The Best American Poetry 1998

by David Lehman (Editor)

Overview

The appearance of The Best American Poetry every September is an eagerly awaited rite of fall — as evidenced by soaring sales and terrific reviews. The popularity of the series is "ample proof that poetry is thriving" (The Orlando Sentinel), and this year's volume will dazzle and delight, instruct and inspire. Under the guiding vision of master poet John Hollander — one of America's most erudite literary minds — The Best American Poetry 1998 spotlights the imaginative power and insight of our finest poets at the fin-de-siècle. Diverse in form and method, the poems display an unwavering nobility of expression, maintaining the uncompromising artistic standards essential to The Best American Poetry tradition as it enters its second decade. With a foreword by series editor David Lehman and with comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1998 will lead you on an exhilarating and inspiring literary adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684814506
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	08/06/1998
Series:	Best American Poetry Series
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Read an Excerpt

The Best American Poetry

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By John Hollander

Scribner Book Company

Copyright © 1998 John Hollander
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0684814536

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

JONATHAN AARON

Mr. Moto's Confession

The famous Tokyo detective looked as if he'd taken a shower
in his linen suit and then slept in it.
He mopped his shiny forehead with a handkerchief.
"Pascal was right," he said, his tenor slightly nasal.
"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to
another form of madness. What's more," he added, the cat
eying the canary, "contradiction is not a sign of falsity,
nor is the want of contradiction a sign of truth - Pascal again."
He took out his fountain pen. I saw my chance.
Mr. Moto, I asked, should I believe all those stories
I've heard about you? "Please do not," he murmured. "I do not."
He was writing something on a cocktail napkin.
"In fact," he said, his pen continuing to move, "my real name is
Laszlo Lowenstein. I was born in Hungary, I drove myself crazy
as an actor in Zurich and Berlin, and now that I live in Hollywood
I have bad dreams. Last night one of them told me
I'll end up buried alive in a tale by Edgar Allan Poe."
He coughed politely, capped his pen, and getting to his feet
handed me the little piece of paper. "An ancient Japanese
poetic form," he said. Even as I stared at it
the little cairn of characters, each a tiny, exotic bird cage
with its doors open, blurred, melted, and reformed as if rising
to the surface of a well, where these words trembled
but stayed clear enough to read: As evening nears, how clearly
a dog's bark carries over the water.

from The New Republic

AGHA SHAHID ALI

The Floating Post Office

(Note: The post boat was like a gondola that called at each houseboat. It carried clerk, weighing scales, and a bell to announce arrivals.)

Has he been kept from us? Portents
of rain, rumors, ambushed letters...
Curtained palanquin, fetch our word,
bring us word: Who has died? Who'll live?
Has the order gone out to close
the waterways...the one open road?

And then we saw the boat being rowed
through the fog of death, the sentence
passed on our city. It came close
to reveal smudged black-ink letters
which the postman - he was alive -
gave us, like signs, without a word,

and we took them, without a word.
From our deck we'd seen the hill road
bringing a jade rain, near-olive,
down from the temple, some penitent's
cymbaled prayer? He took our letters,
and held them, like a lover, close

to his heart. And the rain drew close.
Was there, we asked, a new password -
blood, blood shaken into letters,
cruel primitive script that would erode
our saffron link to the past? Tense
with autumn, the leaves, drenched olive,

fell on graveyards, crying "O live!"
What future would the rain disclose?
O Rain, abandon all pretense,
now drown the world, give us your word,
ring, sweet assassin of the road,
the temple bell! For if letters

come, I will answer those letters
and my year will be tense, alive
with love! The temple receives the road:
there, the rain has come to a close.
Here the waters rise; our each word
in the fog awaits a sentence:

His hand on the scales, he gives his word:
Our letters will be rowed through olive
canals, the tense waters no one can close.

from The Kenyon Review

DICK ALLEN

The Cove

Something was out there on the lake, just barely
visible in the dark.
I knelt and stared, trying to make it out,
trying to mark

its position relative to mine,
and the picturesque willow, the moon-silvered diving board
on the opposite shore. I listened hard
but heard

no sound from it, although I cupped one ear
as I knelt in the cove,
wondering how far I should take this, if I should seek
someone to row out there with me. Yet it didn't move

or grow darker or lighter. Most shapes,
you know what they are:
a rock-garden serpent, a house in the mist, a man's head,
an evening star,

but not this one. Whatever was out there kept changing
from large to small.
The mass of a wooden coffin surfaced,
then the head of an owl,

a tree limb, a window, a veil -
I couldn't resolve it. I ran one hand through my hair
as I stood up, shrugging. I had just turned 50
and whatever it was that might be floating there

I didn't want it to be. Too much before
that came unbidden into my life
I'd let take me over. I knelt again and stared again.
Something was out there just beyond the cove.

from The Hudson Review

FONT SIZE="-1">Copyright © 1998 by David Lehman

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Best American Poetry by John Hollander Copyright © 1998 by John Hollander. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword by David Lehman

Introduction by John Hollander

Jonathan Aaron, "Mr. Moto's Confession"

Agha Shahid Ali, "The Floating Post Office"

Dick Allen, "The Cove"

A. R. Ammons, "Now Then"

Daniel Anderson, "A Possum's Tale"

James Applewhite, "Botanical Garden: The Coastal Plains"

Craig Arnold, "Hot"

Sarah Arvio, from Visits from the Seventh

John Ashbery, "Wakefulness"

Frank Bidart, "The Second Hour of the Night"

Robert Bly, "A Week of Poems at Bennington"

George Bradley, "In an Old Garden"

John Bricuth, from Just Let Me Say This About That (IV)

Anne Carson, "TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)"

Turner Cassity, "Symbol of the Faith"

Henri Cole, "Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting"

Billy Collins, "Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey"

Alfred Corn, "Jaffa"

James Cummins, "Echo"

Tom Disch, "What Else Is There"

Denise Duhamel, "The Difference Between Pepsi and Pope"

Lynn Emanuel, "Like God,"

Irving Feldman, "Movietime"

Emily Fragos, "Apollo's Kiss"

Debora Greger, "Mass in B Minor"

Allen Grossman, "Weird River"

Thom Gunn, "To Cupid"

Marilyn Hacker, "Again, The River"

Rachel Hadas, "Pomegranate Variations"

Donald Hall, "Letter with No Address"

Joseph Harrison, "The Cretonnes of Penelope"

Anthony Hecht, "Rara Avis in Terris"

Daryl Hine, "The World Is Everything That Is the Case"

Edward Hirsch, "The Lectures on Love"

Richard Howard, "The Job Interview"

Andrew Hudgins, "The Hanging Gardens"

Mark Jarman, "The Word 'Answer'"

Donald Justice, "Stanzas on a Hidden Theme"

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "The Orchard"

Karl Kirchwey, "Roman Hours"

Carolyn Kizer, "Second Time Around"

Kenneth Koch, "Ballade"

John Koethe, "The Secret Amplitude"

Rika Lesser, "About Her"

Phillis Levin, "Ontological"

Philip Levine, "Drum"

Rebecca McClanahan, "Making Love"

J. D. McClatchy, "Descartes's Dream"

Heather McHugh, "Past All Understanding"

Sandra McPherson, "Chalk-Circle Compass"

W. S. Merwin, "The Chinese Mountain Fox"

Robert Mezey, "Joe Simpson [ 1919-1996]"

A. F. Moritz, "Artisan and Clerk"

Thylias Moss, "The Right Empowerment of Light"

William Mullen, "Enchanted Rock"

Eric Ormsby, "Flamingos"

Jacqueline Qsherow, "Views of La Leggenda della Vera Croce"

Robert Pinsky, "Ode to Meaning"

ardReynolds Price, "The Closing, the Ecstasy"

Wyatt Prunty, "March"

Stephen Sandy, "Four Corners, Vermont"

Alan Shapiro, "The Coat"

Robert B. Shaw, "A Geode"

Charles Simic, "Ambiguity's Wedding"

Mark Strand, "The View"

James Tate, "Dream On"

Sidney Wade, "A Calm November. Sunday in the Fields."

Derek Walcott, "Signs"

Rosanna Warren, "'Departure'"

Rachel Wetzsteon, from Home and Away

Susan Wheeler, "Shanked on the Red Bed"

Richard Wilbur, "For C."

C. K. Williams, "The Bed"

Greg Williamson, "The Dark Days"

Charles Wright, "Returned to the Yaak Cabin, I Overhear an Old Greek Song"

Contributors' Notes and Comments

Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

People A year's worth of the very best.

From the Publisher

Now in its 12th year, the Best American franchise is perhaps the biggest-selling in poetry. Each year, poet and critic Lehman taps a different gray (or graying) eminence to help choose 75 or so poems from the nation's literary magazines. This year's guest editor, Iron John author and midwestern surrealist Robert Bly (Eating the Honey of Words; Forecasts, Mar 29), has followed his predecessors in the series--John Hollander, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom, to name a few--by choosing poems that complement his own style and tendencies. Short, crypto-surreal works by Franco Pagnucci, Thomas R. Smith and Peggy Steele strongly recall Bly's work from the '60s, while Charles Wright, Lydia Davis, Gray Jacobik, and John Balaban turn in halcyon tableaux and wistful vignettes worthy of the superlative in the title. The rest of the book is mainly divided between the academic--many of the poems are tributes to well-established literary men (Thoreau, Hemingway, Pasternak, Lawrence, Kierkegaard, Freud)--the poor-spirited (Dick Allen's unfunny "The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader"; John Brehm's half-apologetic account of hating his students in "Sea of Faith") and the (more or less probingly) self-involved. As with many anthologies, the Table of Contents and Contributors' Notes make significant reading on their own. Forty percent of this year's contributors are women; at least 45% were born before the U.S. entered World War II; one could further break things down by race, class or region, and find the collection thoughtfully put together. But Bly's test for best-ness, he notes in his preface, was "heat" ("heat of friendship"; "heat of form"; "heat of the blues"; etc.), which excludes, for example, Language-oriented writing, because "those poets work very hard to drain all the meaning out of the words they use." No matter how well-constructed or demographically correct the poems included may be, these empty categories and dismissals don't justify the bland, predictable self-affirmation Bly's choices finally reflect. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As those familiar with Rich's politics and persuasions would expect, her personal selection of outstanding poems published in 1995 offers the widest multicultural gathering of voicesfrom Wanda Coleman to Martin Espada to Stanley Kunitzyet represented in this annual series. It's an anthology of aching, straightforward narratives that explore the effects of victimization and injustice on the American psyche. Since much of this work springs from the need to witness and attest, experimental poetics take a back seat to direct, dignified expression, and the tone is more often one of anger and resignation ("We have done away with all noise, but the agony of respiration"David Shapiro) than of reverie. Rich does not exclude the famous (Atwood, Merrill, Merwin) in her quest for diversity, but as this series proves time and again, some of the most interesting poetry comes from the yet-to-be-known. Poets to watch for in the years to come: Wang Ping, C.S. Giscombe, and Beth Ann Fennelly. For all collections.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.

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