‘It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears’

I like anthologies – to borrow or to buy cheaply, not often to keep. There are too many poets that don’t (in the end, after a few re-readings) interest me. But how else to find out what’s out there, what’s being written? And these are the anthologies I like best: the annual volumes of The Best American Poetry.

The series lets me dip my toe in the waters of a vast ocean of poetry that I know rather less well than the U.K. sea. And because I know very little about which poets are friends, which poets can’t stand each other etc. I’m not distracted by camps and rivalries, nor by my indignant opinion of who should have been included and isn’t.

I approve of the way the poets are placed in alphabetical order. Very few get in, but once selected, the sequence is egalitarian. It also makes them easy to find. It’s a welcome contrast to the Forward Prize books, great surveys of (mostly) U.K. poetry, but I chafe at all the categories; ‘Best collection’, ‘Best first collection’, ‘Best single poem’ – everyone lined up like it’s school prize day.

In the Best American Poetry series the ‘Contributors Notes and Comments’ are a minor art form in themselves. Here’s Dante di Stefano on his poem ‘Reading Dostoevsky at Seventeen’ (2018 volume):

‘If I close my eyes, even now, I can still feel the size and shape of the Signet Classic versions that I carried with me constantly like talismans in those days. Reading the novels was the most significant experience of my adolescence, and the defining moment in my education….. When I re-read my poem, I see it as an attempt to convey the atmosphere of those novels and that particular time in my life: the strange bewildering amalgam of desire, wonder, isolation, foolishness, brilliance, holiness, impetuosity and tempestuousness that one only truly apprehended either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of young adulthood’

A few lines from the poem in question:

This is the old monk with the beard of bees
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.

For a more minimal version of the art of ‘Notes and comments’ read Kay Ryan on ‘Some Transcendental Addiction to the Useless’ (great title – a quote from George Steiner):

‘Perhaps I will have occasionally managed the undoing of a few things that needed it. This poem hopes that.’

Unlike the
work of
most people
you’re supposed
to unthread
the needle.
It will be
a lifetime
task, far
from simple:
the empty eye
achievable —
possibly — but
it’s going
to take
fake sewing
worthy of
Penelope.

Like all Kay Ryan’s poems, it’s tall and thin, as if the poem itself is threading (or unthreading) the eye of its own imaginary needle.

In this same volume, since it’s the one in my hand, I’d also pick out David Lehman’s obituaries (in the Foreword) for Richard Wilbur and John Ashbery:

‘A poem should not be like….the sort of puzzle in which you get nothing until you get it all. Art does not or should not work that way; we are not cheated of a symphony if we fail to react to some passage on the flute, and a good poem should yield itself more than once, offering the reader an early and sure purchase, and deepening repeatedly as he comes to know it better.’ Richard Wilbur

‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ John Ashbery