Maybe it's a Question of Audience

Who is The Best American Poetry for, anyway?

As a recent high school grad, someone interested in and starting to write poems, but not widely read at all, I found the Charles Simic edition of BAP was a genuinely useful gift back in '92 -- literally my first introduction to all the now-familiar names in the series (Ashbery, Collins & Co.). It was also, though it took me longer to reaize this, a sort of mini-directory of literary magazines to go find copies of and investigate -- a Zagat Guide for poetry venues, if you will.

Thirteen years later, I don't need a new BAP each year to tell me that all the usual suspects are still publishing poems -- I've seen them in the journals or will catch them (or not) in book form. In any case, I know they're out there, doing their work. What I now hope to find in the BAP are the best poems/poets I haven't read before. Frankly, all those usual suspects just get in the way of what I'm after. But equally frankly, I recognize that my reason for reading the BAP series for the past few years -- to find out about these new-to-me poets -- has diverged from the stated reason that the series exists.

What I really want is a new series -- say, The Best New American Poetry -- that brings together 75 of the best poems of the year by… well, what's the criteria? Poets who haven't published a book yet, or poets with just one book (surely I shouldn't exclude myself from my own criteria; I'm not looking to edit this, afterall), perhaps. Was it Richard Howard who ruled out, when he guest edited the BAP, any poet who'd already been in the series three or more times? That always felt like a good start to me. This would be somewhat in the spirit of Kevin Prufer's New Young American Poets or Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso's Free Radicals, but in annual installments.

And in fact, there is an anthology on the way that may just fit the bill: Best New Poets (http://www.bestnewpoets.org/). (Of course, a few issues obtain: their entry fee has been discussed previously elsewhere; and in my ideal scenario, the culling from the year's lit mags model would carry over from the BAP.) This seems to be a book for the second sort of reader I've described above -- those already in the know, to various extents. For that first kind of reader, I think the BAP can still do the trick, most years, even if other non-series anthologies come out every year that do it equally well.

More generally, though, any project with such a wide-open premise -- simply the year's best, as selected by DL and the guest editor -- is bound to leave each of us wanting something (at least) a little different than what we get. I would only ever possibly feel the book was 100% right about the truly best poems of the year if I were the guest editor. And then I'd just have a whole different set of doubts about whether the book got it right -- or, rather, whether I got it right.

In my case, what the BAP series makes me want more, each year, is this other anthology. And again, in November, when Best New Poets come out, I'll have it -- I hope. So my thinking out loud here is not meant as a prescription for fixing the BAP, or a replacement for it, but rather a different anthology series to serve this other audience -- the audience I'm sitting in.

In the meantime, I'm happy to see poets whose work deserves to be up in lights, BAP-style, appearing in this year's edition. I'm doubly happy when those poets are people I know, or even friends. At the same time, I don't mind wondering why on earth Jacket -- let alone DL/PM/BAP -- published that Cummins poem (which hardly seems the best of anything), and definitely don't mind reading others' more-than-wondering thoughts about it. (Seth Abramson, in particular, I find smart and engaging and challenging on this and many other subjects.)

And if BNP doesn't deliver what I hope it will, I'd love to see these kinds of dissatisfactions lead someone out there to initiate an anthology series that does.