Introduction: The Birth of The Best
(An excerpt from The Birth of The Best, forthcoming in 2023 from Marsh Hawk Press)
1.
Every September a new edition of The Best American Poetry appears, quickening pulses, provoking arguments. From one year to the next, the editor’s name on the cover is different, as is the cover art. The series editor is the one constant. It is the title I have held since the inaugural volume came out in 1988.
At bookstores and universities, or by digital means during and since the Covid pandemic, launch readings celebrate each new edition and let the public know which poems have gotten the nod from Sherman Alexie, Edward Hirsch, Natasha Trethewey, Dana Gioia, Major Jackson, Paisley Rekdal, Tracy K. Smith, and Matthew Zapruder, to name the successive guest editors since 2015. From 2003 through 2019, the New School in New York City, where I taught in the graduate writing program, sponsored an annual gathering of the year’s contributors in a crowded lecture hall with five hundred seats. On one such occasion, more than forty of the seventy-five contributors took part, some flying in from as far away as California and Greece. In the green room the pre-reading excitement was palpable.[1]
As required reading in many college courses, The Best American Poetry is invariably on poetry best-seller lists – which may seem like an oxymoron but isn’t quite – reflecting data compiled from independent bookstores. Inclusion in the book is a feather in a poet’s cap; not being chosen is, well, how many poets do you know who feel they have won the recognition they deserve? As series editor I am sometimes confronted aggressively: how come my poem wasn’t chosen for Best American Poetry? I resist saying “maybe you didn’t write one of the year’s best poems” and explain for what seems the hundredth time that even a capacious book of seventy-five poems cannot accommodate all the fine verse and prose poetry published in any twelve-month period in a nation as large, diverse, and multitudinous as the United States.
People may suppose that the anthology is part of a literary establishment, an institution of long standing. On the contrary it existed only as an idea and not a fully-formed one when it occurred to me as I drove from Ithaca to the nearby hamlet of Ludowville on the first Sunday in August 1987.
When Glen Hartley, my literary agent, submitted my proposal for The Best American Poetry, most publishing professionals thought that such a book as I had in mind would stand little chance of succeeding. Rejected by two publishers, both of them sympathetic but skeptical, The Best American Poetry became a reality only because an open-minded editor at a major trade house was able to suspend the industry-wide belief that books of poetry, good poetry, could not sell in sufficient quantity to make it worth the publisher’s while. That editor was John Glusman, then with Scribner, which has been our publisher from the get-go. We have benefited greatly from the firm’s editors, art directors, copy editors, proofreaders, and marketing personnel.
Every freelance writer has to be something of an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur in me is proud of having articulated a vison, refined the concept, persuaded a publisher to back it, and gone through all the stages culminating not just in one book but in a series of annual anthologies, year after year, one decade following another, across the century divide. Thirty-four years have gone by since The Best American Poetry made its debut. The 2022 volume reached me today (Sept 8, 2022), and I have three crowded bookshelves devoted to the series. Adding the two retrospective “Best of the Best” collections that appeared in 1998 and 2013, we now have published a total of thirty-six individual books.
My work as founder and series editor has enabled me to bear witness to what is happening in American poetry and to record my own observations in a sort of running commentary.
2.
At the same time that my BAP proposal was making the rounds in 1987, a renowned professor asked me whether I considered myself a critic or an editor first. A colleague of hers overheard and said, “He’s a poet.” Grateful for that recognition, I said that writing poetry was my reality, “an activity of the most august imagination,” as Wallace Stevens defined “reality” in a late poem. Poetry is my base, but I never expected it to generate an income for me and I have always felt that writing prose and editing books and magazines were part of the deal.
I oppose the idea that one can be a specialist in one field only, or in one mode within that field. Why shouldn’t we engage in as many interests as we had in college? I recall a year at Columbia during which I took courses in cinema, philosophy, modern British literature, Italian Renaissance painting, the English romantics, and the French symbolists. Why, then, need one limit oneself to one field of study or another? I have done a lot of different things: written poetry and nonfiction books, collaborated with artists and musicians, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry, taught and lectured widely in the United States and abroad.
Nevertheless, I am glad the critic-or-editor question was raised if only because it prompted me to consider the relative importance to me of the various things I do. When put to it, I identify myself as a poet, an author, an editor, and a teacher in that order – by which I mean to imply that, for example, a poet wrote my books on Frank Sinatra, American popular song, murder mysteries and noir movies. As a self-employed writer, I see editing and literary journalism as ways of teaching by another name and reaching, at least potentially, more readers than can fit in a lecture room.
By temperament, I feel more comfortable praising than scolding, including rather than leaving out. The critic gets to elucidate poems, books, songs, films, and paintings; to air enthusiasms that may prove infectious. The editor of an anthology gets to work on behalf of others and for the sake of the art form. Both are well worth doing. The joy is grand when a piece of mine in the Wall Street Journal or American Scholar prompts readers to thank me for directing them to, say, George Herbert’s “Love (III)” or Carol Reed’s movie Odd Man Out. Equally grand is the joy of notifying a newcomer that her or his poem has been selected for The Best American Poetry — and hearing from them later that it changed their lives.
[1] Other launch readings have taken place at Columbia, Seton Hall University, the Alliance Française and elsewhere in New York City through the auspices of the Academy of American Poets, New York University, the Huntington (Long Island) poetry festival organized by Faith Lieberman, and the Decatur Literary Festival in Atlanta.
David Lehman’s most recent books are The Morning Line (Pittsburgh UP), a gathering of poems, and The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir (Cornell University Press). Of The Mysterious Romance of Murder, Lois Potter in London’s TLS writes: “How often does a critical book actually make one want to read the books it discusses?” Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, series editor of The Best American Poetry, and a contributing editor of The American Scholar.