The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry 2018 at the Southern California Poetry Festival Sunday, November 18, 6:00 PM

At Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
*681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

November 18,  6:00 p.m. *Free

Thursday, November 15, 6:00 PM: An Evening with the Poets of Sage House

Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, & Carmen Torrado Gonzalez with David Lehman 

Thursday November 15 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Buffalo Street Books
The Dewitt Mall
215 North Cayuga Street
Ithaca, New York 14850

Spend an evening with the poets of Cornell University Press: Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, and Carmen Torrado Gonzalez! By day – they publish some of the leading academic and trade books in the country and world. By night – they emerge from Sage House to write and share their own evocative, imaginative, and inventive works. Join us for a reading with Ithaca’s poet-publishers & special guest David Lehman!

The Mission Poetry Series presents Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, & Vandana Khanna

The tenth season of the Mission Poetry Series begins with a reading on Saturday, November 3, 2018, at 1 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Public Library. Sunlight, Leaves, & Shadows: Three Poets in Autumn features three award-winning authors: Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, and Vandana Khanna.  The title of the event is taken from “Words,” a poem by Dana Gioia, the current Poet Laureate of California.

The reading will be held at The Santa Barbara Public Library, in the Faulkner Gallery, at 40 E. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA,  and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/missionpoetryseries/

Tami Haaland, Guest Author Beginning October 31

We'd like to welcome back Tami Haaland as our guest author. Tami will be posting weekly during her stint teaching at a small school near Stuttgardt, Germany. Tami is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (Lost Horse Press, 2018), When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Haaland’s poems have recently appeared in Consequence, Ascent, The Ecopoetry Anthology Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry among other publications. She received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council and is a 2019 recipient of a Governor’s Humanities Award. Haaland has served as Montana's Poet Laureate and is a professor of creative writing at Montana State University Billings.

Welcome, Tami.

-- sdl

Justin Jamail, Guest Author October 22-26

This week we welcome Justin Jamail as our guest author. Justin grew up in Houston, Texas, and he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Justin is the Deputy General Counsel of the Metropolitan Opera. He studied poetry at Columbia University and the UMass Amherst MFA program. Find out more about Justin Jamail here. 

Welcome, Justin. 

-- sdl

"Why No Nobel Prize in Lit This Year: The Real Skinny" [by Morris Phillips]

From our Stockholm correspondent, Morris Phillips, a pretty obvious pseudonym for a chain-smoking friend of ours (pictured above):

Dear David,

By now you've heard the cover story. A bunch of women were sexually harassed, assaulted, or disrespected by a French guy married to a Swedish poet who is a member of the Swedish Academy, and the French guy, an arts promoter whatever that is, went to prison when he was convicted of raping a woman in 2011. 

All of this is true, but the real reason behind the decision to award no prize this year is more complicated and Scandinavian.

The Academy, in a fit of melancholy disguising itself as boredom, had dug itself into a trench. With Bob Dylan in 2016 and Kazuo Ishiguro last year, the odds against an English-speaking author were like the odds against tomorrow from a prisoner facing the firing squad today. Besides: Roth was dead, Updike was dead, and long gone were such nobly neglected authors as Auden, Borges, Forster, Frost, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and Gertrude Stein.

Turning to France, Stella Bergen said, "What about Patrick Modiano?" This was considered an enlightened solution until Greta Ohlsson reminded everyone that the Academy had already awarded Modiano the Nobel a few years ago.

The committee's search for an age-appropriate author of serious mediocrity and high moral aims had turned up the Platonic ideal of an author sympathetic to #Me-Too and staunchly opposed to the primitive masculine hegemony that characterizes ISIS. But while everyone loved the idea, the search was compromised by [REDACTED] and there was no concealing the fact that one of the academy members tied up with the accused rapist, though not literally, had found out the finalists' names and was making a killing in the gambling halls of Stockholm and, via proxy, at Ladbroke's of London.

Also, there was a nightclub called Forum, and don't even ask me what they were doing there, but funds from Swedish Academy members propped up the place. In one word: corruption.

 Being a member of the Swedish Academy is a lifetime appointment, so resignation by the two who were implicated in the mess was not an option. Furthermore no one likes lifetime appointments anymore. Just consider the Supreme Court and the Queen of England. 

Alicia Huberman and Joan of Arc advanced the idea that awarding no prize would make a statement more powerful for what it did not say, and Dr. Constance Peterson supplied the rationale, likening the decision to the interpretation of a dream by John Ballantyne when he thinks he is Dr. Edwardes and can't remember whom he killed, when, or how he has successfully assumed the identity of the murdered man, who looks nothing like him.

It was this motion that carried the day. A quote from Strindberg was considered for the press release but rejected as needlessly gloomy and insensitive to the tenor and alto of the time. -- M. P.

Enter to win every volume of The Best American Poetry from 1988-2018. Deadline 10/7/2018

This just in from Scribner via Instagram:

 Visit @ScribnerBooks on @Instagram and enter for your chance to win! https://t.co/hUCKOyyeIp pic.twitter.com/osTOdusyCP

scribnerbooks🌠🌠🌠#PoetryDayGiveaway🌠🌠🌠 It's National Poetry Day in the UK, and we're joining in with a poetry celebration of our own!

2018 means 30 years of the Best American Poetry series. To mark the occasion, we're giving away a complete set of all Best American Poetry editions to date!

Follow us and tag a friend in the comments below for a chance to win - a paperback copy of each Best American Poetry from 1988 to 2018, including two Best of the Best editions and our 1988 reissue out this year, are going to one lucky reader! An instant poetry collection could be yours.

No purchase necessary. Enter between 10:00 am ET on 10/4/18 and 11:59 pm ET on 10/7/18. Open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. Winner/s will be selected at random on or about 10/8/18. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Official rules: https://tinyurl.com/yb65ldap.

 

 Visit @ScribnerBooks on @Instagram and enter for your chance to win! #PoetryDay @BestAmPo https://t.co/hUCKOyyeIp pic.twitter.com/osTOdusyCP

— Scribner (@ScribnerBooks) October 4, 2018

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

". . .not a cemetery but a crowded, noisy maternity ward": Dana Gioia on the state of American poetry

Here is a brief excerpt from Dana Gioia's introduction to The Best American Poetry 2018:

<<<
The situation of poetry is impossible to describe but easy to summarize. No one fully understands what is happening because poetry and its audience are changing too quickly in too many places. There is considerable continuity with the past. The traditional ways in which poetry has been written, read, and evaluated still have relevance, but those methods don’t always seem very useful in understanding new developments. Old theories (including postmodern ones) are incommensurate with the present realities. There is no emerging mainstream replacing a dying old order. There is no mainstream at all — only more alternatives. The best metaphor is not death but birth. The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward.

So don’t panic. Poetry is not in danger, at least no more than usual. New forms of poetry don’t eliminate established forms, though they do influence and modify them. Culture is not binary but dialectical. A new generation of poets and readers drawn from every segment of society is expanding the art to meet new needs and seize new opportunities. Poetry now has as many categories as popular music. What plays at Harvard won’t get anyone on the dance floor in East Los Angeles, and that’s just fine. All styles are possible, all approaches open, and everyone is invited.
>>>

A fuller excerpt from Dana's introduction appears in the current Los Angeles Review of Books. The book itself will reach bookstore shelves any day now. -- DL

Ashbery Collages at Tibor de Nagy, September 5 -- October 14, 2018

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The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of John Ashbery's collages made from 2015 until his death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.

Oh, What Fun! consists of group of works inspired, as with his previous collages, by Ashbery’s long held fascinations, many since childhood, with cartoons, movies and other forms of popular culture.  Much of the imagery and source material is culled from his personal trove of collections, such as board games, French puzzle plates, old postcards, and other treasured knick-knacks that fill his homes in Manhattan and Hudson, New York.  Ashbery became interested at a young age by surrealism, particularly the collage novels of Max Ernst and the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. A more direct and collaborative influence was his friend Joe Brainard, at times making collages side-by-side with him in Brainard’s house in Vermont and sharing found materials for future collages.  Although Ashbery started making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard with one appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948 (a collaboration with Fred Amory), and he first publicly exhibited a single collage in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1977, it has only been in the last decade that his collages have become more widely known.

​Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 15 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com

Daniel Brown, Guest Author August 13-17

This week we welcome Daniel Brown as our guest author. Daniel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Raritan, PN Review, Parnassus, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180  and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. His most recent collections are Taking the Occasion (winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize) and What More?. Brown’s criticism has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review and other journals. His audio-visual e-books Why Bach?  and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are available at Amazon.com. Brown holds a Masters in Musicology from Cornell University, and taught music history and theory at Cornell and Dartmouth College.

Welcome, Daniel.

-- sdl

Kristina Marie Darling, Guest Author July 9-13

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (CR Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New
American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of
American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni,
Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines.
Kristina  serves as editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, is an opinion
columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

Welcome back, Kristina.

-- sdl

Ready, Set, Summer: "Celebrating 100 Years Of Leonard Bernstein, Boston Pops Showcase 'On The Town'" [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(Ed note: Lloyd Schwartz is the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and senior editor of Classical Music for New York Arts. His latest book of poems, "Little Kisses," was published by the University of Chicago Press.This preview of upcoming performances to celebrate Leonard Bernstein's centenary has us making our summer plans to visit Tanglewood. You can read Lloyd's complete preview here. sdl) 

Matthew DiBattista, Andrew Tighe, Aimee Doherty and David McFerrin perform music from Leonard Bernstine's "Candide" with the Boston Pops on May 5, 2018. (Courtesy Hilary Scott)

April 1944, a year before the end of the Second World War, marked the premiere of an extremely contemporary ballet called “Fancy Free,” about three sailors on a one-day leave in New York. Leonard Bernstein wrote the score, with choreography by Jerome Robbins. It was a landmark for both of them and is still in the repertory of countless dance companies around the world.

It was so successful that before the year was over, it had been turned into a full-length Broadway musical comedy titled “On the Town,” with additional music by Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also performed in the original cast). Bernstein himself wrote the double-entendre lyrics to the comic number “I Can Cook Too” (“I can bake, too, on top of the lot,/ My oven's the hottest you'll find./ Yes, I can roast too,/ My chickens just ooze,/ My gravy will lose you your mind”).

As they begin their leave, the sailors sing “New York, New York, a helluva town,/The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down,/And people ride in a hole in the ground./New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!” And that anthem has remained a popular tribute to our most populous city.

In the 1949 MGM film version, shot on location, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin are the sailors. The shocking “helluva” had to be changed to the less offensive “wonderful” to suit the production code.

The show is mainly comic, but as one of the sailors sings, “A town’s a lonely town.” And the show also captures the poignance of the war years, with all its separations and partings. If I had to choose a favorite song, it would probably be “Some Other Time,” a song of wistful regret and not entirely convincing optimism, giving the underlying possibility that these sailors might not return.

Just when the fun's beginning
Comes the final inning
But let's be glad for what we had and what's to come

Can't satisfy my craving
Never have watched you while you're shaving
Oh, well, we'll catch up some other time

There's so much more embracing
Still to be had, but time is racing
Oh, well, we'll catch up some other time

Continue reading here . . . 

Philip Roth says the Bull Still Has Room to Run [by David Lehman]

In honor of the late Philip Roth we bring you this feature that we ran back in March 2014.

<<<

If the market seemed overvalued last year, wary analysts are eyeing the exit signs now that the individual investor is back into equities. Have we reached a market top? Philip Roth, who accurately predicted the end of the last bull market in 2007, is still long on stocks, according to today's Wall Street Journal. (See page C4, "Bull Market is Weary, but Few Signs Point to Exhaustion" by E. S. Browning).

Roth, now eighty and retired from novel writing, has pursued an alternative career in stockpicking, hints of which surface in the Zuckerman novels and in "American Pastoral." Interviewed about current market conditions he sounded cautious. "There's nothing that I see now that says imminent demise," he says, acknowledging the danger signals: new market highs, overpriced stocks, and a tremendous amount of headline risk. "The Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, Boko Haram (Nigeria) -- and you can't blame it on Israel and the US."

Except for these trouble spots, and the vengeance of nature whose most potent weapon is the weather, Phil sees smooth sailing ahead for the bull. "Most tops are made with high interest rates, rising inflation, and rising stock prices," Roth says. "Two out of three are missing right now, and two out of three ain't bad."

So how much room does have the bull have left to run? "It depends on how you define bull," Roth says. "Not only the metric you use but the ontological status of bull. Let us not overlook the fact that bull is short for bullshit, and if you served in World War II and weren't singing 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me),' you know that everything is bullshit.

"Hell, some writers made a career of it," the retired novelist added. "But let's not go there." Roth refused to comment on the following other subjects I brought up in our conversation: Woody Allen, the Oscars, the new biography of Philip Roth by someone with Roth in her name who is no relation, the Olympics, Bob Dyland, and the disrespect shown him by envious writers and irate feminists.

Roth grew animated when the subject turned to "Investors Intelligence," a widely followed survey of newsletter writers, which indicates that 60% of market newsletters were bullish in January. This unusually high figure sent a bearish signal, and January saw a sell-off. "But people were buying on the dip in February," Roth said. "And the cycle continues. Now comes March like a hungry lion, proud if alone. The ides are not a soothsayer's fantasy for nothing. Then April, and the poets with the hats walk under the trees on college campuses. The old mantra is 'sell in May and go away,' but June is "busting out all over.'  July, August, Summertime, and the slow slog of the marshes. And then, like the unfurling of a matador's cape, September. Oy. September. November. And these few precious days I'll give to you."

-- David Lehman
>>>

Originally posted March 3, 2014

When Philip Roth Retired: "I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad. . ."

Back in November 2012, we ran this column  about Philip Roth's decision to cease his writing career:

Our greatest living novelist is hanging up his spikes. He has been mulling it over for two years, he told Charles McGrath of the New York Times. “I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.” Here's a link to what Roth calls his last interview, and here's a little more about how he came to his decision.

<<<<
“I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s over, maybe it’s over,’ ” he said. “I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn’t read in 50 years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad — two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, ‘First Love’ and ‘The Torrents of Spring.’ ” He also reread Faulkner and Hemingway.

“And then I decided to reread my own books,” Mr. Roth went on, “and I began from the last book forward, casting a cold eye. And I thought, ‘You did all right.’ But when I got to ‘Portnoy’ ” — “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969 — “I had lost interest, and I didn’t read the first four books.”

“So I read all that great stuff,” he added, “and then I read my own and I knew I wasn’t going to get another good idea, or if I did, I’d have to slave over it.”
>>>

Rest in peace Philip Roth (1933-2018)

The great Philip Roth has passed away at age 85. 

from Tablet (2013) in honor of fake news:

<<
Philip Roth didn't win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Mr. Roth, 80, the author of 29 novels and the only living American author to have his works anthologized by the Library of America, is “an epicist who examines contemporary American life with incorruptible scrutiny.” He is the 14th American and the 14th Jew to be anointed with the honor.

The Newark-bred author will add the Nobel Prize to an unparalleled array of accolades, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal. Often short-listed by the betting site Ladbrokes, in recent years, Mr. Roth’s name had dropped to 50/1 odds, making him a perennial long shot.

When reached by phone at his apartment in Manhattan, Mr. Roth seemed nonchalant about his new laurels. “I wasn’t in a hurry,” he said.
>>>

How can poetry thrive in the digital age? David Lehman shows the way! Tuesday, May 15th at 7pm

Join us and Harper's Magazine on Tuesday, May 15th at 7pm as David Lehman discusses Next Line, Please at Book Culture on Columbus!

450 Columbus Ave.

New York, NY

In this book, David Lehman, the longtime series editor of the Best American Poetry, offers a masterclass in writing in form and collaborative composition. An inspired compilation of his weekly column on the American Scholar website, Next Line, Please makes the case for poetry open to all. Next Line, Pleasegathers in one place the popular column's plethora of exercises and prompts that Lehman designed to unlock the imaginations of poets and creative writers. He offers his generous and playful mentorship on forms such as the sonnet, haiku, tanka, sestina, limerick, and the cento and shares strategies for how to build one line from the last. This groundbreaking book shows how pop-up crowds of poets can inspire one another, making art, with what poet and guest editor Angela Ball refers to as "spontaneous feats of language."

How can poetry thrive in the digital age? Next Line, Please shows the way. Lehman writes, "There is something magical about poetry, and though we think of the poet as working alone, working in the dark, it is all the better when a community of like-minded individuals emerges, sharing their joy in the written word."

David Lehman has served as quizmaster of "Next Line, Please" since The American Scholar launched the feature in May 2014. His books include Poems in the Manner of... and Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and series editor of The Best American Poetry. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.

Event address: 

450 Columbus Ave.

New York, NY 10024

Can't make it? Reserve a signed copy by calling our store today: (212) 595-1962 

 

Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers (Paperback)

By David Lehman (Editor), Angela Ball (With), Robert Wilson (Foreword by)

$18.95

ISBN: 9781501715006

Availability: On Our Shelves Now - Click Title to See Location Inventory.

Published: Cornell University Press - March 15th, 2018

The Mission Poetry Series Presents Marisol Baca & Christopher Buckley

     The ninth season of the Mission Poetry Series wraps with a reading on Saturday, April 28, 2018, at 2 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Public Library.
     In Bright Sky Blue: Two Poets in Spring features award-winning authors Marisol Baca and Christopher Buckley.  The title of the event is taken from a poem by Joanne Kyger, a major poet of the San Francisco Renaissance who studied poetry and philosophy at UC Santa Barbara.
     The reading will be held at The Santa Barbara Public Library, in the Faulkner Gallery, at 40 E. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA,  and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/missionpoetryseries/

David Lehman and Linda Gregerson at KGB Bar

 

On Monday evening, April 23rd, David Lehman and Linda Gregerson will be reading poems at KGB Bar!

 

KGB Bar

85 East 4th Street

New York, New York

 

7:30 pm, but get there early to make sure you get a seat!

 

Linda Gregerson, who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is a poet as well as a scholar of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetry. She has won many awards. Her latest book of poems is "Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014" (Houghton Mifflin).

 

David Lehman, who teaches at The New School in New York City, is a poet, editor, and literary critic, just to name a few of his accomplishments. His latest book of poetry is Poems in the Manner of (Simon and Schuster) and his latest book on writing is Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers (Cornell University Press).