The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997

By: Harold Bloom

Book Overview

An anthology of contemporary poets presents works that reflect the diversity in American poetry over the past ten years. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684847795
• ISBN13: 9780684847795
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

thank the gods within man's breast for BLOOM!

Hooray for Lehman for selecting Bloom as editor! I am absolutely as one w/ Bloom in his crusade, and I'm quite used to his general line-up of the perpetrators of the ultimate crime against culture (deconstructionists, historicists, Marxists, and all the other cultural resenters)but even I was shocked to find him being wonderfully and rightfully presumptuous enough to carry his criticism to the contents of a series he was editing and introducing!on the poetry--the big-hitters are present, as well as some surprising selections such as molly peacock's 'have you ever faked an orgasm' (proving that bloom is resolutely not 'out of touch' as one reviewer suggests (is such a phrase even permissible in aesthetic judgements??))and i-forget-his-name's 'a cardinal detoxes' this is the ultimate introduction to recent american poetry.

Can Monkeys Throw Darts? Did Bloom?

I'm pro-Bloom in the general political/aesthetic sense, and it was satisfying for me to see him crystalize some of my sentiments in his foreword. But I bought the book for the poetry, and (judging from the other Best... books I own) I'm of the opinion that Bloom did a mediocre job as editor. His options were, thankfully, limited to a set comprised mostly of strong poems. This book could probably have survived the abuses of a monkey-throwing-darts-at-a-list-of-options editor.

Poetry and no other thing

This entire volume constitutes one of the strongest defenses of the aesthetic I've ever seen. The cumulative effect on the reader is a sense of gratitude and relief that poetry continues to exist (though precariously, as Bloom notes), that a few people continue to produce the sort of language that clarifies and exhilarates. SONOGRAM, a poem by a poet unknown to me, is an amazing piece of writing which manages in great concision to utter funny, ominous, and moving truths about the after all bizarre experience of peeking at the lineaments of one's future. The Ginsberg poem - a consideration of a fellow poet - is a riot. Completely unexpected, full of hilarious asides. Virtually all the poems collected here are things of enchantment. Do buy this book.

An All-American roster of the best poems of the decade!

The process is simple: each year, you have a prominent poet (a practitioner of the art whose ear is ostensibly close to the ground of the craft) select 75 of the best poems from the hundreds published in magazines that year. Then you make this selection available in a single volume which provides a broad portrait of the current state of the art of poetry in America.For a decade, this is how it's been done, and John Ashberry, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, A.R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate have each had a hand in fashioning The Best American Poetry anthologies that are the result, resulting in excellent collections whose range and quality have made the series ever more popular with each passing year.Now, the critic Harold Bloom has taken the 10 resulting volumes and selected the 75 best poems out of the bunch, making a literal Best of the Best American Poetry anthology that is, at the very least, provocative.Bloom's introductory essay, in which he takes no prisoners in his bombastic critique of the state of American poetry, is worth the price of the book alone. Even if you agree with Bloom's conclusions about what's wrong with how poetry is treated nowadays, his skewering of academia (and even of Adrienne Rich, who served as editor for 1996) is guaranteed to set your blood aboil. If, as Shelley wrote, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, then Bloom has set himself up as Chief Justice. And it turns out that this outspoken critic happens to be a hangin' judge!As if this weren't enough, then there are the poems themselves: they are all bard-inspiringly good. All the big guns are present (with the exception of Ms. Rich), as well as some less-famous artisans, even including Carolyn Creedon, who is "basically a waitress who goes to school" and whose poem, "litany," is full of "sweaty immediacy" and heartbreaking insight. Talk about a democratic selection!Other standou! t selections include John Ashberry's "Myrtle," a poem I can't seem to stop thinking about; Lucie Brock-Broido's "Inevitably, She Declined," a compressed and vivid evocation of human history; Anthony Hecht's virtuousic "Prospects"; and Molly Peacock's "Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?," a cycle which manages to be hilarious, moving, and technically-brilliant all at once.This is a volume that passes the only real test of literary worth: it rewards re-reading. I urge you to begin.

Bloom at his idiosyncratic, agonistic, feisty best

In his introduction to THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY, Harold Bloom continues his knockdown fight against the modern multi-culturalists whom he had soundly whipped in his most recent work, THE WESTERN CANON.Seeking to uncover for us the true heirs of the Whitman-Dickinson-Stevens-Hart Crane tradition, he gives us vintage Ashbery, Ammons, Bishop, Clampitt, Hecht, and Kinnell, alongside such exciting new masters as George Bradley, J.D. McClatchy, Thylias Moss, and Charles Wright. Bloom reserves his greatest scorn for Adrienne Rich, editor of the 1996 edition of the BEST AMERICAN POETRY and the apotheosis for Bloom of dedication to multicultural mediocrity. Bloom doesn't argue that these poets and their poems constitute the best of all contemporary poetry, but only that they are the best among the first ten editions of this series. I can't imagine anyone arguing with his choices. Here, he is at his selective best and gives us a powerful volume of visionary poems.