Americans' Favorite Poems offers keen proof that poetry does make something happen, that it can give strength and perspective, inspire and alter lives, and comfort and surprise. How did this grassroots golden anthology come about? When Robert Pinsky was named U.S. poet laureate in 1997, he hoped to persuade 100 Americans to recite and discuss their favorite works. Even he may have been surprised when thousands were moved to contribute and commune. From the wave of responses, Pinsky has selected 200 poems, each preceded by one or more testimonials. Make no mistake: this collection, ranging in alphabetical order from Ammons to Zagajewski, would be a keeper without any commentary whatsoever. But Pinsky's volume again and again makes clear that for real readers Matthew Arnold is far from outmoded, that people still thrill to Robert Browning, and that Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" is--at least for one Hollywood type--a reflection of reality rather than sublime whimsy. And how about John Donne's "The Flea"? A precocious Arizona 17-year-old deems it not a thorny metaphysical work but "the best argument for sex I've ever heard."

Fans will encounter their favorites, from Anna Akhmatova to Langston Hughes to W.B. Yeats, and read them anew in the light of people's passionate comments. But there are also discoveries to be made. A New Mexican treasures "Who Says Words with My Mouth" by the 13th-century Persian poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi: "I can't live without it and I can die with it." And this reader is grateful to one New Yorker for offering up Nazim Hikmet's "Things I Didn't Know I Loved." Twenty-four-year-old Chad Menville writes: "I identify with this poem about imprisonment, censorship, longing, and belief in oneself more than with any other poem I have read. This poem needs to be heard! Please."

Americans' Favorite Poems really is a national portrait: those who took up Pinsky's challenge range from teachers to prisoners, teenagers to nonagenarians. There are even a few artists. Violinist and conundrum merchant Laurie Anderson sent a long, complex paragraph detailing how George Herbert inspired her to create a talking table: "It compressed the sound and drove it up steel rods so that when you sat with your elbows on the table and your hands to your ears, it was like wearing a pair of powerful headphones." And when it comes to A.E. Housman, the writer William Maxwell opted for simplicity with the sentence fragment: "Because I cannot read it without shuddering with pleasure." That same phrase can be applied to the entire volume. Robert Pinsky's vision is inspiring on every level, proof of his belief in poetry--and people. --Kerry Fried


From Booklist
Poet laureate Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project was a stroke of genius. Americans were invited to share by letter a poem they treasured; then many were recorded reading their chosen poems for inclusion in a national video and audio archive. The response was tremendous, and as Pinsky notes, many of the matches between reader and poem defy stereotypes, and all attest to the vital role that poetry plays in more lives than seems possible in a country that appears to pay scant attention to this quiet art form. Here each poem is introduced in extraordinarily moving personal disclosures by the reader who chose it. Teenagers and octogenarians, a social worker, a farmer, a nurse, a truck driver, a commodities trader, a librarian, a judge, and an alcoholic who memorizes poetry to test her sobriety selected poems by Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Haki R. Madhubuti, W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas. No one person, however well read, could have created this resounding collection, which may well become a favorite in its own right. Donna Seaman


Book Description
This anthology embodies Robert Pinsky's commitment to discover America's beloved poems, his special undertaking as Poet Laureate of the United States. The selections in this anthology were chosen from the personal letters of thousands of Americans who responded to Robert Pinsky's invitation to write to him about their favorite poems. Some poems are memories treasured in the mind since childhood; some crystallize the passion of love or recall the trail of loss and sorrow. The poems and poets in this anthology--from Sappho to Lorca, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glck, and Allen Ginsberg--are poems to be read aloud and memorized, poems to be celebrated as part of our nation's cultural inheritance. Accompanying the poems are comments by people who speak not as professional critics but as passionate readers of various ages, professions and regions. This anthology, in a manner unlike any other, discloses the rich and vigorous presence of poetry in American life at the millennium and provides a portrait of the United States through the lens of poetry. The Favorite Poem Project is an official part of the Bicentennial Celebration of the Library of Congress and the White House Millennium Council.


About the Author
Robert Pinsky is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Figured Wheel. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Maggie Dietz is the director of the Favorite Poem Project and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Poet and Nobel Laureate in Literature Joseph Brodsky famously remarked that poetry should be sold in cheap editions in supermarkets and airports. Under the auspices of U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, the Favorite Poem Project takes the opposite tack: instead of putting poetry into the supermarket aisles, how about finding which poems are already there, indelibly imprinted in the hearts and minds of all those shoppers, and then anthologizing them?

Taking its cue from the wonderful Lifelines anthology series, which gathers "famous people's favorite poems," Americans' Favorite Poems contains several hundred poems selected not by editors Pinsky and Dietz, but by ordinary Americans who responded to Pinsky's oft-repeated plea for people to send him their favorite poems. Each poem is introduced by one or more explanatory notes from the person who submitted it, and here is where this book, like Lifelines, becomes much more than another poetry anthology: the notes themselves are worth the cover price. Each offers a unique, always passionate and sometimes heartbreaking perspective on a great poem. Taken together, they speak volumes about our country, and about the solitary, revelatory moment of discovering a poem that will never leave you.

Editors Pinsky and Dietz want to prove that poetry in America is alive and well beyond the walled towers of academia. After reading notes from actors, military men, schoolteachers, handymen, social workers, retirees, priests, doctors, prisoners, students, lawyers, homemakers, fundraising consultants, docents, aging high school football stars, truckers, and dozens more, it is hard to argue that poetry no longer speaks to ordinary people.

Every note offers a personal explanation of the unique link a poem formed with a single reader. Again and again, we witness that moment of bonding, often in the face of a willful determination not to like poetry. A student from New York City introduces Coleridge's hallucinatory "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which creates an ominous and surreal atmosphere that no special effects technology can match, with these words: "I never liked poetry; as a matter of fact, I hated it. In ninth grade, my teacher gave me this long poem to read for homework. I was mad. First of all, I didn't like poetry and second of all, this poem is very long." But, like the wedding guest who encounters the mariner, he is transfixed, and by the end of his note, he declares, "Every time I read this poem I just get a special feeling in my gut and I just want to keep on reading it again and again."

Running through these notes is the theme of renewal: a single poem can be something different each time it is read. Introducing Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," a California retiree says, "this poem comforts me and surprises me every time I read it." A nurse in Michigan says of Rita Dove's "Daystar," "This poem has haunted me ever since I read it the first time."

Then of course there are the poems themselves, small alchemical wonders which mirror the passions of our disparate population. There have been dozens of anthologies of American poets, but this volume, which collects poetry from the world over, seems more accurately American than any that preceded it. Many of the poems concern exile and emigration; many of those who wrote offer a favorite poem from their homeland that has comforted them in the strange environment of the New World. All of the American greats -- Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and others -- are included here. But their grouping, which can seem forced in a geographically specific collection, is as natural as can be alongside poems from Russia, Iran, China, and dozens more countries. Together, these poems present America as it really is, has been, and will be.

Any lover of poetry will find several favorites here, and will get a chance to read how strangers, miles away, found them. Anyone who has yet to discover poetry's force will find it here, and be guided by the straightforward, unpretentious instructions of others who have found it before. And there isn't a reader who won't find at least one poem in this collection that produces that singular sensation, the "special feeling in your gut," which signals that your world has been enriched, permanently.

--Jake Kreilkamp

FROM THE PUBLISHER