Works by
David Lehman
(Poet)
[1948 - ]

As Editor

• The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (2008)
  There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality.
  
  These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy.
  
  David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy.
  
  In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing.
  
  This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

• The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006)
  Here is the eagerly awaited new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry brought completely up to date and dramatically expanded by poet David Lehman. It is a rich, capacious volume, featuring the work of more than 200 poets-almost three times as many as the 1976 edition. With a succinct and often witty head note introducing each author, it is certain to become the definitive anthology of American poetry for our time.
  
  Lehman has gathered together all the works one would expect to find in a landmark collection of American poetry, from Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry to Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West, and from Eliot's The Waste Land to Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But equally important, the editor has significantly expanded the range of the anthology. The book includes not only writers born since the previous edition, but also many fine poets overlooked in earlier editions or little known in the past but highly deserving of attention. The anthology confers legitimacy on the Objectivist poets; the so-called Proletariat poets of the 1930s; famous poets who fell into neglect or were the victims of critical backlash (Edna St. Vincent Millay); poets whose true worth has only become clear with the passing of time (Weldon Kees). Among poets missing from Richard Ellmann's 1976 volume but published here are W. H. Auden, Charles Bukowski, Donald Justice, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Emma Lazarus, Mina Loy, Howard Moss, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, James Schuyler, Elinor Wylie, and Louis Zukosky. Many more women are represented: outstanding poets such as Josephine Jacobsen, Josephine Miles, May Swenson. Numerous African-American poets receive their due, and unexpected figures such as the musicians Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Robert Johnson have a place in this important work.
  
  This stunning collection redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present. It is a must-have anthology for anyone interested in American literature and a book that is sure to be consulted, debated, and treasured for years to come.

• A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems (2006), David Lehman, ed.
  Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. "He is often witty, sometimes bawdy," writes editor David Lehman, "on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything."
  
  A compound, in editor David Lehman's words, of "wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality," the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons's tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way "all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding."
  
  This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons's career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature.

• Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003)
  A prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words "prose poem" an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present. In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Lehman defines the prose poem, summarizes its French heritage, and outlines its history in the United States. Included here are important works from masters of American literature, as well as poems by contemporary mainstays and emerging talents who demonstrate why the form has become an irresistible option for the practicing poet today. Great American Prose Poems is a marvelous collection, a must-have for anyone interested in the current state of the art.

• The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000), Edited with Star Black
  Started in 1997 by poets David Lehman and Star Black, the KGB Bar poetry series is widely recognized as the hottest and perhaps the best reading series in New York. Located in the hip East Village KGB Bar, these Monday-night readings boast a fantastic variety and quality of internationally known poets from Charles Simic, Molly Peacock, and Katha Pollit to Marie Howe, Mark Strand, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
  
  Now Lehman and Black have gathered work from the first three seasons into a wonderful anthology. Together with a generous supply of photographs and anecdotes from contributors on the most memorable thing ever to happen to them at a poetry reading, this unique book of poems reflects the amazing variety and energy of poetry today.
  
  The poems range in style from Douglas. Crase's "Astropastoral" ("I have seen you on every horizon, how you are stored/And encouraged and brought to the brim/Until the round bounds of one planet could not hold you in") to Anne Porter's "Five Wishes." Offering a wide window into contemporary poetry, The KGB Bar Book of Poems debunks the myth of poetry's ivory tower to reveal the kind of raw, candid reading experience that truly brings poetry to life."The pre-Russian revolutionary locale gives the gathering a committed, not to say conspiratorial air, and it somehow manages to foster a true sense of camaraderie, experimentation, and open exchange between readers and audience. I've seldom enjoyed an evening of poetry and friendship more."--Jonathan Galassi (President of The Academy of American Poets), the KGB Bar poetry series
  
  Every Monday night, the KGB Bar's poetry readings are packed to overflowing. Pulitzer Prize winners bum cigarettes from grad students and martini glasses are refilled between readings, while the best poets in the country share their latest work with a rapt audience.
  
  The KGB Bar is the sexiest and arguably the best venue for poetry in New York City, and now The KGB Bar Book of Poems brings this hot literary series to the page. Icons like John Ashbery and Charles Wright appear here with other favorites such as Molly Peacock and Katha Pollitt. Many of the poets have also written anecdotes about their own most memorable poetry readings.
  
  With dynamic black-and-white photographs throughout, The KGB Bar Book of Poems reflects the dazzling variety and tremendous energy of poetry today.

• Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems (1996)
  This unique anthology has as its focus the notion of form in contemporary poetry. No subject has attracted more vigorous discussion within the community of poets and critics in the past ten years. If we are to understand what form is and how it shapes poetic expression, we must turn to the poems themselves for clues. And if we are very lucky, we can listen to the voice of the poets who wrote them.
  In Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, contemporary poets have selected one poem, commenting on the occasion of its creation and on the form the poem eventually took. Originally published in 1987 with a selection of 65 poets, this revised and expanded edition adds selections by twenty additional poets. Other revisions include an enlarged glossary of terms, and more expanded biographies of individual poets. The range of contributors is wide, and includes John Ashbery, John Cage, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, and Richard Wilbur. Among the new contributions is Wyn Cooper's poem "Fun," which was the basis for Sheryl Crow's Grammy-award winning song "All I Wanna Do."

• James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983) with Charles Berger

Best American Poetry Series with Guest Editors

• 2009 with David Wagoner

• 2008 with Charles Wright

• 2007 with Heather McHugh

• 2006 with Billy Collins

• 2005 with Paul Muldoon

• 2004 with Lyn Hejinian

• 2003 with Yusef Komunyakaa

• 2002 with Robert Creeley

• 2001 with Robert Hass

• 2000 with Rita Dove

• 1999 with Robert Bly
   

  • The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997 (1998), Edited with Harold Bloom
    Every year since 1988 a major poet has selected seventy-five poems for publication in The Best American Poetry. The series has quickly grown in both sales and prestige, as poetry itself has seen a remarkable resurgence in popularity and vitality, fueled by established poets at the peak of their powers and a new generation of daring voices. As we approach the millennium, now is the opportune moment to take stock of American poetry and choose the work that will stand the test of time. Harold Bloom, a commanding presence on the American literary state, has read all 750 poems in the series and has picked the "best of the best." He precedes his selections with a compelling and highly provocative essay on the state of American letters, in which he fiercely champions the endangered realm of the aesthetic over the politically correct. Diverse in style, method, and metaphor, the seventy-five poems Bloom has chosen go a long way toward defining a contemporary canon of American poetry. This exciting volume reflects not only the taste of the current editor, but the predilections of the all-star list of poets who have contributed their time and intellect to make this series what is today: a "valuable, invaluable, supervaluable" (Beloit Poetry Journal) record of an ever-changing, always exciting art.
     

• 1998 with John Hollander

• 1997 with James Tate

• 1996 with Adrienne Rich

• 1995 with Richard Howard

• 1994 with A. R. Ammons

• 1993 with Louise Glück

• 1992 with Charles Simic

• 1991 with Mark Strand

• 1990 with Jorie Graham

• 1989 with Donald Hall

• 1988 with John Ashber

Non-fiction

• The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1999)
  A landmark work of cultural history--now in paperback--by one of our best critics and chroniclers: the story of how four young poets reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.
  
  Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.
  
  A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School.
  
  The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.

• The Big Question (1995)
  David Lehman's second book in the Poets on Poetry series confirms his stature as one of our leading literary figures. He is also a literary critic with a rare ability to elucidate thorny ideas and controversial issues in a way that is both entertaining and instructive.
  
  The Big Question leads off with a major essay explaining and exploring the concept of postmodernism. The next sections include pieces about poetry and fiction, lives and letters, and criticism and controversy.
  
  Other "big questions" addressed include political correctness, the genre of literary biography, academic life and deconstruction. There is a humorous piece on poetry "slams" and the whole "downtown" poetry scene, a feisty op-ed column (on the deconstruction of the Gettysburg Address), a pair of wickedly satirical poems, as well as a group of exceptional book reviews.
  The subjects covered range from Philip Larkin to Philip Roth- from the greatest poetry hoax of the twentieth century (which took place in Australia during World War II) to Charles Dickens's unfinished last novel- and from nineteenthth-century American poetry to the political career of Martin Heidegger.

• The Line Forms Here (1992)
  Relfections on poetry by a critic and poet who is also a distinguished literary journalist.

• Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991)
  Deconstruction leaves few people neutral. Lehman examines the current academic uproar over this literary movement and the scandal arising from the revelations that the late de Man, one of its chief exponents, had collaborated with the Nazis, writing anti-Semitic articles during the German occupation of Belgium. He includes a translation of de Man's 1941 essay, "The Jews in Contemporary Literature." Lehman is especially interested in analyzing the often disingenuous defenses of de Man offered by the deconstructive establishment, and the deeper implications of these with regard to the state of intellectual life in the United States. While Lehman finds the implications of deconstruction disturbing, his treatment is lively and thorough.

• The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (1989)
  In this lively, enjoyable look at the best American and British detective fiction, David Lehman investigates the mystery of mysteries: the profound satisfactions we get from evil, disorder, mayhem, and deception--that we know will be put right by the last page.
  As Lehman shows, the detective story draws deeply from ancient storytelling traditions. The mystery's conventions--the locked room, the clue "hidden" in plain sight, the diabolical double, the villainous least likely subject--work on us as childhood fairy tales do; they prey upon our darkest fears, taking us to the brink of the unbearable before restoring a comforting sense of order. The myth of Oedipus, for example, contains the essential elements of a whodunit, with the twist that the murderer the detective pursues is himself.
  
  With their wisecracking gumshoe heroes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fashioned an existential romance out of the detective novel. More recent writers such as Ross MacDonald, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell have raised the genre to a new level of psychological sophistication. Yet the form evolves still, and Lehman guides us to the epistemological riddles of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, who challenge the notion of a knowable truth. Originally published in 1989, this new edition features an additional chapter on the mystery novels of the 1990s.

• Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (1980)

Poetry

• A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (October 6, 2009)
  In A Fine Romance, David Lehman looks at the formation of the American songbook--the timeless numbers that became jazz standards, iconic love songs, and sound tracks to famous movies--and explores the extraordinary fact that this songbook was written almost exclusively by Jews.
  
  An acclaimed poet, editor, and cultural critic, David Lehman hears America singing--with a Yiddish accent. He guides us through America in the golden age of song, when “Embraceable You,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “My Romance,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Stormy Weather,” and countless others became nothing less than the American sound track. The stories behind these songs, the shows from which many of them came, and the shows from which many of them came, and the composers and lyricists who wrote them give voice to a specifically American saga of love, longing, assimilation, and transformation.
  
  Lehman’s analytical skills, wit, and exuberance infuse this book with an energy and a tone like no other: at once sharply observant, personally searching, and attuned to the songs that all of us love. He helps us understand how natural it should be that Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen was the son of a cantor who incorporated “Over the Rainbow” into his Sabbath liturgy, and why Cole Porter--the rare non-Jew in this pantheon of musicians who wrote these classic songs shaped America even as America was shaping them.

• Yeshiva Boys (2009)
  David Lehman, a poet of wit, ingenuity, and formidable skill, draws upon his heritage as a grandson of Holocaust victims and offers a stirring autobiographical collection of poems that is his most ambitious work to date. It covers an expansive range of subjects -- from love, sex, and romance to repentance, humility, the meaning of democracy, Existentialism, modern European history, military intelligence, and the rituals associated with faith and prayer. The title poem, "Yeshiva Boys," is a work in twelve parts that blends the elements of espionage fiction, memory, history, and moral philosophy. It reflects David's experience as a student in an orthodox Yeshiva, and it, along with many other poems in the book, explores what it means to be a Jew in America, what is gained and lost in assimilating to secular culture, how to understand the peculiar destiny of the Jewish people, and how to reconcile the existence of God with the knowledge of evil. Beautiful, provocative, and accessible, this is David Lehman's most inspired collection.

• When a Woman Loves a Man (2005)
  These poems capture the romance, irony, and pathos of love; they movingly chronicle days in post-9/11 New York and bring a fresh perspective to an array of subjects -- from the Brooklyn Bridge to Gertrude Stein to Buddhism. When a Woman Loves a Man is playful, inventive, and as amusing as it is clever; it is the work of a poet at the height of his lyrical and reflective powers.

• The Evening Sun: A Journal in Poetry (2002)
  The eagerly awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed collection The Daily Mirror, The Evening Sun gathers together 150 of David Lehman's favorite "daily poems" from 1999 and 2000 into a brilliant chronicle of a poet's heart and mind as the last century ends and a new one begins.

• The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000)
  Following in the footsteps of such poets as Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, and Frank O'Hara, David Lehman began writing a poem a day in 1996 and found the experience so rewarding that he continued for the next two years. During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998.
  
  For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes.
  
  A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

• Valentine Place (1996)
  A collection of more than forty poems probes every intimate angle, good and bad, of love, commitment, marriage, betrayal, divorce, and the "pleasures of pain and desire."

• Operation Memory (1990)
  Reviewers responded enthusiastically to An Alternative to Speech, David Lehman's first collection of poems, three years ago. John Ash, writing in The New York Times Book Review, praised Lehman's poetry as "elegant, exuberant, witty, lyrical and technically sophisticated." Mark Ford in The Times Literary Supplement called the poet's effects "irresistible." Lehman's new book is of equal or even surpassing excellence--notable for its wide range of subjects, its variety of inventions, its combination of wit and poignancy. Perfidia You don't know who these people are, or what They'll do to you if you're caught, but you can't Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry A briefcase into Germany, and here you are, Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is, Of course, the agent you're supposed to seduce And betray within the hour. Who would have known You'd fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh, But on the screen where your real life is happening It is always 1938, you are always dancing With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes Who slips the forged passport into your pocket And says she knows you've been sent to betray her, Or else it is seventy degrees and holding In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed From the car crash that wiped out your memory, Your past, as you walk into a gambler's hangout On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large, And the piano player plays "Perfidia" in your honor And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

• An Alternative to Speech (1986)

Other

• Poetry Forum: A Play Poem: A Pl'em (2007) with Judith Hall

• Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man ( 2005) with James Cummins and Archie Rand, illustrator
  The sestina is a traditional poetic form that has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity, which promises to expand further with this witty illustrated cycle of poems. Casting themselves as poetic superheroes, authors Jim and Dave take on Osama Bin Laden and various other rogues and luminaries, defeating the "Masked Man" in the end to the cheering of appreciative crowds at the "sestina bar." As the two sestina-meisters take turns writing individual poems (and collaborating on one together), the mild-mannered bespectacled lad and the dashing superhero that coexist inside both Cummins and Lehman rescue the form from the clutches of everyday life and transform it into something fantastic. In this ambitious work, even the table of contents is written in sestina form. Adding to the fun are 39 vivid illustrations by Archie Rand and cameo appearances by Marvin Bell, Anne Sexton, Walt Whitman, Ted Berrigan, Gary Snyder, Arthur Rimbaud, Grace Paley, and others.