The Best American Poetry 2004

The Best American Poetry 2004, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by general editor David Lehman. The guest editor for the year was Lyn Hejinian.

Hejinian, a "partisan of the Language School and the New York poets", according to Jacob Stockinger, editor of the culture desk at The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, "seems to have gotten caught up in a poet-as-political activist or social commentator point of view Perhaps that's why she even seems hostile to the notion of beauty, favoring relevance instead." Stockinger found much of the poetry in the volume, a "graduate school inscrutability without either meaning or music." Some of the pleasant surprises in the volume, for Stockinger, were "Here 2" by Bob Perelman and Jean Day's "Prose of the World Order".

Ron Smith, writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School and director of its Writers Institute, wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the strong points of the collection are its "wit, humor and comedy". He added: "Ms. Hejinian's aesthetic is certainly an intellectual one, rather than an emotional one. The aim is not to move a reader, but to rev up his cognitive functions." Smith thought the volume's best poems were the contributions from Kim Addonizio, Craig Arnold, Billy Collins, Carla Harryman, Jane Hirshfield, Danielle Pafunda, James Tate, Paul Violi, and David Wagoner.

Read more about The Best American Poetry 2004:  Poets and Poems Included, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words american and/or poetry:

    It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
    Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)

    Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)