The Best American Poetry 1999

by Robert Bly (Editor), David Lehman (Series Editor)

The 1999 edition of The Best American Poetry will exceed the expectations of the many thousands of readers who eagerly await the annual arrival of this "truly memorable anthology" (Chicago Tribune). Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, Iron John -- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1999 reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies, American

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1999

About the author

Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.

Reviews

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/4 stars

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my second semester of college, on a whim I took a little one-credit pass/fail class about contemporary poetry. I was, in retrospect, embarrassingly ignorant about the subject, but the class was one that would stay with me the rest of my life.

This book was a primary text. Over the years, I had come back to to it so many times that it's practically falling apart. I can recite half the poems in the book by memory. There are many rewarding and meaningful poems, but a few of my favorites are:

Mary Oliver's "Flare" (I come back to this poem over and over)
John Balaban's "Story"
George Bilgere's "Catch"
Jennifer Hecht's "September"
Bob Hicok's "What Would Freud Say?"
Tony Hoagland's "Lawrence"
Peggy Steele's "The Drunkard's Daughter"
Dick Allen's "The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader"

If you read these, you'll see the kind of poems that appeal to me personally. They're narrative-heavy and many of them have a pinch of humor. If that's not your personal style, there are plenty of other poems in the collection more focused on imagery or lyricism.

I associate this book then with a bit of a personal awakening about the meaning and vitality of poetry in the modern world. It was a gateway to the world of urgent, funny, electric writing that could enrich my own life so much.

[B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐⭐½ / 5
(Damn you, Goodreads... and your tyrannical rejection of half-stars.)

Overall, I would give this collection a solid B+ average (technically an 88.46% avg.) as far as the quality of the poems contained. I know that attempting to quantify poetic effect/value is a ridiculous gesture, but I am simply a ridiculous person. Of course, this is purely based on my own tastes and will not necessarily reflect your average satisfaction rate.

I've been working on my project of reading and reviewing every edition of Best American Poetry for about seven years (with a three-year-ish hiatus, so I guess four years in real-time), and I've come to know what to expect when it comes to this anthology. The first is not very memorable David Lehman introductions that inevitably date themselves (although that is part of the charm of these volumes). The second is the guest editor's foreword and how much it compels me (i.e., do I even finish reading it?) is a good indicator of how much the total volume will satisfy me. Robert Bly's introduction about the ineffable idea of poems having 'heat' to them is a good piece of writing even if it was extricated from this volume. It's a provocative concept and one that I intuitively grasp in my reading as well as my own writing. Right off the bat, I could tell that this would crack the Top 10 of the 26 B.A.P.s that I've read so far. Currently, it is not only in the Top 10 but also the volume I consider to be the BEST in the series so far.

The stats are insane. I think fewer than seven poems scored lower than a 'B-' in my book. Its average rating is a whopping 1.38% above the previous title-holder, Terrance Hayes' B.A.P. 2014. Along with having an excellent 'heat' sensor, Bly's taste happens to align with my own. This doesn't ensure that it will be everybody's cup of tea, but the poems in this volume tend to follow a few of my primary poetic preferences. These include but are not limited to:

(1) Editorial Restraint and Concision

(2) Distinctive Voice

(3) A balance between clear emotional resonance that seeks to commune with the reader and poetic ambiguity to challenge the reader intellectually and leave a mysterious, "I-need-to-read-this-again-but-for-the-experience-and-if-I-come-upon-'answers'-so-be-it" feeling for them upon finishing the poem

(4) Potent Metaphors that are neither willfully opaque nor too spelled out (this especially applies to what I will broadly and far too crudely refer to as 'nature poems')

(5) Allusions that are inviting and not too pretentious or imbued with overtly informative Wikipedia rote-ness

(6) Avoids "from" excerpts from longer poems, rendering the fragment on the page incomplete. I can understand this habit in prose anthologies, but it feels disrespectful and/or commercially craven in a poetry anthology. (This last one is in the weeds and a little too anthology-specific and not applicable to poetry overall, but I appreciated it here, so I thought it was worthwhile to mention.)

I intend to elaborate on my poetic tastes someday in a longer essay once I finish reading and reviewing all of the Best American Poetry volumes, but for now, this edition is the golden standard of the long-running series. Lehman is only 76-years-old (we have older presidential candidates and presidents!), so I'm happy that we ought to have at least another four years in him before the series goes defunct. But I also hope that he finds an heir apparent to continue being "head editor" of the anthology. My vote would be... hmmm. Well, all of my absolute favorite poets are dead or just as old as Lehman (Kay Ryan is the first living poet with the right kind of clout that jumped into my mind). I guess I'll nominate Jennifer L. Knox because nobody of consequence in the decision (certainly not Lehman himself) will ever read this anyway.

At any rate, if you only read one Best American Poetry edition in your lifetime, I recommend that you choose this one. But ultimately, I guess I'd say that you should look at the list and choose your favorite poet of the guest editors and read theirs first. THEN, go this one. There are so many beautiful poems in the volume and even the worst ones still have a few lines

Masterpieces (17)
George Bilgere, Catch
John Brehm, Sea of Faith
Debra Kang Dean, Taproot
John Haines, The Last Election
Jane Hirshfield, The Envoy
Tony Hoagland, Lawrence
Mary Karr, The Patient
Carolyn Kizer, The Erotic Philosophers
Yusef Komunyakaa, Scapegoat
James Laughlin, Nunc Dimittis
Dorianne Laux, The Shipfitter's Wife
Denise Levertov, First Love
William Matthews, Misgivings
Myra Shapiro, Longing and Wonder
Thomas R. Smith, Housewarming
Peggy Steele, The Drunkard's Daughter
Diane Thiel, The Minefield

Masterful (13)
John Balaban, Story
Elizabeth Bishop, Foreign-Domestic
Chana Bloch, Tired Sex
Russell Edson, Madam's Heart
Lucille Clifton, the mississippi river empties into the gulf
Billy Collins, Dharma
Donald Hall, Smile
David Ignatow, The Story of Progress
Ron Koertge, 1989
Franco Pagnucci, And Now
Kay Ryan, That Will to Divest
Ruth Stone, A Moment
Larissa Szporluk, Deer Crossing the Sea

Masters Candidates (12)
Dick Allen, The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader
Lydia Davis, Betrayal
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Buddha in the Woodpile
Ray Gonzalez, Breastbone
Bob Hicok, What Would Freud Say?
John Hollander, Beach Whispers
Louis Jenkins, Two Prose Poems
William Kulik, The Triumph of Narcissus and Aphrodite
Li-Young Lee, The Sleepless Grape
David Ray, Hemingway's Garden
Alberto Ríos, Writing from Memory
David Wagoner, Thoreau and the Crickets

Overall, I would absolutely to highly recommend approx. 57% of the poems contained in this volume.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a weaker than usual installment in The Best American Poetry anthology series. My positively-marked poems were less exciting than similarly marked pieces in other years and I felt like I was leaving a lot more poems blank or giving the moderately positive mark rather than the actually positive mark.

The poems in the 1999 anthology just felt less inspired than many of the poems in years like 1997, or 2014, 0r 2010--or some of the individual favorite pieces in some more middling anthologies in the series, like 2016 or especially 2009--there was less sparkle, less glow (which is particularly ironic, since Bly himself pointedly avoids people like the LANGUAGE poets (who I have very mixed feelings about myself) because he believes that they are lacking in a vibrancy and explosiveness that he finds necessary in poetry--a vibrancy and explosiveness that I actually largely didn't feel in the volume he edited while ostensibly using that as his main criterion for inclusion. As always the collection was filled with big names: Elizabeth Bishop, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Tony Hoagland, David Ignatow, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Czlslaw Milosz, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, C.K. Williams. Some of these I liked, others I didn't like, but there wasn't anyone who jumped out as a voice to look into in the way I sometimes find.

My favorite poems this time around were Lucille Clifton's "the mississippi river empties into the gulf", Lydia Davis's "Betrayal", Louise Gluck's "Vita Nova", Ray Gonzalez's "Breastbone", Yusef Komunyakaa's "Scapegoat", Li-Young Lee's "The Sleepless Grape," Joan Murray's "fromSonny's Hands", Mary Oliver's "Flare" (which is unusual, I don't often like her), Charles Simic's "Barber College Haircut", Marcia Southwick's "A Star is Born in the Eagle Nebula" (my very favorite), and Larissa Szporluk's "Deer Crossing the Sea". There were a few others I marked positively, but that was probably most of them.

Other than the Tony Hoagland (who I never like) there weren't many pieces that I actively disliked, which was a plus, since sometimes it gets frustrating when I encounter really unpleasant poems in an anthology that is supposed to represent the best of the field in that year.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection unintentionally remarkable as a sample of thought and emotion in the last years before 9/11: it's hard not to read them in that context.

I marked about a third of the poems to revisit, recommend, or teach. A few, chosen essentially at random:

George Bilgere's "Catch," about the first time you realize a parent is only human.
Donald Hall's "Smile," chronicling a woman's life from age 25 to the end.
Tony Hoagland's "Lawrence," about heroes and those who disparage them.
William Matthews' "Misgivings," discussing insecurities and how to love long term.
Mary Karr's "Patience," ruminating on the deaths of loved ones.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad one. Let's call it 3.5 stars. My favorites were Chana Bloch's "Tired Sex" and Alberto Rios's "Writing from Memory."

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 3 out of 5]

:-(