Over the course of Modern Poetry, we read a number of highly ranked poems. Having been assigned the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry, we selected three that truly captured our interest. Martha Silano’s “Love,” Denise Duhamel’s “How it Will End,” and Thomas Lux’s “The Happy Majority” were the poems that we found intriguing and…
Rae Armantrout, who is from California and a current poetry professor at UC San Diego, is a prolific member of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a group that arose in the late 1960s and emphasized a poem’s use of language, often employing stylistic techniques not seen in mainstream poetry to do so. She has received significant recognition…
David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series is filled with an overwhelming amount of significant poets and poems. That said, in the 2011 Best American Poetry volume, one of my favorite featured poets would definitely have to be Elizabeth Alexander. Alexander’s poem,“Rally”, connects back to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign in mid October when she noticed a…
“Washed ashore / What was the story about?” Posted on the door of Vavala’s Deli, Darien, Connecticut.
Born in Pasco, Washington in 1946, Ron Silliman is known for his post-avant poetry blog (which garnered an impressive 2 million views in 2009) and involvement in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. Pursuing both a career as a computer market analyst and a generously lauded poet, he was the 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and winner…
Originally born in the Bronx in 1954, Donald Revell received his PhD at SUNY Buffalo, before going on to teach at the universities of Tennessee, Denver, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Utah, and (currently) Nevada-Las Vegas. He has written multiple books, including Tantivy (2012), Essay: A Critical Memoir (2015), A Thief of Strings (2007), and The National Poetry…
2003 was a tumultuous year in and for the United States, with the aftermath of 9/11 still fresh in the nation’s mind, and wars overseas just starting to brew. In times of tragedy and discourse such as this, poets are often called upon to catalog the widespread feelings that everyday people don’t always know how…
Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry: Madwoman (Alice James Books, US, 2017 and Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2017); The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean…
Daniel Johnson’s “Do Unto Others,” Alan Shapiro’s “Country Western Singer,” and Mike Dockins’ “Dead Critics Society” are three of the greatest, most thought-provoking poems featured in Best American Poetry’s 2007 edition. Nick and I read each poem in the volume looking for underlying themes, tone shifts, creative new ways of conveying messages, and other characteristics to narrow down the…
James Galvin’s “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses,” first published by The Iowa Review in the Fall of 2014, and featured in BAP 2015, centers around the idea of forgotten wedding dresses. After winning fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Galvin joined the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.…
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