What is "Best"?
The 2022 Best American Poetry volume is out. What purpose does “best” serve?
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Superlatives are so American. We’re bombarded daily with the “best” apps to help you LYBL (“live your best life”), the “best” ways to [fill in the blank], the “best” poem that won the prize.
The Best American Poetry 2022 just hit shelves. I immediately put a hold on it at my local public library, but I have to admit that the whole premise makes me queasy. Although I often find these volumes delightful and useful (I’ll share why in a minute), I chafe at “best” as a concept.
Guest editors saddled with an impossible task
Matthew Zapruder is 2022’s guest editor, meaning he was responsible for sifting through innumerable journals and other sources to select poems for this volume. In the volume’s introduction, I sense his anxiety about this:
“Is this year’s Best American Poetry anthology a time capsule? A futile cry into a dark future? A harbinger of necessary change? A seed bank? A catalog of soon-to-be-anachronistic neuroses?One of the final exhales of literature’s expired, propped-up corpse? More kindling? I don’t know. I do know that when life is confusing and difficult, we need to encounter it directly.”
Personally, I admire Zapruder’s poetry and how he thinks about poetry. His approach has been helpful to me. One thing I appreciated in his intro, as I did in his book Why Poetry, is how he draws us into poetry’s wide potentials while admitting his subjectivity:
“The imagination of these poets took me again and again to places where I could feel again, though not in the usual ways. Often the poems painfully reminded me that everything is alive.”
“Only a poem, it seems to me, is capable of expressing and creating, in the mind of the reader, the coexisting, colliding, disappointing, irresolvable mess of despair, rage, and foolish hope that defines what it is to be American.”
“The poems I love most are responsible to others and the world but also feel free.”
A note on the series editors’ backgrounds and relative privilege: The series has done a decent job of diversifying its guest editors, with Tracy K. Smith, Paisley Rekdal, and Major Jackson serving as guest editors over the past few years. Still, we have to know that these volumes reflect not only the guest editor’s conscious and unconscious inclinations, but the series editor’s (David Lehman’s) as well. It is what it is.
Permission to experiment
Last year, I suggested my students get The Best American Poetry 2021 edited by Tracy K. Smith as a lens into some wildly different approaches to poem making, a variety of contemporary styles and forms. Representing poets’ variable approaches seems important to Zapruder, too:
“Poets are constantly breaking the rules, to reveal what should be considered beautiful and therefore worth preserving. Which means that the most important elements of the best poems might not be immediately understood as poetry. The inclusion of these disparate, unpredictable, misbehaving elements in the same space expands our sense of what is possible.”
We might not encounter these examples otherwise. Who can afford to subscribe to even half the source journals? The Best American Poetry can be a useful lens on the current publishing landscape, too. In the back of the book, you’ll find where poems were originally published along with poets’ bios listing recent books, etc.
So why not lean into “best”?
Superlatives get thrown around all the time, not only by this series but in literary journal calls-for-submission and in advice about manuscript development: “Put your best poems up front.” “Send us your best work only.” “We want to read your most compelling poems.”
In my opinion, just thinking that certain poems could be “best” or “better” works against us. If you’ve ever taken a class with me, you know I discourage the use of labels like “strongest,” “most compelling,” “weakest,” etc. Although comparisons come naturally to us (they might even be hardwired), we need to circumvent our defaults and cultural training to do the deeper work of poetry—our poetry.
Yes, of course we need to scrutinize our poems, our manuscripts, to rework and refine them to their full potential. We need to be selective about what we choose to submit. But we’re individuals. What defines “best” for me and you will be as different as our fingerprints.
Trying to suss out “best” distracts us from the differences that are helpful to notice—a poem’s or manuscript’s driving instincts, its structural vision, its unique voice. “Best” keeps us from attending to potential, the piece’s or manuscript’s why.
Instead, I encourage you to—as Zapruder did in his intro—be clear about exactly what you want poetry to do for you—the effects you want it to have, the purpose it serves in your life.
Call the poems you choose necessary. What defines “necessary” for you?
From the Poet to Poet Community
Food for thought from this week’s conversation about book publishers: “I’m not sure I have the time to wait for contests. But ‘indie’ publishing is still a lot of work. You’ve got to pay attention to the editing, the design, the paper, the cover …. ”
Check out the new Poet to Poet website for upcoming conversations, classes, and more.
I wonder if it’s wise to call a poem “best” so soon after its publication.
I recently read a Best American Poetry from a few years ago, but there wasn’t a single poem in it that I noted as something to come back to or to pass along to others. I’m sure there were interesting poems published that year, it’s just that in (my) hindsight these were not those poems. Or maybe “best” had an expiration date that year.
Obviously the editor thought otherwise and, as you point out, that’s kind of the problem. But how else to determine what to include, vote on it? Well, that might result in an interesting collection. Eg, The Year’s Most-Read New Poems. Online mags know how many times each poem was viewed, so it could be done if you had a group of cooperating mags (one view = one vote, let’s say).
That would remove editor bias (as long as they’re numerate) and doesn’t make any claim about quality or imply any sort of longevity.
When I think of the "Best of" collections, my brain goes directly to "Selected" - whether it's essays or poems. I think that's the lens you're putting on this, Radha, that we should think of the poems as selected at several steps - the poet who submitted to the journal, the journal's editor (plus whatever reading staff the journal has), the volume's editor (this year Zapruder, whose book Why Poetry should be on every poet's shelf, where the books we've already read at least once are), the series editor. That's a lot of selection.