Best American Poetry 2001

Foreword by David LehmanA curious thing has happened. While American poetry continues to flourish, this has occurred in an inverse relationship to the prestige of high culture as traditionally understood and measured. High culture has taken a beating. At regular intervals journalists announce the demise of the "public intellectual." Stories circulate about dysfunctional English departments (Duke, Columbia). Outrageous hoaxes bamboozle the faculty's talking heads, whose peculiar patois and preference for theory over practice provoke savage indignation in some corners and satirical merriment in others. A respected professor at a major university told me that the only thing unifying the warring factions in the English department there is "a common hatred of literature." In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the journal's editor, Herbert Leibowitz, laments the dwindling of "the audience for belletristic criticism -- as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety." Leibowitz regards poetry criticism as an art, an art in crisis because of bad academic habits on the one side and the timidity of poets on the other ("the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers"). He surely has a point and is in an excellent position to know. Yet what is equally noteworthy is that the virus afflicting poetry criticism has left poetry itself uncontaminated.In the last decade the audience for poetry has grown; enthusiasts keep turning up in unexpected quarters, and the media are paying attention and magnifying the effect. Poetry readings, fairs, and festivals have proliferated. National Poetry Month has raised April sales (without lowering those of other months). Initiatives ranging from "Poetry in Motion" posters in buses and subways to Robert Pinsky's "favorite poem project" have helped bridge the gap between poetry and the ordinary citizen. The radio voice of Garrison Keillor reads a Shakespeare sonnet in drive time, and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that evening a retired Air Force officer tearfully recites Yusef Komunyakaa's poem about the Vietnam Memorial, "Facing It." Are these things causes or effects of the poetry boom? Probably both, as are Bill Moyers's PBS documentaries, The Language of Life in 1995 and Fooling with Words four years later. Moyers's efforts have met with highbrow derision, but that is true of many efforts to popularize a cultural phenomenon with a reputation for difficulty. One critic has called Moyers the "Bob Costas of the American poetry world," the "ultimate fan," which may be one of those left-handed insults that conveys something of a compliment despite its contemptuous intent. Quarrel with Moyers's taste and judgment all you want; there is no denying the value of his TV programs in building an audience for the poets lucky enough to get air time.More popular than ever, creative writing programs have helped make up for the neglect of literature elsewhere on campus. It is an argument for the health and vitality of contemporary poetry that so many talented young people devote two graduate years to its study despite knowing that "there's nothing in it" (as Ezra Pound's Mr. Nixon warns in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"). It is, of course, easy to mock the locutions of the universal workshop, though I find not only humor but a sort of charm in them. One day in a workshop last February, somebody said, "I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, too," and off went that little mental explosion that tells me a poem, in the case at hand a villanelle, was on the way. I called it "Issues": I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, too.It started to kick in for me with the part about the war.Did what I say make sense to you?I wondered whether what "you" said was true,Which may have been what "you" were aiming for.I had issues with the pronouns in the other lines, toLehman, David is the author of 'Best American Poetry 2001' with ISBN 9780743203838 and ISBN 0743203836.