Scarriet Editor is the most satisfying job in the world. We see articles published years ago (2009 to present) still read. We are not a news organization—nothing of ours is thrown away. Only its quality recommends it to the reader. We don’t advertise. We don’t hire. We don’t fawn. We are not subsidized. We are independent in every sense. Like our favorite author, Poe, we seek only to elevate literature; this makes us publicly ambitious and privately lazy—and happy in the various ways these two combine.
We discovered yesterday, thanks to a conversation on Facebook, that a new “Scarriet Poetry Hot 100” is long overdue. Kent Johnson, trickster and poet (we had public debates on Facebook) topped our last “Hot 100” list, and shortly after publication, he passed away. This, I want to say, has something to do with the project’s lapse, but I can’t say for sure. Scarriet doesn’t dwell with calendars and deadlines. Nor do I believe in sharing my personal trials and tribulations. Some use pain for poetry; I think poetry requires (as much as possible) freedom from pain. To be serious about poetry is impossible if one is too serious about life. Feeling pain is not genius. Escaping it is.
Facebook isn’t a bad place for credentialed poets to brush up against each other occasionally. Scarriet finds a few connections there. I say “a few,” because more than a few is not possible on Facebook.
What we might call “the world’s restaurant” wants customers without taste to more easily feed them swill at a greater and greater profit. This is the model which unfortunately succeeds at large scale in every institution, a self-perpetuating loop in which the producer not only controls, but weakens his audience. One can see this model in the algorithms on Facebook, where excellence never goes viral, because every person is kept in a silo with a small group of readers. Extrapolated out, this causes the system as a whole to gradually sink into entropy. The fool and the genius are equal. In Facebook’s fully realized and frozen “democracy,” the fools far outnumber the geniuses (naturally) and define the system as a whole. The FB restaurant is absolutely fine with this. In fact, this is what it wants.
Scarriet is placid in the face of this. Some poets are not.
The poet Michael Blumenthal posted the following on Facebook last month (9/9):
“I never in my life thought I would post, or send out, a message such as this. But I am nearing the end of my long and winding road, so—what the hell?—I have nothing further to lose.
My publisher informed me last night that she had sold all of 81—I repeat: EIGHTY-ONE—copies of my CORRECTING THE WORLD: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, the culmination of almost a half-century’s worth of my work as a poet. Eighty-one copies. 81 people in this country– my so-called “friends” included (the same ones who expect me to attend their movies, art openings and buy their books, yet who are unwilling to shell out all of the $24 (less, of course, on Amazon)—an amount, without blinking an eye, they leave as a tip at the expensive restaurants they regularly frequent)—required to possess the culmination of my life’s work.
Possibly they are simply not interested. Possibly—indeed a real and legitimate possibility– they simply don’t like my work, or don’t care for poetry in general. Possibly they don’t think it matters. Possibly they have no time for such indulgences and diversions, no time in their overly busy lives to press the “buy now” or even the “add to cart” button on their Amazon account, much less to order from the publisher. Possibly they simply love reading, and adoring, my poetry for free on Facebook, but don’t think it’s worth deducting even a few shekels from their 401(K). Possibly they don’t realize that, if your publisher doesn’t sell your book, soon you will have no publisher at all. Or, alternatively, perhaps this world has simply turned into a hopeless place for those of us who are aging, white, Jewish, heterosexual males still living in the same gendered body they were born into?
Anyway, so be it… And so it is. Does it sadden me? Yes, it does. Does it depress me? Yes, again. Do I wish for people to buy my book because not doing so (or reading this missive) makes them feel guilty?? For damned sure, NO. I’d rather make my peace with, and be grateful for, those generous, spendthrift and truly interested eighty-one, bless their lonely and endangered little hearts.” —MB
Then an apology the next day, which began:
“I have decided to end my Facebook participation—I am simply tired of people, myself included, making a lot of noise about themselves, or dishing out false praise in the hope of being its beneficiary later. But I do want to re-enter FB for a moment to briefly apologize for the tirade I unleased the other day (and with which I violated my own rule of decorum: “Never speak in heat”) after hearing from my publisher that my Selected Poems had sold all of 81 copies.” —MB
And then a further change of heart about 5 weeks later:
“Well, I’ve been convinced to re-enter FB, at least in a limited way. Along with all the garbage and stupid nonsense and likes and hearts and waves abd self-promotion and other such garbage, there are many kind and generous people, whom I appreciate. And it’s better to have 100 or so grateul readers than none at all… Right?” —MB
To which Scarriet commented:
Poetry lost its public roughly 100 years ago when it bought into the pyramid scheme of ‘poets looking out for poets.’ This is the result. If there’s no structure of Criticism and honest reviewing the public trusts, things will only get worse the more the poets cry about it and seek in the same flawed manner to get recognition. Selling books, as honorable as that is, need not be seen as separate from “sharing poems on FB.” They can work towards the same end. Poetry will be saved by curators, editors, publishers, and critics, not poets—who are legion, and mostly peek at other poets out of ambition or jealousy. Poetry—and only poetry—requires our love. The rest is vanity. This very simple truth will save poetry, which should never be viewed as something else. We need to be cruel to be kind.
And here now is The List:
ONE Michael Blumenthal “My publisher informed me last night that she had sold all of 81—I repeat: EIGHTY-ONE—copies of my CORRECTING THE WORLD: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, the culmination of almost a half-century’s worth of my work as a poet.” The final collapse of the Creative Writing Pyramid Scheme. All poets are now equal.
TWO Ada Limon Poet Laureate of the United States, is currently serving an unprecedented third year in the position (July 2022 thru April 2025). “the night sky inky with black expansiveness” is her lyrical take on ‘space’ for NASA.
THREE Brandon Som wins the 2024 Pulitzer with Tripas: Poems. The usual poetry which tries very hard to not be poetry, but sociology, in breathless, quasi-lyrical dress. It’s been everywhere for what? Twenty, thirty years?
Tata shined shoes
as a boy for movie money
& I imagined how
FOUR Mary Jo Salter (Norton Anthology of Poetry editor, student of Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard) is guest editor for the 2024 Best American Poetry volume (David Lehman Editor, 1988–) and begins her introduction quoting Emily Dickinson: “I’m Nobody.” This is finally true for everyone in po-biz.
FIVE A.E. Stallings is the first American Professor of Poetry at Oxford (and second woman to serve) a position held by poets who were mostly clergymen and Shakespeare scholars as well, since it was founded in 1708—Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney more recently. Stallings is a formalist and translator. She has perhaps the most prestigious, time-honored, English-speaking, poetry job left on earth. Though pretty certain no one cares.
SIX William Logan is a reviewer who also writes poems. Most poets consider him a jerk. But since “Daddy” was posthumously published in 1965, who can point to a more exciting event in poetry than when William Logan hangs a contemporary poetaster?
SEVEN Billy Collins perfected the sardonic, free-verse, Iowa Workshop Poem. Late 20th century burst of excitement in the poetry world, but (unfairly?) dismissed as middle-brow. He’s now 83!
EIGHT Sharon Olds gave free verse a shot in the arm with frank, raunchy content—with just enough poignancy and restraint. Like Collins, has many imitators. She, too, is in her early 80s. She published her first book, Satan Says, at 37.
NINE Jorie Graham went after the nebulous in content and form, establishing a faux lyrical mysticism for free verse—completing the free verse trinity of Collins and Olds. She was born in 1950 and has a new book. She’s the last surviving Best American Poetry Guest Editor of the 20th century. Rita Dove was Guest Editor in 2000.
TEN Kevin Young is poetry editor of the New Yorker. If a poet were to achieve fame for publishing a single poem in a periodical (the last time it happened in the U.S. was Poe and “The Raven”) the New Yorker is perhaps best positioned to make this happen—but as far we know, poems by ‘name’ poets are published in its pages, and subsequently forgotten. Young also does podcasts with the greatest—including the youngest and sexiest poets—he can find; but these interviews wallow in the stuffiness of polite school lessons.
ELEVEN Rupi Kaur appears to the educated poetry critic today as Brian Jones and his rhythm and blues did in 1964 to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who were enamored of Handel, Brahms, and jazz. If art which emotionally impacts a certain part of society is legitimate, do we need to acknowledge best-selling Rupi Kaur? As for calling something “poetry” which is not “poetry,” well this happens in highly educated realms, too.
TWELVE Gjertrud Schnackenberg published her breakout volume, The Lamplit Answer, in 1985. Her muse is classical music, and she writes both light verse and free verse. Her 2024 book of poems is St. Matthew Passion (Arrowsmith Press).
THIRTEEN Maggie Millner teaches at Yale; her publishing debut is Couplets, a novel in verse, which, according to the Poetry Foundation, “is a story of love, sex, and betrayal in Bed-Stuy.”
Now and then, I’d get the strange impression
that she was me. A stab of chthonic recognition
would set off a little spasm in my eye.
Sometimes from far away I’d spy
her slanted walk or messy hair and every muscle
in my body would contract. At school,
while my students bent over their exams,
I’d scroll through photos on her Instagram.
FOURTEEN Diane Seuss has a Pulitzer and is a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award. She both mocks and loves the Romantic poets—about as close as a Modern master will come to respecting them.
FIFTEEN Jeffrey Harrison recently published an essay on Marcel Duchamp, the only avant-garde artist who ever lived, because once that gesture (toilet in a museum) is made, there’s nothing more the avant-garde as the avant-garde can say. His BAP 2024 poem “A Message From Tony Hoagland,” manages to combine a computer screen with D.H. Lawrence perfectly. Salter and Lehman, you did a good job this year!
SIXTEEN Steven Cramer is as brilliant as any poet writing today; a giant intellect full of humor—the effect of reading one of his lyric poems is like eating the richest imaginable chocolate cake. Of course he teaches in Massachusetts. He will never out-sell Rupi Kaur. Too many words.
SEVENTEEN Eliot Weinberger would make Ezra Pound proud (if Pound did not care only about himself) with his poems influenced by Tu Fu in his The Life of Tu Fu.
EIGHTEEN Christopher Childress has a really cool poem in the 2024 BAP. And we learn in the bio section of the back of the BAP: “The Penguin Book of Lyric Greek and Latin Verse, entirely translated by Childers, was published by Penguin Classics in 2024.”
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.
I hide. I wait. I write polemic prose.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?
NINETEEN Glyn Maxwell is one of the best British poets and his New and Selected Poems is just out from Arrowsmith Press.
TWENTY Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award, has a poem in the BAP 2024 called, “How To Fold.” Terrance has achieved the kind of prominence where he will be in every BAP from now on. In the beginnings of BAP (still alphabetical) it was Ammons/Ashbery for years. “When you find your phantom lover’s/ item in the pile, you will have to decide/ how to handle it.”
TWENTY ONE Kim Addonizio has a pretty well known poem about desire and a red dress. My apologies if I don’t remember the name of the poem—poets should be grateful for any little thing they’re famous for.
TWENTY TWO Rita Dove published a 20th Century American Poetry anthology (Penguin) about 15 years ago. Both Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler publicly made it clear too many poets were included. Dove shrugged. This was not an argument po-biz was capable of having with itself.
TWENTY THREE Ben Mazer Sigh. What do we say about Ben Mazer? A poet’s poet with a Harvard Ph.D, studied with Seamus Heaney and Christopher Ricks, editor of John Crowe Ransom and Delmore Schwartz Collections which were reviewed by Helen Vendler and William Logan. Scarriet wrote a book on him. A genius in poor health who never listens to anyone. Every opportunity to become known, but unknown.
TWENTY FOUR Marie Howe published a book in 1998 which put her in the company of Plath and Olds. What the Living Do.
TWENTY FIVE Dana Gioia wrote an essay about corrupt po-biz in the late 20th century, writes edgy lyric poems, tried to resurrect Longfellow. His poem in the 2024 BAP is called “Satan’s Management Style.”
TWENTY SIX Alan Cordle was editor of Foetry.com at the end of the 20th century—which caught Jorie Graham giving prizes to friends as a poetry contest judge, contests which were supposed to be strictly anonymous. A press would collect entry fees from poets living in poverty entering these contests to defray costs of publishing the winner. Poets/publishers/teachers helping one another (secretively, or not) is now the rule. Remember when poet-critics fought each other, using manifestos as swords? Those were the days.
TWENTY SEVEN Charles Martin has a nifty poem in the 2024 BAP. He was born in 1942 in the Bronx. First stanza:
You summon me from silence like a Muse,
And without even asking, freely use
The form I made my own, my Rubiyaiyat!
On any subject matter that you choose!
TWENTY EIGHT Andrew Motion succeeded Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of England in 1999 and requested the post for 10 years (normally a lifetime appointment). His father was a wealthy brewer; his mother suffered a severe horse riding-accident. He befriended Philip Larkin at Hull and became his literary executor. In 2012 he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. He teaches part of the year at Johns Hopkins.
TWENTY NINE Paul Muldoon is a professor at Princeton and has won both the Pulitzer and the T.S. Eliot Prize, I don’t know how many have won both. Go, Paul! Irish, he’s best at formalism and the whimsy of fright. “Every wood had its twist of woodbine./Every cliff its herd of fatalistic swine.” Seamus Heaney was too serious to have written something like that. This defines the minor major and the major minor poet pretty well.
THIRTY Surazeus Simon Seamount is the kind of prolific amateur who makes the professionals full of care uncomfortable. As he writes on FB, “I am not getting published in journals, have won no awards, nor have been hired by a university to teach, or any other accomplishment associated with being a professional poet, the only thing “hot” about me is that I am writing lots of poetry, averaging 3 to 4 a day. The ideas and lines just keep coming to me. I wrote 552 poems in 2023 and have written 603 so far this year. I will publish them all in January in a book I titled “Cosmic Herald” as part of my Astarian Scriptures series.” The question is, ‘how much of poetry is physical?’ When is prolific good, and when is it bad?’
THIRTY ONE Sven Birkerts is a critic (think: Helen Vendler 1933-2024) who has been in the field a long time, with a new book on writing from Arrowsmith Press.
THIRTY TWO David Lehman founded Best American Poetry (1988-present) and his Guest Editor published him in the current volume, a selection of his sonnets from Ithaca. Lehman is a good enough editor; his chief fault is that he is too happy-go-lucky—he appreciates everything with too much enthusiasm. He has a healthy love of formalism, but he’s also like the Hollywood producer who aims to please at any cost. Formalism for him is mostly light verse. His Ithaca is a didactic re-visitation of Homer, and the poetry he has presided over as BAP editor for 36 years (a task for which he deserves praise) tends to over-explain. We’ve seen these poems. They are everywhere in respectable circles, the poems which feed the reader information like an encyclopedia, as if the poetry were entirely forgotten, and academic learning were the whole thing. We know you’ve read a lot. But how about A Poem, rather than some exotic, learned, or Hollywood subject with your effort at poetry trailing after?
THIRTY THREE Robert Pinsky was the first United States Poet Laureate to serve three terms, working hard to popularize the art in a “Hey, what’s your favorite poem?” sort of way. My favorite of his is “At Pleasure Bay.”
THIRTY FOUR Amirah Al Wassif wrote Arabic poems, now English, mostly online. One of those amateur poets who is not curated, but whose hard life sometimes knocks you out.
THIRTY FIVE Tracy K. Smith studied with Helen Vendler at Harvard and won the Pulitzer at the age of 39 for her book, Life On Mars. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has taught at Princeton and Harvard. She was BAP Guest Editor in 2021.
THIRTY SIX Adrian Metejka is the latest editor of Poetry, the little, historical, Modernist magazine now a wealthy foundation, which, for at least 20 years, has published issue after issue of mostly boring work. Why not Adrian Metejka as editor? Here’s how his November 2024 issue “Editor’s Note” begins: “Poetry is mostly like other arts: work and more work, curiosity and contemplation, studying and more studying. But one of the things which differentiates the art of poetry is that poems always start with a question while hoping to find an answer.” Are you kidding me?
THIRTY SEVEN Heather Christle has published four books of poems. Her poems in the September 2024 Poetry are quite good.
THIRTY EIGHT Frank Bidart writes harrowing psychological studies of real people. He met Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as a student at Harvard. He won the Pulitzer in 2018.
THIRTY NINE Stephen Cole publishes wonderful original poems and translations (from the German) on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100031474755352
FORTY Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Louisiana in 1947. He served in the Vietnam War. “Facing It,” a frequently anthologized poem written indirectly as a result of that war (he did serve) was not published until 1988.
FORTY ONE Arthur Sze is Jorie Graham’s age—this American poet did not really “appear” on the scene until 2015 when he was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Much published, his work is a bit precious. “Half-filled with sand, a Karatsu tea-bowl/placed on a writing-desk: no incense/smokes the air; above, on a wall, heart,/brushed in three strokes, where the black/ends of each stroke flair into the void.”
FORTY TWO Stephanie Burt (formerly Stephen Burt) is a literary critic who roots for the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA and teaches a class at Harvard called “Taylor Swift and her World.”
FORTY THREE Henri Cole can be relied upon to be honest in his poems. Lines like “he pondered the annihilated earth” (which pops up as he’s being frankly mundane in the free verse “At Sixty-Five”) can be safely ignored—Jim Morrison in 1967 did that better. As one who believes in the importance of “music” in poetry, Henri Cole perhaps liked the sound of “pondered” and “earth” near each other. It brings up the old question: is prose musical? And if we think it is, is there poetry?
FORTY FOUR Ed Roberson is great. If WC Williams had been born in Pittsburgh in 1939, but was better?
FORTY FIVE Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1949. They met Allen Ginsberg in NYC in 1974 in a writing workshop at the St. Marks Poetry Project. In 1979 they were a private secretary to James Schuyler, going on to teach college in California and find some Beat notoriety of their own.
FORTY SIX Dan Sociu is a Romanian poet whose Mouths Dry with Hatred was published by Long Leaf Press in 2012. Thanks to Dan reading Scarriet, we visited Romania (for a conference) in 2016.
FORTY SEVEN Patricia Lockwood is best known for a poem which went viral on the internet in 2013 and then wrote a novel which was a Booker Prize finalist in 2021.
FORTY EIGHT Valerie Macon resigned her appointment as North Carolina Poet Laureate in 2014 after academics complained she didn’t have enough poetry creds for the job.
FORTY NINE Askold Melnyczuk is a poet who teaches at UMass Boston and is the founder of Arrowsmith Press.
FIFTY Julia Alvarez shakes the Objective Correlative to its core with a metaphor in her poem “Amenorrhea” in the 2024 BAP. In the poem, she laments a woman not being able to give birth again and in the bio section, castigates the “patriarchy” for its birth expectations. Also, from the bio section, this passage expresses, accidentally, and without irony, the engaged yet scattered nature of the human race at the moment: “Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She lives in Vermont.”
FIFTY ONE Claudia Rankine teaches Creative Writing at NYU. With her 2016 MacArthur Grant she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute.
FIFTY TWO Ron Padgett was born in 1942 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the New York School. Can you believe it?
FIFTY THREE George Bilgere runs a daily online newsletter, Poetry Town, which “selects a poem by a writer he’s crazy about and he says a few words about why he picked it.” Sometimes compared to Billy Collins, he’s the author of six collections of poetry.
FIFTY FOUR Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Prize in 1971, the only winner of that prize who was in the Vietnam War and whose poetry is simple, accessible, minimalist. He’s still around, writing chapbooks. The 70s. When Maxine Kumin, Gary Snyder, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and James Merrill were winning the Pulitzer prize.
FIFTY FIVE Cathy Park Hong is a poet and professor who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Wrote an influential essay (2014) in which she dismissed the white avant-garde.
FIFTY SIX Marilyn Chin received her MFA from Iowa and has since won many prestigious awards, mostly for being a “Chinese American poet.” Scarriet knew Marilyn at Iowa, in the International Writing Program run at the time by businessman poet Paul Engle and his novelist wife, Hualing. If I say anything more, Marilyn will laugh.
FIFTY SEVEN Matthew Zapruder was BAP Guest Editor for the 2022 issue, and one could tell, reading between the lines of his introduction, Lehman was exasperated by Zapruder publishing only free verse and not listening to any of his (Lehman’s) suggestions. In the next (2023) issue, Zapruder was represented by a poem, “The Empty Grave of Zsa Zsa Gabor.” No hard feelings.
FIFTY EIGHT Elaine Equi teaches in the MFA programs at City College of New York and the New School and was the 2023 BAP Guest Editor. She has ten collections of poetry and her poem in BAP 2024 is a domestic poem which is charming as hell.
FIFTY NINE Timothy Donnelly was born in 1969 in Rhode Island and teaches at Columbia. His latest book of poetry is Chariot, 2023. He had his 15 minutes of fame, somewhere in the 90s, I think.
SIXTY Rachel Hadas has retired from teaching in the English Department at Rutgers. In a recent article in “The Conversation,” an art and politics journal, she writes, “A week before the election, everyone seems to be afraid.” Summoning Virgil and Homer, Hadas attempts to look at things philosophically and writes, “Fear is linked to love.” The old, high ways of poetry are eschewed today. Now we are circumspect. You would think a poet (oh not today) would go out on a limb and simply write, “Fear is Love.”
SIXTY ONE Simon Armitage born in 1963, has been the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom since 2019 (10 year appointment). He is also the lead singer of a rock band.
SIXTY TWO Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer in 2010. She belongs to the West Coast Language Poets group. The word “group” has probably just now given Rae Armantrout a heart attack.
SIXTY THREE Daipayan Nair is a haiku/senryu poet from India. What is better than this?
porch mist—
the woodsy aroma
of a paperback
SIXTY FOUR Frederick Seidel is a controversial poet who is now 88 years old.
SIXTY FIVE Forrest Gander won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for his volume of poems, Be With.
SIXTY SIX Mary Jo Bang received an MFA from Columbia. She was born in Missouri in 1946. She was the co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005.
SIXTY SEVEN Kushal Poddar is an Indian poet who is a fountain of playfulness. Other poets laugh, frown, or cry. At times I think he’s the only poet who smiles.
SIXTY EIGHT Maggie Dietz has a seasonal tour de force poem, “November,” which is currently being passed around the internet, perhaps because as we enter November, 2024, everyone is on edge. Good to be distracted by a beautiful poem which is just about—November. “Crisp breezes, full-throated cries/Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.” Some are never satisfied, however. They can’t help but be reminded of Keats’ “To Autumn” and think how in 200 years no one—no one—in even a single poem, has shown they are as good as Keats. Every poet knows what I’m talking about. The question is: Why? What is it that makes everyone fall short? Is it the didactic impulse? This terrible need to inform us they are “migrating” geese? The inability to make “breezes” and “geese” and “moon” cohere, existing—by necessity—in the same phrase?
SIXTY NINE Toi Derricote became a Wallace Stevens Award judge in 2012; she won the $100,000 Wallace Steven Award in 2021.
SEVENTY Heather McHugh is one of our more playful poets. She has a rhymed poem in the 2024 BAP about a sex robot.
SEVENTY ONE John Hennessy has a nice poem in the BAP 2024 about a hummingbird invading his house.
SEVENTY TWO Gabriella Fee is young (born in 1992), “grew up near the North Atlantic Coast” and her poem in the 2024 BAP, “A Lighthouse Keeper Considers Love” is a delicate lyric which grows on you.
SEVENTY THREE John Liles wins the 2024 Yale Younger Poets Award. His poems are “scientific” and not necessarily in a good way.
SEVENTY FOUR Ange Mlinko is poetry editor of The Nation.
SEVENTY FIVE Jacqueline Osherow began a poem in 2016 about the fact she was turning 60 and one daughter was in China and another lived in Harlem and she was envious of Emily Dickinson who didn’t need to be a world traveler to be a good poet. It ended up in the Harvard Review in 2023. And then the BAP 2024.
SEVENTY SIX Maya C. Popa teaches poetry at NYU and her BAP 2024 poem “What’s Unsaid” has that sort of Eastern European reticence I’ve come to recognize from that region’s poetry. I look in the comments and the poem was written in a mountainous region of Greece. Close enough.
SEVENTY SEVEN Kenneth Goldsmith read his poetry at the White House during the Obama administration. His avant-garde work, “The Body of Michael Brown,” ended his career.
SEVENTY EIGHT Anne Carson is a Member of the Order of Canada and teaches Classics. I would call her a slightly less philosophical, but more scholarly version of Jorie Graham, having certain career similarities. They were born in the same year.
SEVENTY NINE Adrianne Su has published 5 books of poetry and her 2024 BAP poem ends:
Each night I had written Here is what happened
like a kid whose pen makes her small life exciting,
then gone on mistaking the plot for the story,
as if the point of writing were writing.
EIGHTY Kay Ryan writes short poems and occasionally hits one out of the park.
EIGHTY ONE Cate Marvin is a poet and professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
EIGHTY TWO Charles Bernstein. What was all that nonsense about “Official Verse Culture,” again?
EIGHTY THREE Ron Silliman. The avant-garde. Does that still exist?
EIGHTY FOUR Ben Lerner received high praise from the NY Times for his book of poems, The Lights, published in 2023. Born in 1979, he has been lauded for his poetry and prose. Because he is a novelist, “The Voice,” published by Poetry Daily, from The Lights, sounds suspiciously like excerpt from a novel. The poets won’t believe it’s a poem?
EIGHTY FIVE Peter Gizzi published his Selected Poems ten years ago. The literary magazine o-blek he began in 1987 while waiting tables (he left it in 1993 and it folded in 1995) brought him notoriety.
EIGHTY SIX Brad Leithauser was married to Mary Jo Salter—they were both leading New Formalist poets in the 1980s. They divorced in 2011. Leithauser teaches at U Mass Amherst.
EIGHTY SEVEN Joy Harjo was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2019. She won the Bollingen Prize last year. Her MFA is from Iowa.
EIGHTY EIGHT Matthew Yeager was born in Cincinnati and teaches college there. He has been in BAP in 2005 (guest editor Paul Muldoon), 2010 (Amy Gerstler), and now in 2024 with “The Man with the Yellow Balloon,” a long poem based on a true story sighting in New York City—with an interesting back-story by the author in the back of the book.
EIGHTY NINE Bob Dylan belongs with Poe, Frost, Millay, Eliot, Ginsberg, and Plath as the Seven Most Important American Lyricists—all gaining notoriety for the seven most common reasons. Poe, the 19th Century Romantic /Scientific Verse Genius. Frost, the School Teacher Poet (taught prior to the Creative Writing industry.) Millay, the Lyrical Feminist Force. Eliot, Modernist, Anglophile poet of Despair. Ginsberg, the Obscenity Trial Dionysian. Plath, the Feminist Tragedian. Dylan, Song.
NINETY Ocean Vuong is 36 and was born in Ho Chi Minh City. He balances a best-seller knack with critical acclaim—he won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2017 and published a novel in 2019.
NINETY ONE Martin Espada is a professor at U Mass Amherst. He is the winner of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award.
NINETY TWO Michael Dickman published a poem in Poetry in 2020 which led to the resignation of editor Don Share—a speaker in the poem used what was found to be racist language. Dickman has a twin, Matthew, who is also a poet.
NINETY THREE Mark Doty was the first American poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize.
NINETY FOUR Carol Muske-Dukes is a former Poet Laureate of California and she was short-listed for the Pulitzer in 2019.
NINETY FIVE Rosanna Warren saw her poem “A New Year” published in 2023 in the New Yorker—a stylistic mixture of her parents, the poet Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) and the travel writer Eleanor Clark (1913-1996).
NINETY SIX Mitch Sisskind has a poem in BAP 2024 on how John Ashbery liked Jack Benny.
“You can say funny things or say things
Funny but silence was the punchline
For Jack Benny.” And he was gone.
NINETY SEVEN Natalie Scenters-Zapico has a poem in BAP 2024 written during postpartum depression after a C-section birth. It’s the kind of poem which makes you run to the comments to see exactly what it’s about, and then it makes sense. She teaches at the University of South Florida.
NINETY EIGHT Laura Kasischke is both a poet and a novelist. Her Where Now–New and Selected Poems was published in 2017 from Copper Canyon Press.
NINETY NINE Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the New Republic poetry editor, and has a poem in the 2024 BAP called “The First and Final Poem is the Sun,” a brief lyric which is not bad at all.
ONE HUNDRED Matthew Walther wrote in The New York Times at the end of 2022 a piece entitled, “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” blaming the demise of poetry on “The Waste Land” (1922) by T.S. Eliot. David Lehman alludes to Walther’s article in his introduction to 2024 BAP. This is how poetry died. A poet made a poem for the university and into the university it went. And stayed there.