Edited by Charles Wright & David Lehman

In the past, David Lehman has chosen some key figures in American poetry to guest edit The Best American Poetry Series: John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Robert Creeley—all edited volumes of the series, and all of these poets have helped to form some of the many movements that make up our contemporary moment.

This year’s editor, Charles Wright, writes poems of folklore in Appalachia, of ghosts and dead things. His eyes are of the soil, and he feels the passing days like the last of the morning’s frost. When he writes, his life is written down on to the page and he writes to move us, to capsize our collective boat. As an editor, however, he merely capsizes. Wright fails to make this year’s Best American Poetry edition something in which we can have a continuous float. instead it is rarely more than instances of floating.

In the past, Lehman has chosen poets that seem to know the past and current moment in poetry. A poet’s views are going to be subjective, filled with half-truths. How then, can one poet capture the current moment in poetry? Charles Wright is a poet who never fully settled into any school. He sat there in the ether writing about, well, ether. He chose to write poems about music and feeling, about feeling and the way the nighttime sinks inwards. These are, then, the types of poems one would expect to see in a series edited by Charles Wright. Wright states in his introduction:

I like things now that I probably wouldn’t have liked some forty years ago. And vice versa. I like things to make sense nowadays. Putting aside the nagging possibility that one man’s sense is another man’s sensibility, as the years wind down, I like a definitive in things, I want to understand them…And poetry, of course, is an art. Or should be, and not just a rag bag for dusty emotions and stained experiences. Emotional sense, rhythmical sense, rhetorical sense, linguistic sense, musical sense. No posing, no vogueing, no lip-syncing. As Stein said to Hemingway, damn it all anyway, remarks are not literature. I don’t know how much literature we have in here, but these are some of the things that made sense to us this year, in one way or another.”

It is hard to disagree with these views—they make sense. Charles Wright is pretty clear about the fact that he thinks poetry needs standards and he’s clear in his assessment that poetry should have a boundary between what makes it art, and what makes it just more emotional blabbering. Wright chose poems based on general guidelines in seeing poetry as an art form. In my mind, there is little to disagree with. If, however, the poems don’t go past a general art sense, then where do they go? The poems in The Best American Poetry 2008 have another general in mind: general mediocrity. There are moments in the book that make you stop and shudder, that stop you with resentment for a feeling you couldn’t grasp earlier in your life. These are the moments Wright intended to fill the book.

But this feeling is an exhausting one to sustain. A reader needs more than epiphany, we need sustenance. Sadly, the book is too erratic to give us that. There are too many long-winded phrases, too many transparent prose poems, too many expected names. Dean Young and Franz Wright are gigantic poets and they’ve certainly written poems which could be included in something labeled “best of the year.” They’ve written better poems than these though; these are the poems of accessibility. Not that accessibility is bad, but more that it is a compromise and in poetry there should be no compromise. Accessibility can aid a reader, but it should not and cannot define a poem.

Of the poets represented here, Brenda Hillman and Joshua Beckman are redeeming—in this book and in poetry itself. Beckman comes through with repetition and a subtle fear of change. His poem grows without seeming to grow at all. It is fearing and fearful; its ears are tucked. Beckman’s poem is titled, “***.” Three asterisks, not much of a title, but captures the moment, his moment. It begins:

The canals. The liquor coming through
the straw. The canals the land and
the bridge and the landing by the bridge
destroyed. The liquor. The little anger
growing inside the friends. The canal.

Beckman brings fear into this issue without melodrama and uses repetition without a single tired note. This poem shadows what Beckman does, uses someone else or even his own craft to create a relationship with the reader.

Brenda Hillman crafts work with a similar element in this collection. Hillman has a two column poem that is reminiscent of her earliest work: the two columns are parallels, yet can be read either as one poem or two poems, or a poem in two parts, etc. In doing this, Hillman creates a relationship by giving the reader a freedom that avoids the concrete, something this collection seems otherwise to miss.

Charles Wright creates landscapes of choice and burden in his own work. There are broken horses rounding the horizon, half-lights making sound. Without finite sense he has written a career, but in this phase of his life Charles Wright wants to understand, or at least “get” the poems he reads. But with this he loses aspects of his readers on both sides.

Some readers will feel that many of these poems are simplified at the expense of truth. Others will view these poems as just a list of people visible. In his introduction, Wright concedes the possibility he is picking the “best” poetry, he states, simply, that he is picking the poetry that feels correct to him. This is a collection for him, then, a collection is housed in his sensibilities. For this, he can be applauded. Wright, at least, doesn’t sacrifice. These are his choices, in sound, in memory.

Reviewed by Jesse Crouse

The Best American Poetry 2008 edited by Charles Wright & David Lehman
Scribner , 2008
Paper, 197 pp, $16.00
ISBN-10: 0743299752