Major Jackson and David Lehman ,_Best American Poetry 2019_ (poetry week 3)

WASN'T SURE WHAT to expect here, having read only a few of Jackson's poems in journals here and  there and having no idea what his aesthetic was, so I was mightily put off by his introduction. Long-winded, for one thing (13 pages), and near the beginning Jackson goes off on "the preciousness of poetry," on "glass fortresses of language whose walls and ceilings were lined with parallel facing mirrors in which the poet's ego or aggressive wit or moral superiority or mannered experimentation gradually faded into an abyss of itself," and so on, lamenting contemporary poetry's "lack of engagement with the work beyond art," and I thought, Jesus, one of these guys is editing BAP?

What bothers me most about the writers of such complaints is that they never acknowledge that someone else made the very same complaint in the public prints a few months ago, and someone else a few months before that, and someone else shortly before that, all the way back to the age of Dryden and Pope. It's been the bedrock complaint about poetry since early modernity, if not all the way back to Plato.

So, I arrived at the poems themselves in a foul humor. The first one, by Dilruba Ahmed, a new name for me, was...really good. The second, by Rosa Alcala, was...also really good. Then a Margaret Atwood. Really good! And so on. It turned out that every poem had something that popped--a verbal effect, a metaphor, an unexpected close. Jackson is an outstanding editor, I had to admit. The 2019 BAP turned out (for me) to be the best read in the series since Terrance Hayes's turn back in 2014.

Hayes himself is in here, with another American sonnet for a past and future assassin, plus some other canny vets (Espada, Gerstler, Hass, Mlinko, Muldoon, Sanchez, Trethewey) and some folks to watch (the aforementioned Ahmed, Summit Chakraborty, Nasheen Yusuf, Didi Jackson).

It caught my attention that editor Jackson broke with tradition by including one of his own poems. Audacious move. "In Memory of Derek Alton Walcott" struck me as less an elegy to Walcott than an homage to Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which serves Jackson as template: opening section in which, as per the elegiac tradition, nature mounts the dead poet; second section in the second person, addressing the deceased poet with misgivings about his wayward episodes (Yeats's politics, Walcott's history of sexual harassment); final section in tight closed quatrains speaking to poetry's higher mission.     It's a straight lift, I would say. I was hoping Jackson would acknowledge the debt in his note at the end, but no. Why not?