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Informationen zum Autor David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry , edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry . His books of poetry include The Morning Line , When a Woman Loves a Man , and The Daily Mirror. He has written such nonfiction books as Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York. Klappentext Gerstler and Lehman present the latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world. FOREWORD by David Lehman Over the years I’ve read novels centering on lawyers, doctors, diplomats, teachers, financiers, even car salesmen and dentists, but not until 2009 did I come across one about the travails of the editor of a poetry anthology. When word of The Anthologist , Nicholson Baker’s new novel, reached me last September, I couldn’t wait to read it. Baker’s novels defy convention and reveal an obsessive nature, and I wondered what he would make of American poetry, for surely his novel would reflect a strenuous engagement with the art. The title character here, Paul Chowder by unfortunate name, has put together an anthology of poems he is calling Only Rhyme. The phrase describes the notional book’s contents and indicates the editor’s conception of poetic virtue. Paul has chosen the contents of his anthology but is now, on the eve of a deadline, afflicted with writer’s block. He needs to write a foreword but cannot. “How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway?” he wonders, then volunteers, “I do, but I’m not normal.” Having asked myself that same question and given a similar answer, I can appreciate the speaker’s troubling awareness of the many poets who have to be left out of his book—and the relatively few people who will bother to read his introductory essay. The task of writing a prefatory note becomes no less difficult when it is an annual requirement, though Nicholson Baker may have made my job a little easier this time around. Every editor has the impulse to use the introductory space to open the door, welcome the guest, and disappear without further ado. But some things are worth saying, and one such is Baker’s defense of anthologies. For a poet facing all the perils that lurk in a poet’s path—a poet very like the novel’s Paul Chowder—anthologies represent the possibility of a belated second chance. And it is that possibility, however slim, that spurs the poet to stick to a vocation that offers so much resistance and promises so few rewards. The “you” in these sentences refers to the American poet—and perhaps to American poetry itself, an oddity in an age that worships celebrity. “You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now.” The poet’s conception of fame exists within modest limits, but it is persistent: “And you think: Maybe the very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.” Baker’s skeptical distance from the fray makes his take on things particularly compelling. The opinions he puts forth are provocative and entertaining. A proponent of the sit-com as the great American art form, Baker’s anthologist believes that “any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.” That is quite a statement, even allowing for the complexity of irony. (After all, to be “uplifting for the human spirit” may not be the ideal criterion by which to judge poetry or history.) The speaker establishes his credentials as an American poet with his realism f...
