Eating Good in the Neighborhood: Poetry Style
I’ve talked before here about how the mainstream poetry machine is a broken machine, especially when it comes to doling out prizes, awards, etc. It seems to randomly spit money and prestige at certain poets who know how to play the po-biz game (not to be confused with The Game), regardless of merit. The Best American Poetry anthology put out by Scribner’s is a particularly egregious example of this. It’s curated by David Lehman and guest edited every year by a poet of some renown. Some volumes are better than others–tastes vary, but the general consensus this year (edited by Billy Collins) seems to be, pretty much from every aesthetic and stylistic camp, that it’s a very, very, very bad year.
One of the problems of patronage is more outstanding, and longstanding, however. It has to do with Tendrils of Lehman(tm). Seth did a little digging (looking at the credits in the book) and found an astounding statistic: that, after looking at 11 of the 18 volumes of the anthology, 46% of those who assisted with the Best American Poetry series have appeared in at least one of the anthologies.
I mean–how many poets are there in the country? Thousands? Regardless of one’s poetic stripe, this is pretty galling. This is the one poetry volume that, every year, gets the most attention in your bread-and-butter bookstores, and it has become–what? A gravy train of epic proportions? As Seth says elsewhere:
The point here is that Best American Poetry is a Lehman vehicle. Period. The Guest Editors–as there seems to be ample evidence in this direction–play, to varying degrees, patsy to Lehman’s personal nepotistic instincts.
Choo-choo!
