The Best American Poetry 2006: Series Editor David Lehman
By David Lehman and Billy Collins
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
-- From Billy Collins's introduction
The Best American Poetry series offers a distinguished poet's selection of poems published in the course of a year. The guest editor for 2006 is Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, who has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in an array of styles and forms. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry -- from Laura Cronk's marvelous "Sestina for the Newly Married" to the elegant limericks of R. S. Gwynn and from Reb Livingston on butter to Mark Halliday's "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women."
In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he chose seventy-five poems from among the thousands he considered. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's thought-provoking foreword, The Best American Poetry 2006 is a brilliant addition to a series that links the most noteworthy verse and prose poems of our time to a readership as discerning as it is devoted to the art of poetry.
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of twelve poetry collections, including Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Whale Day, and Horoscopes for the Dead. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Lehman College, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001 to 2003, and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife in Westchester County, NY.
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Reviews for The Best American Poetry 2006
34 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It's incredible what passes for poetry now. "Prose poetry" has become an excuse to write like you speak and absolves the writer from having any unique insights or profound observation. If that is an unfair assessment of prose poetry then perhaps it is my own fault for not having made adequate effort at finding the good stuff. Perhaps 2006 was a bad year, but my suspicion is that poetry, prose or narrative or whatever, has been dumbed down by the 20 year old morons that infest the MFA programs in this country.
Even so, there are maybe three gems in here. You've gotta mine and dig and wash and skip, but you may find a couple with some depth and worth a few re-reads.
Most of these "poems" (that's right, quotation marks) are lame, kitschy, not clunky, not at all clunky, which is great, but that's not enough, there has to be something more, not just clever commas, to let us know, how clever, you think you are, by separating your sentences, just so. (See what I did there?)
Two stars for the few good ones. Instead of this, just read Keats again. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Surely this was not the best American poetry of 2006! There were a few that stood out. "Religion" by Robert Wrigley about a mysterious shoe brought home by an old dog was a favorite and stimulated much discussion at bookclub. Why does the narrator have so many one-legged friends? Also "Gratification" by Susan Wood: "Now the sun is going down in flames like a ship on fire, but slowly, listing a little to the left. Don't worry, everyone on board gets off. That's the best part. Everyone is saved." And, "Monsieur Pierre est mort," about the fate of a beleagured French teacher's pet rock. Most of the poems, however, read more like essays on overvisited themes than poetry that catches you by the heart and demands that you stay awhile and return often.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Surely this was not the best American poetry of 2006! There were a few that stood out. "Religion" by Robert Wrigley about a mysterious shoe brought home by an old dog was a favorite and stimulated much discussion at bookclub. Why does the narrator have so many one-legged friends? Also "Gratification" by Susan Wood: "Now the sun is going down in flames like a ship on fire, but slowly, listing a little to the left. Don't worry, everyone on board gets off. That's the best part. Everyone is saved." And, "Monsieur Pierre est mort," about the fate of a beleagured French teacher's pet rock. Most of the poems, however, read more like essays on overvisited themes than poetry that catches you by the heart and demands that you stay awhile and return often.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed the poetry....but....it's one of those books where everything was good, but nothing truly jumped me by surprise and stayed with me. I assume some of the poems will do that for somebody, but this was a one-time read that I enjoyed for the most part, but probably won't go back to at any point.
Book preview
The Best American Poetry 2006 - David Lehman
OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
John Ashbery, editor, The Best American Poetry 1988
Donald Hall, editor, The Best American Poetry 1989
Jorie Graham, editor, The Best American Poetry 1990
Mark Strand, editor, The Best American Poetry 1991
Charles Simic, editor, The Best American Poetry 1992
Louise Glück, editor, The Best American Poetry 1993
A. R. Ammons, editor, The Best American Poetry 1994
Richard Howard, editor, The Best American Poetry 1995
Adrienne Rich, editor, The Best American Poetry 1996
James Tate, editor, The Best American Poetry 1991
Harold Bloom, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1991
John Hollander, editor, The Best American Poetry 1998
Robert Bly, editor, The Best American Poetry 1999
Rita Dove, editor, The Best American Poetry 2000
Robert Hass, editor, The Best American Poetry 2001
Robert Creeley, editor, The Best American Poetry 2002
Yusef Komunyakaa, editor, The Best American Poetry 2003
Lyn Hejinian, editor, The Best American Poetry 2004
Paul Muldoon, editor, The Best American Poetry 2005
SCRIBNER POETRY
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Copyright © 2006 by David Lehman
Foreword copyright © 2006 by David Lehman
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Billy Collins
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CONTENTS
Foreword by David Lehman
Introduction by Billy Collins
Kim Addonizio, Verities
Dick Allen, ‘See the Pyramids Along the Nile’
Craig Arnold, from Couple from Hell
John Ashbery, A Worldly Country
Jesse Ball, Speech in a Chamber
Krista Benjamin, Letter from My Ancestors
Ilya Bernstein, You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby
Gaylord Brewer, Apologia to the Blue Tit
Tom Christopher, Rhetorical Figures
Laura Cronk, Sestina for the Newly Married
Carl Dennis, Our Generation
Stephen Dobyns, Toward Some Bright Moment
Denise Duhamel, Please Don’t Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen’
Stephen Dunn, The Land of Is
Beth Ann Fennelly, Souvenir
Megan Gannon, List of First Lines
Amy Gerstler, For My Niece Sidney, Age Six
Sarah Gorham, Bust of a Young Boy in the Snow
George Green, The Death of Winckelmann
Debora Greger, My First Mermaid
Eamon Grennan, The Curve
Daniel Gutstein, Monsieur Pierre est mort
R. S. Gwynn, from Sects from A to Z
Rachel Hadas, Bird, Weasel, Fountain
Mark Halliday, Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women
Jim Harrison, On the Way to the Doctor’s
Robert Hass, The Problem of Describing Color
Christian Hawkey, Hour
Terrance Hayes, Talk
Bob Hicok, My career as a director
Katia Kapovich, The Ferry
Laura Kasischke, At Gettysburg
Joy Katz, Just a second ago
David Kirby, Seventeen Ways from Tuesday
Jennifer L. Knox, The Laws of Probability in Levittown
Ron Koertge, Found
John Koethe, Sally’s Hair
Mark Kraushaar, Tonight
Julie Larios, Double Abecedarian: Please Give Me
Dorianne Laux, Demographic
Reb Livingston, That’s Not Butter
Thomas Lux, Eyes Scooped Out and Replaced by Hot Coals
Paul Muldoon, Blenheim
Marilyn Nelson, Albert Hinckley
Richard Newman, Briefcase of Sorrow
Mary Oliver, The Poet with His Face in His Hands
Danielle Pafunda, Small Town Rocker
Mark Pawlak, The Sharper the Berry
Bao Phi, Race
Donald Platt, Two Poets Meet
Lawrence Raab, The Great Poem
Betsy Retallack, Roadside Special
Liz Rosenberg, The Other Woman’s Point of View
J. Allyn Rosser, Discounting Lynn
Kay Ryan, Thin
Mary Jo Salter, A Phone Call to the Future
Vijay Seshadri, Memoir
Alan Shapiro, Misjudged Fly Ball
Charles Simic, House of Cards
Gerald Stern, Homesick
James Tate, The Loser
Sue Ellen Thompson, Body English
Tony Towle, Misprision
Alison Townsend, What I Never Told You About the Abortion
Paul Violi, Counterman
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Harvesting the Cows
David Wagoner, The Driver
Charles Harper Webb, Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down
C. K. Williams, Ponies
Terence Winch, Sex Elegy
Susan Wood, Gratification
Franz Wright, A Happy Thought
Robert Wrigley, Religion
David Yezzi, The Call
Dean Young, Clam Ode
Contributors’ Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
Acknowledgments
David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of six books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999) and The Perfect Murder (Michigan, 2000). He edited the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. He also edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003. He teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City and offers an undergraduate course each fall on Great Poems
at New York University. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship a year later. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
by David Lehman
Back in 1992, when he made his first appearance in The Best American Poetry, Billy Collins was a little-known, hardworking poet who had won a National Poetry Series contest judged by Edward Hirsch. He had supported himself for many years by teaching English and was, like many other poets, looking for a publisher. Charles Simic chose Nostalgia
from The Georgia Review for The Best American Poetry 1992 and for the following year’s Best, Louise Glück selected Tuesday, June 4th, 1991
from Poetry. Others, too, recognized Collins’s talent. The University of Pittsburgh Press began to publish his books in its estimable series directed by Ed Ochester. Radio host Garrison Keillor gave Collins perhaps the biggest boost of all by asking him to read his poems on the air. He did, and the audience loved what it heard. Collins grew popular. At the same time, it was understood that he was no less serious for having the common touch. Asked to explain his poetic lineage, he liked citing Coleridge’s conversation
poems, such as This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.
And for all their genial whimsy, many of Collins’s efforts have a decidedly literary flavor, with such subjects as Tintern Abbey,
Emily Dickinson, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, poetry readings, writing workshops, Keats’s handwriting,
and Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts.
John Updike put it exactly when he described Collins’s poems as limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem.
In 2000, two publishers quarreled publicly over the rights to publish Collins’s books, and the New York Times reported the story on page one. The unlikely success story reached its apogee a year after September 11, 2001, when Billy Collins read The Names,
a poem he had written for the somber occasion, to a rare joint session of Congress.
By then Collins had become a phenomenon. While remaining a member in good standing of the poetry guild, an entity with a purely notional existence whose members would theoretically starve for their art, he had regular contact with honest-to-goodness book-buying readers who were not themselves practicing poets. They numbered in the tens of thousands and made best-sellers of his books. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems were published in respected journals such as The Atlantic and Poetry and were chosen by the diverse quartet of John Hollander, Robert Bly, Rita Dove, and Robert Hass for four consecutive volumes of The Best American Poetry. In June 2001, Collins succeeded Stanley Kunitz as Poet Laureate of the United States, and I remember hearing people gripe about the appointment. Collins was regularly dismissed as an easy
or anecdotal
poet. It was then that I knew he had made it big. Harold Bloom has propounded the theory that poets fight Oedipal battles with ancestors of their choice, so that Wallace Stevens had to overcome Keats’s influence as Wordsworth had earlier overcome Milton’s. It sometimes seems to me that a different Freudian paradigm—sibling rivalry—may explain the behavior of contemporary poets, for the backbiting in our community is ferocious, and nothing signifies success better than ritual bad-mouthing by rivals or wannabes.
The story as I’ve sketched it broadly here illustrates more than one useful lesson. Probably the most important is that poetry has the potential to reach masses of people who read for pleasure, still and always the best reason for reading. Radio is a great resource for spreading the word, and attention from programs such as Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, and the interview shows of Leonard Lopate in New York City and Michael Silverblatt in Los Angeles is among the best things that can happen to a book or an author. Another lesson is that some poets share a resistance to popularity—other people’s popularity, above all—though they might bristle if you called them elitist. It’s a problem that afflicts us all to some extent. We say we want real readers, who buy our books not as an act of charity but as a free choice, yet should one in our party escape the poetry ghetto, we tremble with ambivalence, as if having real readers means a sure loss in purity. Inevitably the discussion turns to a question that seems substantive. What accounts for an individual poet’s popular appeal? Does popularity result from (or result in) a loss of artistic integrity? What makes the lucky one’s star shine so bright that it can be seen to sparkle even in the muddy skies of the metropolis, where industrial wastes have all but abolished the sighting of a heavenly body?
To the second of these questions, the answer is a simple no. Collins’s readers came to him; he did not alter his style or his seriousness to curry anyone’s favor. (It is, in fact, entirely possible that the poet setting out to be the most popular on the block stands the least chance of achieving that goal.) The answer to the other questions begins with the surface of Collins’s poems, which is amiable, likable, relaxed. Even critics of Collins would concede that his poems have a high quotient of charm. He is, to ring a variant on a theme from Wordsworth, unusually fluent in the language of an adult speaking to other adults in the vernacular. Moreover, he insists on the primacy of the ordinary, as when he expresses contentment in an ordinary night at the kitchen table, / at ease in a box of floral wallpaper, / white cabinets full of glass, / the telephone silent, / a pen tilted back in my hand.
I would wager that Collins’s ability to find and express contentment in the ordinary has contributed in a major way to his popular appeal. Wit and humor, traits of his verse, don’t hurt. Above all, his poems make themselves available to the mythical general reader that book publishers crave. You don’t need to have been an English major to get a Collins poem such as Osso Buco
or Nightclub.
Such poems insist on a poetic pleasure principle. They are, to use a charged word, accessible. Billy Collins’s poetry is widely accessible,
said Librarian of Congress James Billington in June 2001. He writes in an original way about all manner of ordinary things and situations with both humor and a surprising contemplative twist.
Collins himself has reservations about accessible, a word that he says suggests ramps for poetically handicapped people.
He prefers hospitable. But there’s no dodging accessible, and in the introduction to his anthology 180 More, Collins granted that the quality denoted by the word was what he looked for in a poem. An accessible
poem, he wrote, is one that is easy to enter,
in the sense that an apartment or a house may be welcoming. Some poems talk to us; others want us to witness an act of literary experimentation,
he wrote, declaring his preference for the former and arguing that pleasure in poetry—its paramount purpose, according to Wordsworth—demands clarity.
The opposition between clarity and difficulty, or between communication and experimentation, is happily not absolute. Nor can we take it for granted that any of these terms has a fixed meaning that all can agree on. Accessibility—as a term and, implicitly, as a value—has been attacked recently by Helen Vendler in The New Republic. ‘Accessibility’ needs to be dropped from the American vocabulary of aesthetic judgment if we are not to appear fools in the eyes of the world,
Vendler wrote in the context of defending John Ashbery, with his resolve against statement bearing the burden of a poem.
Yet it is of course conceivable, it is even perhaps inevitable, that a poem by John Ashbery should be among the seventy-five poems chosen by Billy Collins for The Best American Poetry 2006. And so it has happened. Abstract discussion is one thing, poetic creativity and intuition is another, and it takes the former a long time to catch up with the latter. Let the debates continue. The poets themselves will make their choices, but they will do so on the basis of poems loved rather than positions held, rebuffed, or discarded.
There may be a structural antagonism between poets and critics, but at its best, criticism can make better writers of us, link poetry to its readership, and help build a community. The work of explanation, evaluation, and elucidation is there to be done. Unfortunately, much contemporary criticism is singularly shrill, sometimes gratuitously belligerent, even spiteful. I wonder where the rage comes from. Is it to overcompensate for the widespread if erroneous perception of poets as a band of favor-trading blurbists forever patting one another on the back? Or is the explanation simply that it is and always has been easier to issue summary judgments than to grapple with new art? I wonder, too, whether young poets flocking to MFA programs or working on their first manuscripts know what they’re in for. It sometimes seems to me that the fledgling poet is in the position of the secret agent in Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden,