WhimsyLand

Well, I was going to be back yesterday, but Qwest had other plans and my DSL line is down.  I'm hoping it will be back tomorrow.

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Jimmy is at it again, making me laugh at the expense of BAP poems.  He's already annotated some of the same eye-rolling contributions that I had critiqued in the margin of the paperback.  So, what makes me think that this is the best BAP in a decade (which somehow reminds me of "the youngest seeker in a century")?  I'll tell you later.  First, let's do the numbers:

BAP Overview

Every year, David Lehman collaborates with a guest editor to produce what is arguably the best-known anthology in poetry (by which I mean, you don't find Norton in airport bookstores).  This year's guest editor is the mercurial Heather McHugh, the 20th editor of the series.  To give you some perspective, here's the stats on prior BAP issues:

The designation "Number of Poems" isn't 75 for all years, because some poets apparently refused to give their ages (almost all women, I might add). 

Ms. McHugh is about the age of most BAP editors (with noticable exceptions of Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley).  The average and median ages of the poets included is in the low 50's, which is also increasingly typical. 

The Journals

There's a somewhat larger-than-normal clustering of journal contributions, and the journals from which the most poems were chosen aren't usually this high on the list.  APR was the original publishing journal of 5 of the poems (which is a bit above their historical average), but Barrow Street, Sentence, POOL and Beloit Poetry Journal had 4 contributions each – a far greater number than they've ever had.  AQR and Crazyhorse each had three poems in this issue (and a total of 2 in the prior 19 years).

Equally atypical is the number of journals that usually rank high in contributions, but ranked low in 2007.  This includes New Yorker (who have had 7 contributions 5 times, but only 1 this year), Poetry (also only 1), Threepenny Review (who have missed being included in the last 3 BAPs), and Boston Review (also batting zero for the last 2 years).

The top "contributing" journals are shown below.  Antioch Review, Atlanta Review, BOMB, Bookforum, Conduit, Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Field, Five Points, Gulf Coast, Hanging Loose, Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, New Criterion, New England Review, New Letters, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poetry, Raritan, Rattle, Sacramento News & Review, Southwest Review, Subtropics, Tarpaulin Sky, the tiny, Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Vocabula Review each contributed one poem to the total.

Among the relative newcomers, POOL, Sentence and American Poet have made the largest gains in their BAP count. 

The Poets

There are, of course, 75 poems in BAP 2007 as there always are.  What's odd about this BAP is that McHugh has chosen to include two poems by each of three poets: Linh Dinh, Susan Paar, and Robert Pinsky.  The poets in BAP 2007 that have been featured in prior BAPs include:

Of the "Old BAP Standbys", this year we're missing John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Tate, John Koethe, Amy Gerstler, and David Wagoner.  Ashbery, however, still leads the field with 14 appearances, followed by Hall, Simic, Pinsky, Tate, Collins and Wilbur.

Poets in BAP for the first time included Kazim Ali, Jeannette Allee, Nicky Beer, Christian Bok, Louis Bourgeois, Geoffrey Brock, Matthew Byrne, Macgregor Card, Julie Carr, Michael Collier, Mike Dockins, Sharon Dolin, Landis Everson, Thomas Fink, Helen Forman, Daniel Johnson, Richard Kenney, Milton Kessler, Brad Leithauser, Ben Lerner, Joanie Mackowski, Amit Majmudar, Sabrina Orah Mark, Campbell McGrath, Leslie Miller, Ed Ochester, Meghan O'Rourke, Gregory Orr, Chad Parmenter, Susan Parr, Peter Pereira, David Rivard, Marya Rosenberg, Natasha Saje, David Shumate, Carmine Starnino, Brian Turner, Cody Walker, Kary Wayson, Joe Wenderoth, George Witte, Theodore Worozbyt, and Harriet Zinnes.

Metrics

Exactly one-third of the poets in BAP 2007 are women, which is about what has been for a few years.  The age distribution is also fairly typical, with the largest number of BAP contributors in their early 50's:

BAP Facts

Poets who were in the first BAP (1988) and BAP 2007:  Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Richard Wilbur, Robert Creeley, Robert Hass, and Rae Armantrout.

Journals that contributed to the first BAP and BAP 2007:  New Yorker, Poetry, APR, New American Writing, and Verse.

BAP journal with the longest name: Princeton University Library Chronicle.

BAP contributor with the largest number of appearances who has not been a guest editor:  Richard Wilbur (10 appearances).

BAP journal with the shortest name: No.

BAP journals with a number in their name:  88, 26, 32 Poems, 3d Bed.

Youngest and Oldest BAP contributor at the time:  Deborah Stein (19) and Carl Rakosi (101).

BAP journals with the most humorous names:  Van Gogh's Ear, Stud Duck, Sal Mimeo, Pressed Wafer, Iodine Poetry Review, Heavy Daughter Blues, Figdust, Croonenbergh's Fly, No Roses Review, O.blek.

The distribution of contributing journals has changed over the years (in 1990, the largest contributor was in fact poet's books, not journals at all).  In the early years, the journals with significant contributions included Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, New American Writing, Grand Street, Sulfur, and Boulevard.  The journals with the most BAP selections since 2000 include:

The Work

OK, so why do I think this is the best BAP in a decade?  Mainly because I like the whimsical nature of much of the work.  I've always considered McHugh a somewhat quirky poet (and I mean that in a good way), and the selections seem to reflect her aesthetic.  Even the old-timers, from whom we've come to expect long, muted poems seem to have representative works that are shorter and stranger.  The poems by Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Elaine Equi, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinsky, Richard Wilbur, and even Albert Goldbarth (!) run about a page, sometimes less.  Even with the poems that I didn't care for, no one sounded like a parody of themselves.  Here are a few among the ones I especially liked::

Jeannette Allée, Crimble of Staines:  "You're back in motherbickered / England dumb with brick / & viper typists."

Mary Jo Bang (natch), The Opening:  "Feels warm. There may have been an arson. / Mistakenly Released Suspect Still Missing"

Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary:  "Moon, refrigerate the weeping child / and guard his frozen brook."

Matthea Harvey, From "The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future" Series:  "From the gable of the window, we shot / at what was left:  gargoyles and garden gnomes."

Daniel Johnson, Do Unto Others:  "How many rocks would I stack / on my brother's chest?  A rock / for his beauty, a rock for his trust,"

Joanie Mackowski, When I was a dinosaur:  I was a stegosaurus, a.k.a. "armed roof lizard", with seventeen / headstones growing from my spine. ..."

Amit Majmudar, By Accident:  "Your friend may want to start running. / I gave his scent to the hounds by accident."

Carmine Starnino, Money:  "Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes / like still-cooling splatters of silver.  Stater and shekel, / mina and obol.  Persia's bullion had a lion and bull."

Kary Wayson, Flu Song in Spanish:  "God of the bees, god of gold keys, god of all in- / famous noses, I folded our total"

There is also fine work by our blogmates Peter Pereira, Danielle Pafunda, and Sabrina Orah Mark.

What's Online

The complete list of contributors to the last 20 years of BAP is available here.  The rankings of journals by year are available here.