The Best American Poetry 1988 30th Anniversary of the Debut Collection

A celebration of the first edition of Best American Poetry and a tribute to the late John Ashbery—the guest editor and one of the best American poets of all time—this thirtieth anniversary edition is a look back at the beginning of a renowned anthology series and an outstanding collection of poems.

In 1988, series editor David Lehman began an institution with the inaugural installment of Best American Poetry. Thirty years later, this anniversary edition celebrates its guest editor, the brilliant John Ashbery. Ashbery was a vastly-admired, highly decorated, and generative artist; The New Yorker noted that, however one interprets Ashbery, “An alternative view says that every Ashbery poem is about poetry.” How fitting that he worked with Lehman on the first Best American Poetry, which would go on to become nearly as admired and generative as Ashbery himself—and always a book of poetry about poetry.

The Best American Poetry 1988 includes poems by Derek Walcott, Amy Gerstler, Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Ruth Stone, Ann Lauterbach, Seamus Heaney, and many more. With a Foreword by Lehman, in which he calls Ashbery “a poet’s poet’s poet,” and an Introduction by Ashbery, where he reflects that “life is what present American poetry gets to seem more like, and the more angles we choose to view it from, the more its amazing accidental abundance imposes itself,” this edition, with a new Preface from Lehman about how Best American Poetry has developed over the years, is a rewarding look back at the beginnings of the series.

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His eleven books of poetry include The Morning Line, Playlist, Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

John Ashbery (1927-2017) was an American poet, art critic, playwright, and translator. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and at least as many major international awards.