What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Best American Poetry 2013

I'm not really sure how to talk about an entire book of poetry, and I'll admit that up front.

I've recently discovered, thanks to an exercise I did in a class, that I prefer poetry that either portrays an experience or a snapshot of memory/life or explores an idea. With that said, there were some poems in The Best American Poetry 2013 that I enjoyed and some I did not. My least favorite was "Joe Adamczyk" by Mitch Sisskind, and I think my favorite was "Wintering" by Kevin Young, though "George W. Bush" by Mark Jarman had the ideas I found to be most intriguing. There are 75 poems in this collection, each by a different poet and each following its own style. Most are contemporary in tone and language--for instance, the first poem compares sex to a sandwich with mayonnaise and the second poem is a numbered list of 101 one- to two-line statements, usually incomplete, that tell a story (example: "54. The dirt was gone. 55. Except for a few grains that had embedded themselves into his palm.").

The poems are mostly in either free-verse or in some form the poet made up to suit their own purposes (Exhibit A: That second poem. It's titled "Pachyderm," by the way, and is by Sherman Alexie). I don't know what that says about American poetry these days compared with poetry from other places throughout history, but there you go.

This is not a book for those who . . . how to put this. It isn't porn, but it hints at porn from time to time. One poem is about an exotic dancer, for example. But what do you expect from a book of poetry that starts out with a poem that compares sex to a sandwich? No, it isn't being sexist with that comparison, though there are poems in there about being sexist.

This collection is the 2013 installment of The Best American Poetry, and I think that series title deserves a pause. Did this collection represent America? Was it supposed to? I don't know, to be honest. I didn't travel throughout America in 2013. I feel like the collection was a mix of ideas and morals, scenes and voices, and that is what makes up America. Mixing pot, you know. In the introduction, Denise Duhamel, the guest editor for this collection, mentions that she had problems trying to portray "American": "I understood the basic concept - I was to choose work written by poets living in or from America, most likely from magazines published in the United States, though I was able to consider American poets published abroad. How was I able to get in as much of America as possible?" Add to the usual problems of diverse cultures and walks of life the problem that not every sector of America has great poets, and also, that she was not able to consider all types of poetry. I'm not sure about other types, but I know there were no sound bites in this book allowing me to listen to a spoken-word poem, something that isn't meant to be read at all, but heard. Songs are also a form of poetry, and they were not represented. So the series is inherently flawed, but maybe I see it that way because of my more-liberal definition of "poetry."

I did something new and made a pinboard for this book on Pinterest. Only rarely am I a Pinterest user, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment to pin one image per poem. I'm not sure it helped with my comprehension of the poems, but it did force me to pay attention to the imagery and the central ideas or themes used. I was sometimes (okay, more than sometimes) saucy in my captions, so be warned. Click here to visit the board. Note: There is no nudity or crude imagery on the board, though the comments may make mention of sex (never graphically).

P.S. - I just submitted my first-ever piece of feedback to Google. My request? I told them I want to be able to type em dashes into blog posts. There is no way to do that now without copying one from another website. I consider this request both extremely practical and nerdy.