on Jacob is utterly different from the Greek bow. Yet at bottom we find the familiar dialectic of compensation.

Such myths may console us. The logic of Emerson's essay "Compensation" has saved my spirits on many a dismal afternoon. "The sure years reveal the deep emotional force that underlies all facts," Emerson writes. "The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character." It is to Emerson's essay that I turn when I need to tamp down the impulses of resentment or envy and reconcile myself to realities. There is wisdom here and truth, a counterargument if not exactly a solution to the problem of evil that Gerard Manley Hopkins stated summarily: "Why do sinners' ways prosper? And why must /...

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