Fjords Reviews

January 05, 2017

Poetry
The Best American Poetry 2016
Edward Hirsch (Guest Editor),
David Lehman (Series Editor)

Simon & Schuster 2016
240 pages
ISBN: 9781501127557

This has been a difficult year. If you’re like me, “You can’t stop mourning / everything all the time.”¹ It seems entirely appropriate that David Lehman dedicates the foreword to The Best American Poetry 2016 to a close reading of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”. Like the poem, Lehman’s foreword is apocalyptic and prophetic. It’s a bleak way to start, but then again, it’s been a bleak year. He invites you to “ask yourself which unsettles you more: the revolutionary monster ‘slouching toward Bethlehem’ or the sad truth that the best of us don’t want to get involved, while the worst know no restraint in the pursuit of power?”

Guest editor Edward Hirsch takes a different tone in his introduction. True, “There is genuine suffering in the world, the suffering of actual people,” people suffering in the streets and on trains, people suffering at the hands of police and at the hands of each other, people suffering oppression and persecution and violence, but it’s also true that “poetry addresses this suffering almost better than anything else.” It’s not just poetry in the abstract that address suffering, it’s these poems, it’s the poems in this book. They are “souls that twirl like kites lashed to the wrists of the living.”² It’s as if “God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing,” and these poets heeded the call.³ Are all of the poems great? Perhaps not. But the great poems form a supermajority of the collection. The great poems in this set could override a veto, and they do. To anyone who doubts the vitality of contemporary American poetry, to anyone who questions the purpose of poetry in times of unrest: read these poems. To anyone looking to poetry for commiseration or hope or escape: read these poems.

It’s difficult to speak in generalities about these poems because they are so diverse; the poems in this collection are as various as the poets represented, something that Best American Poetry impresses me with every year. “This book is multitudinous,” it contains contradictions. Hirsch celebrates “Whitman’s empathetic imagination” in the introduction yet Rick Barot’s (excellent) poem finds Whitman “dragged... from under the bed / where he had been hiding,” tarred and feathered.⁴ Hirsch also includes poems by six poets who are no longer living and who will be dearly missed. James Tate’s poem is one of the best in the collection, as is Phillip Levine’s long, hopeful poem that perfectly counterbalances apocalyptic Yeats:

It could be worse. It could be life without mortadella sandwiches,

twenty-five-cent pineapple pies, and quarts of Pilsner
at noon out on a manicured lawn in Grosse Pointe

under a sun that never before caressed an Armenian or a Jew.⁵

Hirsch tells us, “We choose our own ancestors, our own influences—or perhaps they choose us. Everything, everyone, is potentially part of the mix.” You are what you read. While the media feeds us processed artificial junk we find nourishment in poetry. I am grateful for the poets represented in this year’s selection and for the editors who have collected them, not just because they are a joy to read (and certainly they are that) but because they demonstrate the robustness of American poetry at a time when many voices feel threatened. Yes, “We live, perhaps we have always lived, in perilous times, and stand on the edge of an abyss, which absorbs us. We are called to task. Poetry enlarges our experience. It brings us greater consciousness, fuller being. It stands on the side of life, our enthrallment.”

This has been a difficult year, but not for poetry. “Look at these books: hope.”⁶