You know these Best Poetry Books of 2013 Lists?
Not one has induced us to buy or read the books.
A description like this, for instance, is not going to make us the least interested in a book of poems; it just isn’t:
Reading Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion is like entering a medieval painting, a miniature world populated by strange and gorgeous figures. Her labyrinthine syntax and archaic diction cast spells that recall the infinite possibility and wonder of the sentence.
This is all we get: no quotations, just blurb-y rhetoric advertising “labyrinthine syntax” and “infinite possibility.” This is the poetic equivalent of used car salesmanship—why can’t people see that?
A minority of the Best of 2013 notices do quote the poetry, briefly, and while we appreciate the gesture, the quotations don’t help, either.
Why? Because taken out of context, contemporary poetry, in brief excerpts, might present an arresting image or phrase, but cool phrases can be found in magnets on someone’s fridge—we need more than a cool phrase. If we don’t see the immediately apparent skill of the formalist, or the whole poem’s arc, a slice of nifty rhetoric is not going to cut it.
Bill Knott, as usual, gets it. On Facebook recently, the poet confessed he couldn’t afford to buy all these books in order to make a true list of his favorites, but he had a list of ten poems he read on-line in 2013 which struck his fancy.
We had to do the work and search the poems on-line, and a few we couldn’t find, but the hunt was worth it—we found some good poets we hadn’t known existed; Bill’s judgement is sound and he put us on the right paths—no sales pitches, no blurbs; we actually felt a warm glow.
There has to be a better way to sell poetry, and we think Bill has the right idea: focus on poems—not award winning poets and their award winning books.
When the popular music business was a little less corporate, you would hear a song on the radio and say to yourself, ‘What a great song! Who is that?’
Never in a million years would you buy an album because someone told you it was “labyrinthine.” You’d scrape together your last pennies for a song you heard on the radio.
Now we have the Internet and we can hear songs on the radio ( we can discover poems by unknowns). You love a poem and then maybe you love the poet and buy their book. A buzz is generated by one successful poem.
Instead we drown in a sea of small press blurbs or tiny positive reviews from college interns. Too much cheery is very, very dreary. There’s no chance for real conversation, real discrimination, real excitement. It’s a sci-fi nightmare: The Blurb.
The anthology exists for just this purpose: find good poems for us because we don’t have time to find them ourselves—put them in front of a wider audience to allow poems—rather than puffed reputations—to scale Parnassus.
Scarriet, from now on, will do its part by starting a new feature inspired by Knott’s humble top ten poem list—we will feature poems that we come across in our travels and reprint them based on their excellence alone. We already feature new poems from our editors, and feel these warrant more attention; but we must concede there is excellence all around us that needs our help.
Here are the ten poets mentioned by Knott:
Rope by Rose Kelleher
An hour is not a house by Jane Hirshfield
Installation by Helen Humphreys
Government Spending by Patricia Lockwood
Crane by David Yezzi
Elegy for a Small Town Psychic by Morris Creech
A Novel by Sampson Starkweather
The Butcher’s Apprentice 1911-14 Adam Kirsch
At the Sewanee Writers Conference I Go Looking for Allen Tate’s Grave by Christopher Bullard
Fancy by Jehanne Dubrow
Tell us what you find, and if you like what you find. And Merry Christmas.
