As a graduate student at Columbia, I alternated with Michael Andre as host of a weekly radio program for WKCR-FM. We called it "The Only Poetry Show." In the first weeks, we played Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia" and recordings of T. S. Eliot and other poets. Morris Dickstein came and talked about contemporary ficrion; Ron Horning read Robert Desnos's "Fantomas." Bill Zavatsky talked about writing poetry while Bill Evans played piano. There were songs from Franz Schubert, "The Three Penny Opera," and William Blake, and poems from John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
What fun to be interviewed, more than fifty years later, from a new outfit called "Only Poems."
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Interview with the series editor for Best American Poetry
“No one thought it would last. One publisher’s “optimistic” forecast: we’d last two, maybe three years, and be lucky to sell maybe 2,000 copies. Poetry isn’t supposed to be an asset on the publisher’s balance sheet.”
David Lehman inaugurated The Best American Poetry series in 1988. Lehman’s work as an editor also includes such volumes as The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), and others. He is the author of several collections of poems. He is also known as a prominent editor and literary critic. Lehman's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and many more. Lehman is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at the New School and New York University. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York
“It’s difficult to judge one’s own poems – that’s why we value sympathetic poetry editors, who help us determine which of our poems should be released and which should be locked in the drawer.”
KARAN
David, let’s begin with the famous process question. Would you share with us how your daily surroundings or routines influence your creative process? Do you have a writing routine? How has it changed over the years? Do you have any particular habits that help you stay creative?
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DAVID
I write every day. There are few things I like more than writing. If you write every day, you will have the chance to surprise yourself. If you want inspiration, you can go to the computer, look at a Delacroix, listen to Tony Bennett, and take it from there. As a classic Gemini, I constantly divide my mind and subdivide my time in a way that ultimately leaves me charged up and eager to do more, it being my assumption that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do. There are only so many hours in the day that you can devote to writing poetry. So, you have other hours to fill: I read a lot, write books, edit anthologies, prepare lectures, see to my correspondence. For example, I edit the Best American Poetry blog.
KARAN
You've edited numerous poetry anthologies and have a vast knowledge of poetic forms and history. How do these roles influence your own writing? Are there specific poets or movements that continually inspire your work?
DAVID
My reading feeds my writing. I love imitating the great poets of the past and I enjoy writing in form. Very old-school: I subscribe to the idea that poetry is a vocation, a calling, that requires us to familiarize ourselves with the history, traditions, and conventions of our art form. I love memorizing a Shakespeare soliloquy. I also get a lot of stimulus from other art forms – from the movies, for example. Lately I’ve had the chance to write regularly for The American Scholar on the subject of movies.
KARAN
Over the years, your poetry has evolved in both form and thematic focus, yet there’s a voice or the person behind the poems (you) who remains. Could you discuss the arc of your writing, and also the mysterious element that remains the same?
DAVID
Good question. A dedicated reader of my work (if there were such a person) would be in a better position to answer. I believe that however different my poems may be on the surface, in the end they sound like me. I don’t look back, and sometimes, like this morning, I will pick up a book of mine that I haven’t read in years. This morning I picked up The Evening Sun, a book of daily poems that Scribner published in 2002. It was wonderful to like poems that I had written so long ago.
KARAN
Music appears in your poems frequently. I consider music to be the supreme art form, and many consider it a great influence on their poetry. I’d love to know your thoughts on music, especially as it relates to your poetics. Additionally, what do you like to listen to? Who is your favorite classical composer? Why?
DAVID
I’m comfortable with Walter Pater’s assertion that music is the condition to which the other arts aspire. My favorite classical composer is Beethoven, but I also dearly love Schubert, Mahler, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, et al. I love many others, too, and I am passionate about the American songbook as performed by Sinatra, Ella, Bobby Darin, Michael Buble, Doris Day, Lee Wiley, Helen Forrest, Nat Cole, Mel Torme, Ray Charles, Joe Williams, Johnny Hartman, no to mention piiano players like Art Ttaum, Teddy Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller. When I write, the classical or jazz radio station may be playing in the background, and sometimes the music itself enters the poem. Writing about music is a delightful challenge, and I like challenges.
KARAN
Would you tell us about your journey as the editor of Best American Poetry? Did you have an inkling it’d become so huge when you started it? The literary landscape changes every decade or two — can you delineate for us the trajectory of the poetry world from 1988 to 2024? What has changed for the better, what for worse?
DAVID
No one thought it would last. One publisher’s “optimistic” forecast: we’d last two, maybe three years, and be lucky to sell maybe 2,000 copies. Poetry isn’t supposed to be an asset on the publisher’s balance sheet. Luckily, John Glusman (then with Macmillan, later with Scribner) believed in the project, and Scribner has published BAP since 1988.
To discuss the “trajectory” would take much time and many pages, but I believe that my forewords for each volume since 1988 may provide a shortcut. They are collected in The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 (Pittsburgh) and The Birth of the Best: The Making of the Best American Poetry (Marsh Hawk, 2023), which contains the forewords for BAP 2015 through 2022. I’d love to see the books reviewed as a springboard toward a discussion of the evolution of American poetry.
KARAN
As the series editor of the most famous poetry anthology ever, you’ve shaped the way poetry is received by the public. What do you look for in a poem when deciding to include it in Best American Poetry? How do you balance personal taste with broader appeal? I imagine it to be an extremely difficult task to bring the millions of poems published in a year and bring it down to 50 or so poems. Since we have a new guest editor every year, what is your role in the selection process?
DAVID
How to “balance personal taste with broader appeal”: as someone said of psychoanalysis, it’s not only impossible but also very difficult. I do my best. But the beauty of the series is that a different guest editor makes the selections each year. That assures variety. My role: to assist the guest editor, to pick the cover art, to supervise the whole process of making a manuscript and seeing it through production.
KARAN
You’ve mentioned elsewhere that selecting poems for these anthologies is very different from selecting poems for your own books. Would you speak more about this divide? Are you more or less critical of your own work? Do you have specific examples of how you approach these two tasks differently?
DAVID
It’s difficult to judge one’s own poems – that’s why we value sympathetic poetry editors, who help us determine which of our poems should be released and which should be locked in the drawer. This is especially important for someone like me, who is a good critic of other people’s work but less confident about his own productions. It’s easier to judge other people’s poems because the onus is on them to win you over, and if they do, you want to shout hallelujah to the heavens. It is a very nice feeling knowing that you’ve made a big difference in the life of a poet, who needs all the support he or she can get.
KARAN
How has being an editor shaped your practice as a poet? For instance, has it influenced your approach to writing, your thematic choices, or even the way you revise your own work?
DAVID
I am a great believer in revision. Revision is a creative act, and it beats staring at “le vide papier que la blancheur défend.”
KARAN
How do you think the rise of digital platforms and social media has affected the landscape of poetry? Do you see these changes as beneficial or detrimental to the art form? What are your thoughts on Instagram poetry? Moreover, more and more literary magazines are also turning online. How do you perceive that change — positively or are you wary of it?
DAVID
When it comes to tech stuff that everyone is supposed to be enthralled with, I tell people that I come from a different century. But I am certain poetry will survive.
KARAN
I imagine, like most people who read so much, you must have a list of poets who you think are not as well known as they ought to be. Would you introduce us to a few of these hidden gems and why you think we should be onto them?
DAVID
There are many. I would recommend looking at each year’s Best American Poetry. We have made a habit of introducing new, little-known poets – such as, in the 1990s, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Amy Gerstler, Kay Ryan, A. E. Stallings, and Dean Young. Isn’t that a terrific list? And then there’s Nin Andrews, Laura Cronk, Elaine Equi, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mitch Sisskind, Adrienne Su, and Matthew Yeager. Some writers known for their fiction, such as Julia Alvarez and the late John Updike, write terrific poems and are represented in our volumes.
KARAN
What advice would you give to poets who are just starting out, especially those who might feel overwhelmed by the breadth of content and style in contemporary poetry?
DAVID
Read the great poets – Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne, Pope, Gray’s elegy, the Romantics, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Stevens. Write every day, even if it’s only a few lines. Enjoy the experience. Remind yourself that you don’t have to depend on your poems to earn you a living. Let the love of poetry be your guide, and do not be distracted by rivalries or the desire for recognition.
KARAN
What are you working on now? Will you tell us about any upcoming projects or collections you're particularly excited about? What can your readers look forward to next?
DAVID
I’m almost always working on multiple projects. Right now I am writing a book of “astro profiles,” astrological readings of twenty-five of my favorite individuals from Antigone to John Keats
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photo: Jack Mitchell, copyright (c) 1997 Jack Mitchell.
Since the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night, people have been scrambling and googling to find out more about the poet Frank O'Hara and his book Meditations in an Emergency. In the show, the man reading it (with horn rimmed glasses and curly hair: code for highbrow) is sitting next to Don Draper at the bar of a midtown cafe -- like perhaps Larre's, where O'Hara, professionally a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, lunched often. Draper asks the man about the book. "You probably wouldn't like it," he is told. But Don buys it, we see him reading it in his office, and the episode concludes with Don's voiceover reading the fourth and final part of O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" in Meditations in an Emergency.
