The Best American Poetry 2007

While I think it is pretentious to sit in a bar (or on a train) and discuss poetry, if you are not a poet, I still do it anyhow. I am one of the very few people I know (RM and MP being the only others that come to mind), who actively care about and consistently engage with poetry. And, for good or bad, we have largely different tastes in this regard.

When it comes to poetry, I tend to like a few different kinds of poems. I enjoy poems that are written because the poet loves language - ranging from the clever, surprising, or inventive use of words to poems that are mostly just about the sounds of the words, treating them less as vessels of meaning, and more as things, that you might drop from a third story window, just to see what happened. I like poems that shine a light, that reach through time and space to allow you, the reader, and him/her, the poet, to share a moment of recognition, understanding, wonder, joy, or clarity. I do not, however, tend to like maudlin poems. I like poems that rattle a conceit, be it poetic, linguistic, literary, metaphysical, or whatever, in order to project a world. I tend to prefer a spare poem to a dense one, but I will take density if it offers entertainment.

I do not tend to read anthologies of poetry, more often flipping through magazines, and diving deeper into the body-works of poets who engage me. So, it was a bit of a whim that I bought The Best American Poetry of 2007, and I have to say, I was largely disappointed. A lot of poems, few of them bad, but only a handful really hit home. Here is a sampling of a few of my preferences:

Scumble by Rae Armantrout

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as "scumble," "pinky," or "extrapolate?"

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words?

Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue.

What if "of" were such a hot button?

"Scumble of bushes."

What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another's name?

A Voice From The City by Louis E. Bourgeois

And why, Nephew, does this engine make you sad?

The night before the Communists invaded the city my uncle sat at the
stone table and was transfixed by a dozen ripe bananas lying there.
"Aren't they wonderful, Nephew? Isn't it wonderful that we should
have such fruit in our house? We are luckier than all the kings who ruled
over Cambodia -- they could have all the bananas they wanted but as
sated as they were, they could never eat them." My uncle was not an
optimist; he had simply grown unclear in the head. He didn't sleep, he
sat up all night at the stone table staring at the bananas -- two days later
they dragged him to the outskirts of town and shot him in the face for
wearing eyeglasses.

1975

Etymology by Marilyn Nelson

The filth hissed at us when we venture out --
always in twos or threes, never alone --
seems less a language spoken than one spat
in savage plosives, primitive, obscene:
a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame
of reference and novelty, the same
suggestions of what we or they could do
or should, ad infinitum. Yesterday
a mill girl spat a phrase I'd never heard
before. I stopped and looked at her, perplexed.
I derived its general meaning from the context,
but was stumped by the etymology of one word.
What was its source? Which demon should we thank
for words it must be an abomination to think?