The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 (Pitt Poetry Series)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.71 (838 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822944391 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-11-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Brilliant Tour through the Literary Landscape M. Coffey This anthology of Lehman's introductory essays to the Best American Poetry series covers a quarter-century of his astute, wise, amusing, and incredibly knowledgeable writing on contemporary poetry. These play-by-play, state-of-the-art annual reports add up to a brilliantly perceptive tour through the literary landscape of our time.
More than a quarter-century later, likely to the surprise of everyone except the indefatigable Lehman himself, the series is still going strong. "In 1987, Lehman, the prolific poet, critic and editor, somehow talked Scribner into publishing an annual anthology to be called The Best American Poetry, and so became the Casey Kasem of American verse. Read end to end, they form a swift, dishy, insightful, entertaining account of American poetry’s fashions and trajectories as one century sputtered out and the next cleared its throat."—New York Times . They aren’t scholarly, and aren’t meant to be. Lehman has contributed brief forewords to every volume; this book collects them. the joy of the project, for me, arises exactly from the fact that its click-bait cachet gets peopl
This book collects all twenty-nine forewords (including the two written for the retrospective “Best of the Best” volumes for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversaries.) Beginning with a new introduction by Lehman and a foreword by poet Denise Duhamel (guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013), the collection conveys a sense of American poetry in the making, year by year, over the course of a quarter of a century.. The acclaimed annual, The Best American Poetry, is the most prestigious showcase of new poetry in the United States and Canada. Each year since the series began in 1988, David Lehman has contributed a foreword, and this has evolved into a sort of state-of-the-art address that surveys new developments and explores various matters facing poets and their readers today