Stephen Burt, the poem is you (Belknap/Harvard)Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This is what happens when poetry is annexed by academia. The professor at Harvard has to explain the many and various ways in which poetry defines itself as not such a commodity.
The 60 American poems begin in 1981 with John Ashbery and a poem, almost needless to say, about being a poem. It's the first of many where the main theme is its own 'ars poetica' and while I'm very much in favour of poems being aware that they are poems, one would soon tire of a chair that only concerned itself with being a chair or an aeroplane that defined itself as an aeroplane very specifically but never actually flew.
I thought it an excellent opportunity to survey 'contemporary American poetry' and I'm glad of it per se but while it is impressive in its breadth and depth, it is inevitably still a partial view by an industry insider and, however bewilderingly diverse, I wonder if it is missing something. Surely 60 is enough but if I, from this side of the water, question that his 61st poet might have been Anglo-American, Thom Gunn, but he finds no place for Timothy Steele, Marilyn Hacker, August Kleinzahler or the best-selling Billy Collins, it already looks like a personal view. Robert Pinsky is only present as a translator and the usual debate about who is in and why needs to be halted before it gets out of hand.
Burt is a sympathetic and comprehensive guide in his commentaries and is often able to 'sell' poems that on first reading might have struggled to sell themselves but at other times one could be suspicious that he is making special pleas for niche campus interests that illustrate what poetry is happening in these inward-looking faculties but have less appeal beyond. I am expecting to read the next few books I pick up with more relish and enjoyment than I so dutifully did this one.
But I'm glad to have been introduced to, and enjoyed, a healthy quota of the poems featured and that must have been the object of the exercise. Six poems in, John Hollander arrives just in time even though we have already seen Richard Wilbur by then.
There are names that can be trusted with poems to admire, like Adrienne Rich, reasons to be found to pursue Louise Gluck, a convincing case made for Rae Armantrout, Laura Kasischke's Miss Weariness, and the abundance of Albert Goldbarth's 'ultra-talk', and if a magazine brought together a dozen such poets it would be an issue to celebrate and so each reader will come away with their own shortlist of poets to follow up.
Being in chronological order, and finishing with Brandon Som's Oulipo, French for 'where is Li Po', and Ross Gay's Weeping, not long after the Inupiat, dg nanouk okpik, one is tempted by the idea that some strands of contemporary poetry have found their way out of language poetry and offer things to look forward to, which of course there always will be, but it is difficult not to close the book wondering at the special pleading for diversity, the dysfunction and alienation felt by so many and thus how come the Democrat vote collapsed to such an extent that Donald Trump got in.
There is simply no point poets congratulating themselves on the integrity of their esoteric work if meanwhile the lunatics are taking over the asylum.
No, poetry probably doesn't make anything happen but that is to be regretted rather than rewarded.