The State of the Art

A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014

David Lehman

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780822980971
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The acclaimed annual, The Best American Poetry, is the most prestigious showcase of new poetry in the United States and Canada. Each year since the series began in 1988, David Lehman has contributed a foreword, and this has evolved into a sort of state-of-the-art address that surveys new developments and explores various matters facing poets and their readers today. This book collects all twenty-nine forewords (including the two written for the retrospective "Best of the Best" volumes for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversaries.) Beginning with a new introduction by Lehman and a foreword by poet Denise Duhamel (guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013), the collection conveys a sense of American poetry in the making, year by year, over the course of a quarter of a century.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1988: “like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo”
• 1989: in an unlit alcove where bookstore patrons fear to tread
• 1990: to inflame passions, disturb the complacent, and arouse the anxiety of despots
• 1991: a poem entitled “Cigarettes” by a poet named Ash
• 1992: The question of poetry and its audience
• 1993: the gust of fresh air that turned into the blizzard of ’93
• 1994: It’s safe to say that the inaugural was the best-attended poetry reading of the decade
• 1995: At least somebody played ball in 1994
• 1996: a given volume in this series might hang question marks over all three terms in the title
• 1997: As a gimmick, if that’s what it is, National Poetry Month worked
• The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988–1997 (1998): The debate is joined
• 1998: The president spoke of having had to memorize 100 lines of Macbeth
• 1999: “Whitman rocks”
• 2000: “Now I know how poems feel”
• 2001: “Everybody else was analog and Nietzsche was digital”
• 2002: The day now marks a boundary
• 2003: “How many people have to die before you can become president?”
• 2004: canons do not remain fixed for long
• 2005: the creative writing workshop [and] the fall of civilization
• 2006: Accessibility—as a term and, implicitly, as a value
• 2007: Undoubtedly the most parodied of all poems
• 2008: Who says that hot poems can’t get you into trouble in 2008?
• 2009: “that is how I should talk if I could talk poetry”
• 2010: McChrystal sent copies of “The Second Coming” to his special operators
• 2011: in Dickinson’s brain, “wider than the sky”
• 2012: the “uncanny” is a category too little invoked
• The Best of the Best American Poetry, 25th Anniversary Edition (2013): “Every time I read Pessoa I think”
• 2013: It was his poetry that kept him going
• 2014: In the antagonism between science and the humanities
• Index of Names