Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems.

The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, has a different guest editor every year. Lehman, still the general editor of the series, each year contributes a foreword focusing on the state of contemporary poetry, and each year the edition's guest editor also contributes an introduction. The book titles in the series always follow the format of the first, changing only the year: for instance, The Best American Poetry 1988.

According to the Academy of American Poets Web site, "Best American Poetry remains one of the most popular and best-selling poetry books published each year and the series continues to provide a bird's-eye view of the breadth of American poetry."

A compendium for the first decade of the series has also been published, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, guest-edited by literary critic Harold Bloom, who selected what he regarded as the seventy-five best poems from the previous ten anthologies.

The guest editors of the series, by year:

† editors who (as of 2007) have also been U.S. poets laureate

In his 1988 foreword to the first edition of the series, Lehman laid out the following rules:

Lehman also wrote that he had set some tasks for himself as series editor:

John Ashbery selected a poem by the series editor for inclusion in the inaugural volume of The Best American Poetry. In his introduction to the 1989 volume, Donald Hall noted that, "The series editor declined to be included." The series editor's own poems have not appeared in subsequent volumes.

In Lehman's foreword to the 1992 book, he noted that translations are ineligible.

According to the Academy of American Poets Web site, "[t]he Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world." The Academy Web site called the introductions to the collection by the guest editors, as well as Lehman's "state-of-poetry" forewords, "indespensible." As a whole, the anthologies "seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry."

However, the Academy article also noted that the series and its editors are "often criticized for their selections and assessments (common complaints include the exclusion of experimental poets, lack of diversity, and allegiance to poetry's "old guard") [...]"

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