Best American Poetry 2008

Forewordby David LehmanIn a wonderful essay inThe Dyer's Hand(1962) -- an essay written far in advance of the ubiquitous writing workshop -- W. H. Auden prescribed the curriculum of his "daydream College for Bards." Matriculated students in the "daydream college" must learn at least one ancient and two modern languages. They have to memorize thousands of lines of verse. Forbidden from reading criticism, they must exercise their critical faculties by writing parodies. They need to take courses in prosody, rhetoric, and comparative philology. Most unconventionally, they are required to study three subjects from a varied group, including "archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking," and they are expected also to take up gardening or to adopt a four-legged pet.While the proposed banning of literary criticism from the college library may go too far, I think Auden is right about a lot of things. The value of knowing a poem by heart lies not in the public recitation but in the inward recollection of the lines when one is in a vacant or a pensive mood; there is simply no better way to possess a poem than to memorize it. A good parody is an act of practical criticism, as instructive and more amusing than most. Among the most efficacious exercises are those that involve writing in set forms and handling various metrical and stanzaic patterns. I agree, too, on the value of such nonliterary activities as cooking and gardening, which in their creative processes and structures bear more than a passing resemblance to the act of writing. Given the sheer number of graduate writing programs in the country today -- urban or pastoral, low or high residency, fancy or no frills, traditional or innovative -- it's a wonder, in a way, that none has given Auden's curriculum a try.Auden begins "The Poet & the City" with the observation that a great many young people of limited talent, "when asked what they want to do in life," answer neither sensibly ("I want to be a lawyer, an innkeeper, a farmer") nor romantically ("I want to be an explorer, a racing motorist, a missionary, President of the United States"). Instead they want to become writers, "creative" writers. The phenomenon had long astonished and vexed the author. In "The Prolific and the Devourer," written in 1939, the year Auden first took up residence in America, he asserts that the secret meaning of "I want to write" is "I don't want to work." Art as a form of play, he adds, "is the least dependent on the good-will of others and looks the easiest." For the shirkers, Auden's message is that you must work very hard not only at becoming a poet but at earning a living. He goes on to recommend learning a craft or taking up a trade that does not "involve the manipulation of words," a very Audenesque piece of advice that his own industrious practice as an essayist and anthologist belies. Perhaps, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing to do with good advice is pass it on and assume that it doesn't apply to you. Richard Howard, the guest editor of the 1995 volume in this series, recollects the time that "Wystan [Auden's first name] scolded me for translating books from the French. He thought manual labor was a much more suitable idea." On another occasion, Auden voiced his opinion that "poets should dress like businessmen," while he wore, in James Schuyler's words, "an incredible peach / -colored nylon shirt."Such inconsistencies are amusing but do not affect the central point, and we may thank Auden for raising the whole question of what job options there are for, in his phrase, "the average poet." Many young writers today can see their lives unfold in a seamless transition from one side of the classroom to the other without an intervening period of living in the place that professors sometimes call the "quote-unquote real world." The importance of going out into the world and encountering its complexity aWright, Charles is the author of 'Best American Poetry 2008', published 2008 under ISBN 9780743299749 and ISBN 0743299744.