The Best American Poetry 2005

I just bought this book, and I’m doing what I always do: looking at the table of contents to see what names I recognize. Thrilled to see James Tate and Amy Gerstler and Linda Pastan and Stephen Dunn, four of my favorite living poets, represented. Not so thrilled to see Charles Bukowski. Not because I don’t have a soft sport for Bukowski, because I totally do, but he’s been dead for eleven years. I refuse to concede a space in a volume that’s supposed to be about this year’s poetry to a long-since-dead guy. I actually don’t care how good it is.

More when I've actually read, oh, say, at least one poem in the book.

Okay, it's slightly later. I'm up to the D's and I have to say I'm not impressed so far. A lot of mediocre stuff. However, there's a prose poem in here from Sentence, which is a fabulous magazine that is publishing two of my poems in about, oh, a year and a half. Best American Poetry 2007, here I come!