It is possible to court disaster with the naming of one’s publication. Dave Eggers famously dodged this fate by going over-the-top tongue-in-cheek with his 2000 novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The anthology Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers—published locally by UVA-housed Meridian magazine and edited by faculty member Jeb Livingood—takes a less ironic approach to identifying itself, risking grandiosity. Unfortunately, the claim falls flat.
 Putting rhyme before reason: Best New Poets 2007 falls a bit short of its name. |
Simply publishing 50 good poems from young writers is one thing. Indeed, there are some worthy pieces of writing here. Jamie Ross’s “Peterbilt” conjures a muscular scene of a truck climbing a mountain and, more importantly, does so using language like malleable clay: “…he’s/ driving grease the spitfire pots/ the dirty coffee counter smears of more or don’t/ until the gears heat harder…” And Christina Duhig has her dial tuned to a sort of neo-surrealist frequency, crackling with inventiveness: “A drink of something. Not tea, sky. You ask for the sky/ In a shade of purple. A pickup truck and I, you say I/ Must write the particulars….”
But flying the banner of “best” should at least spur editors to rigorous standards, and here the values seem unexamined. Ross and Duhig are standouts in what is—if we are to take the volume’s title at face value—a relatively bleak outlook for contemporary poetry. So many of the poems here have a quality of piety, as though these young poets’ task was simply to repeat conventions their elders had established. Convention number one: Poems are about paintings, love, the body, the moon and other frequently mined topics. (In his poem “Six Ways of Looking at the Moon”—blandly derivative title, anyone?—Matthew Nienow connects the moon with menstruation, a boat and milk: worn-out metaphors, to put it mildly.)
Convention number two: Violence is an aesthetic virtue. If we can see a woman or a sheep bleeding and dying, then a poem is “powerful.” Convention number three: The tone of a poem should be earnest and reverential. Elizabeth Langemak’s “A Brief History of Sainthood” serves as example, though dozens of others in this volume easily could have: “This was her greatest discovery:/ air from lungs, blood from vein…bone out/ of socket, child expelled from the womb….”
Though this collection proves there is a steady river of MFA graduates pumping out poems and filling a glut of journals, it still gives the impression that poetry as art is in some danger, since conservative writing like this is more in the realm of craft. That would bode poorly if this were the only kind of poetry being written—which, emphatically, is not the case. A pity this collection of “bests” did not open its arms to more work deserving of the superlative.
