The Best American Poetry 2007 guest edited by Heather McHugh
Scribner, 2007
The Best American Poetry series is the hottest-off-the-press anthology of contemporary poetry we've got and this year's edition, edited by wordsmith Heather McHugh, is one of the best we've seen. A random handful of the well-loved, wide-range of poets includes Jane Hirshfield, David Rivard, Julie Carr, Billy Collins, Rae Armantrout, Geoffrey Brock, Natasha Sajé, Christian Bök (coming soon to the Conceptual Poetry Symposium) and Cody Walker (the Poetry Center's 2006 Summer Resident).
In her Introduction, McHugh writes
Fond of the textures of a text, the matter of a letter, I've always gravitated toward ideograms, letterforms, literary graphics, and kinetics, the white space composing the poetic frame. I'm a logic-and-structure addict but I'm also swayable by a passage's sonic architectonics. I hope my heart is smart; my brain knows Braille. I bring six-senses to the enterprise, or seven: because poetry is (as Poe said) "not a purpose, but a passion."
A few verse excerpts to whet your whistle:
I was trying to love matter.
I taped a sign over the mirror:
You cannot hate matter and love form.
(Louise Glück, from “Archaic Fragment”)
The opposites of earth are two
And which you choose is up to you.
One opposite is called the sky,
And that's where larks and swallows fly;
But angels, there, are few if any,
Whereas in heaven there are many.
Well, which word are you voting for?
Do birds or angles please you more?
It's very plain that you are loath
To choose. All right, we'll keep them both.
(Richard Wilbur, from "Opposites" and "More Opposites")
I said some crazy things, but I swear, officer,
I burned her place down by accident.
Only surfaces interest me.
What depths I sound I sound by accident.
"What should we look for in a ghazal, Amit?"
Inevitabilities found by accident.
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New In the Collection
a few highlights from our new acquisitions
come browse, read, respond to new works
come browse, read, respond to new works
The Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill
Penguin, 2007
In “On Reading Burke on Empire, Liberty and Reform” Hill takes his inspiration from the great 18th C. British political orator, an advocate for colonial reform, an expert on American affairs and a hero of Enlightenment:
Culture is a dead word; let us re-
animate it. No, that would use
more resources than I have exhaustion
to yield, pledge, dig up, borrow against. Strange
heterogeneous monsters, an impoverished
and defeated violence. One scrawls obsessed.
Getting out of limbo is the earth-shaker.
This book is rife with artistic and intellectual allusions but the terse poems, if you have the patience, will reward your labor. Take, for example, these tightly stitched phrases from "Harmonia Sacra":
Harmonia sacra, a few sacred crumbs
and we're a scared people. Not even now
sapped or snapped, the willing of form
William Logan, in The New York Times Book Review, says “Gloomy poets are rarely good….For more than 50 years, however, Geoffrey Hill has written a pinch-mouthed, grave-digger’s poetry…(whose) lines have the strength of Miltonic enjambment…but…also…a clotted and defensive mystery.”
"As to the sublime," says Hill, "Don't take / my gloss on it" ("On Reading Blake: Prophet Against Empire”).
BASS CATHEDRAL by Nathaniel Mackey
New Directions, 2008
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate is an ongoing novel of which Bass Cathedral is the fourth in a series. The novel comprises letters written by N., a composer and founding member of the band Molimo m'Atet. Earlier volumes are Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run, and Atet A.D. "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths," writes Utne Reader.
As much as character, this epistolary novel touches upon African American history and theories of music and language. In a Callaloo interview with Christopher Funkhouser, Mackey discusses "how as poets…we’re engaged in something that is looking at the complex interconnectedness of people, of cultures, in a way that is finally in opposition to the oversimplifications…that dominate…politics.”
Bass Cathedral exemplifies such philosophy and aesthetic. His sophisticated prose is charged with mystery and puzzles:
She sang as though she talked out loud in her sleep, a ripped insistent talk that was garbled and articulated by turns, thick-tongue, inebriate talk in which “dream” and “thief” kept coming up…But for all her vehemence one couldn’t make out whether the dream was what was stolen or itself the thief.
And, acid and sharp, nothing is straightforward:
Piss and vinegar were the way of the world…unmentionability’s bouquet ameliorating the shrill extreme it bordered on. Given such singing what there was was a much more relayed and ramified marshalling than boogaloo largesse, a less lyrically overcharged imitation…
Also see Mackey's 2006 National Book Award selection in poetry Splay Anthem.
