"The Best American Poetry, 2000" by Rita Dove (ed) (Scribner, 2000)

There was much I didn't understand, and I struggle with long poems, of which there were several. I think many of the pieces I felt I understood would have been tighter if re-written as prose. The poets write about their pieces, but not in a way that helps me.

Form

• Denise Duhamel supplies a double sestina.
• Quincy Troupe's "Song" is a villanelle.
• Brenda Hillman's "Air for Mercury" is in couplets - except for a single line about a third of the way through. She writes that "The couplet form seemed intimate". Each couplet comprises lines that have the same number of words.
• Olena Kalytiak Davis's "Six Apologies, Lord" is one of a "sequence of 'Shattered Sonnets' that sort of simultaneously distort, discard, and highlight formal, thematic, and rhetorical sonnet conventions." Oh really?
• Adrienne Su says of the 6-stanza "The English Canon" that "I deliberately ended the first four stanzas with '-ing', which is a kind of cheater's rhyme, and the last two with the imperfect rhyme of 'combat' and 'scratch.' I threw in 'protest' and 'trust' near the end, for fun. Between the cheating, the imperfection, and the distance between rhymes, I hope that the poem reads as free verse, yet looks formal because of the tercets. The combination of the free and constrained, of modern and traditional, seemed suited to the subject, writing to and from the canon". To me it looks sloppy, with a cynical adherence to the form, which isn't very English.
• Mary Jo Salter says "The poem was a liberation to write, technically speaking; though it rhymes, the rhyme scheme changes every stanza, and the meter is deliberately clunky."

Individual poems

• Isn't Donald Justice's "Ralph: A Love Story" just 2 pages of ordinary prose?
• "The Oration" (Carolyn Kizer) is Flash, though it would need tightening up to be publishable as prose.
• Mary Oliver's 6 page "Work" has a Whitmanesque feel. She writes of it that "I refused to let either a wish to be stylish in a succinct way or a desire to stop where one might lean against some small answer curtail the ongoing flow of the poem". Here's the end of section 1

  and I am the hunter, and I am the hounds, and I am the fox, and I am the weeds of the field, and I am the tunnel and the coolness under the earth, and I am the pawprint in the dust, I am the dusty toad who looks up unblinking and sees (do you also see them?) the white clouds in their blind, round shouldered haste;        I am a woman sixty years old, and glory is my work.

  Why "of the field"? Is the tunnel part of the fox's den? Is this Larkin's Toad? I hope so, given the poem's title. I like the cloud image.

Maybe Lynne Knight's "The Muse of the Actual" is my favourite, along with Paul Perry's "Paris".