It is not surprising that a commercial poetry anthology overseen by “a who’s who of U.S. poetry elites” and styled like an annual prize functions on and reinforces feedback loops of cultural capital. Nor is it surprising that The Best American Poetry elevates already elevated publications over the enormous number of small magazines published each year. Looking at the collected tables of contents, one might come away imagining that the last four decades of print and online small press publishing have had little influence. But instead of rushing to critique the most published poets and most selected journals, we should see these numbers as a way to assess the 40 years of The Best American Poetry’s production from a bird’s-eye view. When we look down, rather than individual poets and publications, we see a unique aggregate of literary success, a wide and varied field that, though nominally inclusive and aesthetically disparate, is organized around one criterion: professionalization. Though Lehman does not use this word in his forewords to the anthology, the professionalization of poetry, primarily through MFA programs in creative writing, is the institutional undergirding of The Best American Poetry. As Lehman says in the anthology’s first volume, the boom in MFA programs provides his project with an expanding and receptive audience protected from the misguided teachings emerging from other parts of university English departments. In this sense, The Best American Poetry is a genre management project that drives a wedge between poetry and interdisciplinary intellectual culture. It powerfully insists on defining American poetry as a literary practice self-managed by the professional networks it privileges.
Institutions work tacitly to produce consensus. In the case of The Best American Poetry, that consensus is reinforced through a circumscribed roster of poets and publications whose prestige serves to filter the series editor’s culture wars within the trusted colophon of a Big Five publisher. Poetry’s aesthetic variousness, radical discontinuities, and political efficacy are smoothed over into a marketable narrative of the genre’s ongoing resurgence in the face of difficult odds. The anthology’s profits are spent to sustain poetry’s corporate shine, legitimating Lehman’s reactionary ideology as apolitical orthodoxy. This is the production of the mainstream. Again, this is not a charge against the anthology’s guest editors or hundreds of contributors, or a suggestion that the dozens of journals represented are complicit in the consolidation the anthology produces. This is also not about the labor of individual actors within Big Five publishing, many of whom affirm their work in the language of literary care. But these professional and economic processes, framed as forces of taste and elided by the marginal yet powerful functioning of commercial publishing in the poetry world, are subtle and consistent in their movement toward a neutralized center.