New York poet David Lehman has overseen publication of Scribner’s annual Best American Poetry anthology for almost four decades now. But this summer, the 77-year-old Lehman announced that the series’ 2025 installment will be the last. Although he says his decision was sparked only by a desire for “new adventures,” it’s hard to see it as anything but the falling of another tree in the artistic forest. True, the purported “best” often included lousy work—in her review of the 2001 edition, critic Joan Houlihan said the editors should change the series’ title to The Best I Can Do This Year—but it also included samples from some of America’s best living poets, including A.E. Stallings, Amit Majmudar, and Stephen Kampa, and offered curious readers a chance to dip their toes into an art form that, more than any other, has been torn by the competing forces of our divided and divisive culture. Where can they look now?
Consider: Although few people would ever claim to dislike all painting, sculpture, or music, many dismiss all poetry as incomprehensible affectation. As recently as 1941, the poet James Whitcomb Riley was so widely revered that the New York Central Railroad named its Chicago-to-Cincinnati train after him. Today, the vast majority of Americans could probably not name a single living poet.
The causes of this collapse of public appreciation are complex—and the degree to which people actually “don’t read poetry” is debatable. As Dana Gioia pointed out in his now-classic book Can Poetry Matter?, some varieties of poetry, especially rap and cowboy poetry, remain extremely popular. But these rarely receive honors from the poetry community, and certainly aren’t published in literary journals. That which does appear there tends to strike ordinary readers as inaccessible, irrelevant, fraudulent, or just plain dull. Three years ago, the New York Times even published a column by the editor of a literary journal arguing that “poetry is dead,” and in fact had died a century ago.
That’s not true, but flip through any given issue of Poetry—supposedly the country’s most respected poetry magazine—and it’s easy to sympathize. The contents tend to be highly political, charged with emphatically left-wing fixations about race, gender identity, and Palestine, and devoid of the techniques that for centuries have marked the very essence of poetry, such as rhyme, meter, metaphor, and allusion. Some even aggressively slap back at this sort of criticism, such as the anti-Israel “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” from Poetry’s October 2020 issue, which says that caring about whether a poem actually is a poem instead of something else is something only “colonizers” do.
Such things vindicate Gioia’s conclusion that those who are considered the leaders of the art form have driven it into self-imposed isolation, or at least into an incestuous relationship in which poets only write for each other, creating a feedback loop that encourages their worst tendencies—especially contempt for the ordinary reader. This has led to fads and gimmicks like “Language Poetry,” which expressly rejects linguistic meaning and revels in incomprehensibility, or “Erasure Poetry,” in which the “writer” takes a pre-written text and deletes words to make it say something else. Is it any wonder that potential readers feel alienated? Or that, in seeking to quench their thirst, they resort to such nostrums as “Instagram Poetry,” which, for all its lack of depth, technique, or insight, at least says something?
This is where annual reviews like Best American Poetry should come in—to open the doors for new readers who might be invited into this art form, but who are instead made to feel that they’re being treated to the literary equivalent of the Royal Nonesuch, and scolded for disliking it. But not only is Best ceasing publication; the poetry world has also lost several other guardians of quality in recent years. The journal Measure—one of the finest showcases of poetic talent in the country—ceased publication in 2018, and the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, which for three decades served as the annual convention for writers seeking to preserve and promote poetic standards in a world swamped by fashionable propaganda, was effectively hollowed out in 2015, becoming just another undistinguished get-together.
The truth, however, is that there is much outstanding poetry being written today, if only people knew where to look. Journals such as Think, Dark Horse, and Blue Unicorn, and their online counterparts such as New Verse Review, Pulsebeat, and Orchards, regularly offer new work by superb contemporary writers who appreciate feeling, insight, and craft. These include Susan McLean, David Southward, and Jean L. Kreiling (whose new book Home and Awaywas just published by Kelsay Books). But the layman is unlikely to stumble upon these things by poking around on Google.
Of course, it would be wrong to blame the fall (or rise) of poetry entirely on the world of publishing. Good writing makes demands on readers, and today’s culture militates relentlessly against just those qualities necessary to appreciate it: patience, introspection, and—perhaps most of all—aloneness. As an art form, poetry is singularly solitary; no matter how much influence or collaboration is involved, a poem is ultimately the work of a single mind, and it speaks to each reader on the individual level. But our world practices literacy, if at all, primarily through social media, a babel where the individual is crowded on all sides and is pressured to react rather than listen. Bombarded by rapid-fire memes, readers inevitably become habituated more to wincing than reflecting. Such an environment is uniquely unsuited to an art that asks readers to sit by themselves and look inward. As with music, sculpture, or painting, a taste for poetry must be developed—perhaps a better word would be earned—and that requires time and attention to detail.
To see what I mean, consider Susan McLean’s poem “The Year of the Snake,” in the latest issue of Pulsebeat. McLean—a retired English professor in Minnesota who has won several prestigious prizes for her work, including the Richard Wilbur Award—has honed a talent for both precision and seeming simplicity, meaning that while she hits all the right marks in poetic form, her work, though deep, is never obscure. Her poems are often tinged with a certain bitterness—just enough to make them candid and profound without being cynical. “Year of the Snake” is a perfect example.
As a Petrarchan sonnet, it follows the traditional 14-line pattern of rhyme and meter with an exactness that experts can appreciate—yet readers unfamiliar with the form will find nothing intimidating or stilted about it; the language flows as straightforwardly as conversation. The current “Year of the Snake” in the Chinese zodiac began in January and lasts until February 16, 2026, and the poem borrows the image of the snake shedding its skin to express a theme of self-renewal—of outgrowing one life and taking on another. It’s a time-tested analogy, yet McLean brings such a freshness to it—or, to use her words, an “aching, raw, bereft” sensibility—that the poem contains no trace of cliché. Ultimately what it says is something we can all sympathize with: We wish we could remain in the comforting situation in which we find ourselves today, rather than yielding to time’s irresistible momentum, and yet we know we must move forward. Anyone who has started a new job, moved to a new town, been divorced or married, recalls the feeling of “reaching back for what I left”—while knowing this is futile. Blending the ophidian metaphor with the ultimatum presented by the year’s end enables McLean to achieve the ultimate artistic goal of being apt. If, as Alexander Pope said, “true wit is nature to advantage dressed / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” this poem is a gem of poetic “wit.”
Equally fine is Jean Kreiling’s “The Mail Carrier,” in the latest New Verse Review. This poem is a rondeau, a form in which the first few words (in this case, the phrase “she likes the nor”) are repeated three times throughout the poem, and in which the rhymes hover around two sounds—in this case “-een” and “-ist.” These rules make writing a good rondeau challenging, and great ones, such as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” or Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear The Mask,” tend to have a haunting, profound quality. But Kreiling has made a specialty out of using it in unusual ways, producing more lighthearted poems, often character sketches that have the modest grace of an Andes mint.
“The Mail Carrier” begins with the oft-quoted idea that nothing will stop postal workers from delivering letters: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night.” Kreiling uses the word “nor” as the spark for her poem, which describes a woman who finds that the repetition of that little syllable fosters a feeling of strength she admires. That word “declares no threat shall intervene” in her work—it “seems to lean” against the dangers contemplated in the inscription, and thus makes her a “survivalist of sorts.”
Thus Kreiling exploits the rondeau’s rules in a clever way, even carving the phrase “she likes the nor” into two phrases in the middle of the poem by inserting a period. This trick lets her break up the repetition and helps give the poem freshness and positivity—but, again, it’s done so subtly that readers unacquainted with poetry’s traditions will hardly notice. The result is a vignette, a tiny window into a person’s character, with all the brevity and exactitude that lyric poetry aims for.
These are just two examples, but they illustrate the good news: Strong, moving, skillful poetry is still being written—poetry that achieves its goal of opening up the reader’s humanity like the blossom in one of those “flowering teas.” The bad news is that it takes detective work to find it.
Still, even in an age that seems to do its best to distract, deride, and diminish—all things that knock poetry off its aim—there’s still a large public demand, or at least potential demand, for those willing to provide a guidebook. As Steve Mintz of the University of Texas wrote in response to news of Best American Poetry’s demise, there’s no reason the series couldn’t be succeeded by something that opens the doors to a new generation of readers. Such a new Best anthology should “make poetry feel familiar and usable, not distant or fenced off,” Mintz writes—and that means teaching people how poems work and why, respecting what resonates with audiences instead of haranguing and blaming them, and rewarding poets for skill, memorability, and impact.
Poetry is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous art forms. For it to do its job in today’s world and thus to be treasured by a new generation of readers, will require a serious effort to break past the noise—including the noise too often produced by alleged poets—and speak to and for the actual reading public.
