The Best American Poetry 2010
Guest Editor Amy Gerstler,
Series Editor David Lehman

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. Books read.

How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. Anne Carson. Bashō. The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise. Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Chase Twichell. Corey Marks. François Villon Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet. J. D. McClatchy. J. Zimmerman. J. Zimmerman (haiku). J. Zimmerman (tanka). Jack Gilbert. James Maughn. Jane Hirshfield. Jean Vengua. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan. Laureate Poets: Britain; USA. Len Anderson. Les Murray. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Louise Glück. Mary Oliver. Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Rainer Maria Rilke Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sappho. Sara Teasdale. Shiki (haiku). Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Series Editor David Lehman. Compare with others in series: The Best American Poetry: 2010; Guest Editor Amy Gerstler. The Best American Poetry: 2009; Guest Editor David Wagoner. The Best American Poetry: 2008; Guest Editor Charles Wright. The Best American Poetry: 2007; Guest Editor Heather McHugh. The Best American Poetry: 2006; Guest Editor Billy Collins. The Best American Poetry: 2005; Guest Editor Paul Muldoon.

Amy Gerstler's Introductory Essay.
Poets. Places of first publication.

Introductory Essays to
The Best American Poetry 2010

BUY: The Best American Poetry 2010 Guest Editor Amy Gerstler, Series Editor David Lehman

David Lehman: Series Editor

• Began The Best American Poetry series in 1988. The controversial Best of the title probably helped the series get even more press than the worthiness of the contents.
• Continues as the series editor.
• Selected Amy Gerstler as the 2010 guest editor.

Amy Gerstler: Guest Editor

In her 2010 introductory essay, Amy Gerstler writes on the process of selecting the 75 poems for this collection. Read the whole essay but here are my highlights:

And while I am bemoaning the not-included, I will issue a public apology to my teaching colleagues. To avoid conflict of interest, I decided not to include poems by anyone I currently teach with at the three colleges where I'm employed. [p. xix] [Very wise. JZ.]

Prose poems have always intrigued me. I feel they are a fertile direction in American poetry and they are amply represented here. If someone wants to revive that weary old argument about how prose poems are not legitimate poetry, buy me a drink and I'll politely listen to your views. [p. xx]

For me, once I stopped trying to fight my own leanings and succumbed to the idea that my taste was my sharpest tool, and that if I was going to edit this thing, I was going to have to make maximum use of it, the job got a little easier and a lot more doable. The wishful delusion I am so often prey to, that some new move or activity (getting a radical haircut, learning German, doing an enemy a favor, becoming Buddhist, editing an anthology) is going to transform me, and allow me to operate as a different being in the wide world, died the same quick, violent death it always does right out of the gate. I was going to have to edit the anthology as me, and do the best job I could under the circumstances. [p. xx-xxi]

Reading these poems helped straighten out my soul, which is in constant need of such ministrations. [p. xxi]

Many of the poems in this anthology use humor ... to question, to pull reality apart in ways that jolt us into perceptual shifts, propelling us to reassemble ourselves and our dearly held assumptions. Caricature, satire, mockery, absurdity, wit, and irony can be social, emotional, and political disinfectants. [p. xxii]

In ancient Mesopotamia, a culture perhaps not so different from our own, there were five basic job descriptions for poets: astrologer/scribe diviner exorcist/magician physician lamentation chanter ... And which one best suits you, dear reader? [p. xxii]

... This one sentence from Keats's [sic] letters: "Here are the Poems — they will explain themselves — as all poems should do without any comment." [p. xxiii]

This anthology anticipates your presence! Welcome. [p. xxiv]

Poets of
The Best American Poetry 2010

BUY: The Best American Poetry 2010 Guest Editor Amy Gerstler, Series Editor David Lehman

Of the 75 poets whose work is included (one poems each), see our web pages on:

• Anne Carson,
• Billy Collins,
• Louise Glück,
• W.S. Merwin,
• James Tate,
• Chase Twichell.

Best of these "Best" poems include:

• Sandra Bearsley's "Unit of Measure" — I will always have more interest in the capybara after reading this!
• Anne Carson's "Wildly Constant".
• Peter Davis' "Four 'Addresses'".
• Jill Alexander Essbaum's "Apologia".
• Amy Glynn Greacen's "Namaskar" — its ABAAB cinquains are a delightful form, particularly because of her variation of line length (between tetrameter and pentameter) and her use of rhyme (rarely aslant).
• Sonia Greenfield's "Passing the Barnyard Graveyard" — lightweight yet appealing.
• Hailey Leithauser's "The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon" — Leithauser's statement on this form includes 'I played with it [the idea of writing a villanelle with a drunken speaker] for years but could never get it to cohere until ... it came to me that the problem was the ABA rhyme scheme, that the speaker needed the exuberance of a faster, tipsier, happier AABB rhyme. The next morning I sat down at my computer and in two hours turned a decades-old dead-in-the-water villanelle into a working rondeau.'
• Dolly Lemke's "I never went to that movie at 12:45".
• Camille Norton's "They Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone".
• Sharon Old's "Q" — how pleasant to have a humorous poem from Olds, with a balanced political closing edge.
• James Richarson's "Vectors 2.3: Fifty Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays" — one can see how quickly someone's poem could become a text for a new religion!

BUY: The Best American Poetry 2010 Guest Editor Amy Gerstler, Series Editor David Lehman

Notice the mode (most common) of the birth decades of the poets:

• For the 2006 issue (guest editor Billy Collins), it was the 1940s.
• For the 2007 issue (guest editor Heather McHugh) it vaulted forward three decades to the 1970s.
• For the 2008 issue (guest editor Charles Wright) the mode returns to an earlier decade: the 1950s.
• For the 2009 issue (guest editor David Wagoner): bimodal with the 1940s (as for the 2006 issue) and the 1960s (the strongest represented that the 60s have been).
• For the 2010 issue (guest editor Amy Gerstler): the mode returns to that of the 2008 issue: the 1950s.

In the 2006 to 2010 issues, quick glances at birth dates give this approximation:

Decade of birth.	2010 issue.	2009 issue.	2008 issue.	2007 issue.	2006 issue.	1995 issue.
2000s	0	0	0	0	0	0
1990s	0	0	0	0	0	0
1980s	2	3	1	1	0	0
1970s	10+1=11	9	10+2=12	10+6=16	10+1=11	0
1960s	10+7=17	10+8=18	10	10+3=13	10+2=12	7
1950s	10+10+1=21	10+3=13	10+10+1=21	10+5=15	10+4=14	10+10+10=30
1940s	10+5=15	10+9=19	10+6=16	10+5=15	10+10+3=23	10+10=20
1930s	4	6	8	6	10	5
1920s	5	6	6	6	3	10+2=12
1910s	0	0	0	1	0	0
1900s	0	0	0	0	0	0

Places of first publication before poems appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2010

BUY: The Best American Poetry 2010 Guest Editor Amy Gerstler, Series Editor David Lehman

Acknowledges first publications in 52 publications, which is close to the mean (which is 51) of totals for the previous five years:

	2010 issue	2009 issue	2008 issue	2007 issue	2006 issue	2005 issue
Number of publications as source of poems	52	57	45	45	52	60

Places of first publication for the 2010 collection are:

1. 32 Poems
2. ABZ
3. Action Yes Online Quarterly
4. Agricultural Reader (The)
5. American Poetry Review
6. Antioch Review
7. Atlantic (The)
8. Boston Review
9. Boulevard
10. Brooklyn Rail (The)
11. Callaloo
12. Chicago Review
13. Columbia Poetry Review
14. Conduit
15. Court Green
16. Double Room
17. FIELD
18. Five Points
19. Georgia Review (The)
20. Harper's
21. Hat (The)
22. Hudson Review (The)
23. Image
24. LIT
25. London Review of Books
26. Michigan Quarterly Review
27. MiPOesias
28. New England Review
29. The New York Quarterly
30. The New Yorker
31. Open City
32. Oxford American
33. Pleiades
34. Ploughshares
35. Poetry
36. Poets and Writers
37. Prairie Schooner
38. Public Space (A)
39. Sentence
40. Sewanee Review
41. Sewanee Theological Review
42. Sienese Shredder (The)
43. Sixth Finch
44. Sonora Review
45. Southern Poetry Review
46. Tin House
47. Vanitas
48. Verse
49. Virginia Quarterly Review (The)
50. West Branch
51. Witness
52. Women's Review of Books

Links and Books

Links and Books.

• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and poets. How to Write Poetry.

Copyright © 2010-2015 by J. Zimmerman, except for quotations. All rights reserved.

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