The State of the Art by David Lehman

Author:David Lehman [Lehman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822980971
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Lyn Hejinian and I met at a poetry conference in Copenhagen in August 2001. Our Danish hosts had hoped that she and I would come to blows on a panel at which it was thought that she would represent the Language School and I the New York School in a debate. Instead we began a dialogue that lasted months, took different forms on different continents, and gave us both, I think, much pleasure. I knew in what great esteem she is held by the many young writers who consider her autobiographical sequence, My Life, to be a modern masterpiece. “I saw a juxtaposition / It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation / Pure poetry,” she wrote in “Nights,” a group of “night thoughts intended as an homage to Scheherazade,” which Robert Hass picked for the 2001 edition of this anthology. I felt that this respected and admired writer with her eye for poetry, pure and otherwise, would make an excellent choice to serve as guest editor of this year’s The Best American Poetry, and I am glad I enlisted her. The Berkeley-based Hejinian threw herself into the task, reading as generously as she could while remaining true to her aesthetic convictions and her commitment to poetry of a high experimental bent. One reason the volume is exciting is its strong accent on youth. But we also rejoice in the fact that a book containing a poem written by a high school senior (Marc Jaffee, now an undergraduate at Vassar) also contains a poem by Carl Rakosi, the Objectivist poet who celebrated his hundredth birthday in 2003. Above all, there is satisfaction in knowing that the contents of this book represent a coherent vision of what one important poet considers to be American poetry at its most vital, daring, and aggressively new.

In 2003 Louise Glück became the nation’s twelfth poet laureate, succeeding Billy Collins in the post. Glück, who edited the 1993 volume in this series, has made few pronouncements in her new official capacity. She has given us a new poem instead: the beautiful October, published as a chapbook by Sarabande. It is a quiet and intimate poem and it has nothing political in it, yet it seems to have a public dimension, speaking to all who can identify themselves with that time of year when the light begins to fail and yellow leaves or none or few still cling to branches. At the end of the poem we reach the ultimate condition of lyric poetry: the lonely self contemplating the naked universe.

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