PREFACE TO THIS YEAR'S "BEST OF POETRY" ANTHOLOGY

Hallelujah! Poetry, it turns out,

is not dead, I promise you. Reading this 

year's nominations you realize that 
it's not even on its deathbed hacking 

paroxysms of spittle and bile, no, 

our contemporary verse has taken 

a quixotic creep toward health -- nothing a

good six months of drinking green tea with 

ginseng and honey won't cure! This year we're 

calling for a dose of the elemental, 

yoga, meditation, brisk walks to restore 

the soul. So here's my Rx, dear reader, 

this year you'll find oodles of gloomy pantoums 

and an imitation of  Poe's "Ulalume"!

But in this new century poets are 

no longer enjambing the relics of 

our lives into familiar forms. Here you'll 

find the palaver of our xenophobic 

culture translated by Crazy Jim, and 

those whacky internet postmodernists

who present us with a parade of 

numbskulls and street ministries: fire eaters, 

torch singers, Venetian horses galloping 

in golden splendor, tattooed and gurning freaks 

pounding 16-penny nails into their flesh. 

Yes, the pantoum is reborn, reinvigorated, 

reconstituted, recapitulated, 

cleansed from the recent sins of poetry 
when the hybrid jingoistic linguists just 
spit any abstraction on a page, here, in 

this collection, beside the regenesis 

of -- dare I say it? -- the palindrome! 

Yes, our old childhood friend is back on the 

radar, need I refer you to these deleveled 

stackcats?  And for once no one in the country 

wrote a flippin' sonnet, Italian or 

otherwise, RIP my syllabic schemers, 

and while we're reading the obits let's bid 

a fond farewell to the narrative, finally, 

no apostrophes, no sestinas, no 

lyrical ballads, no elegies, no! 

Begone! It turns out that in this new century

there's no time for mourning these exhausted 

forms, no room for pettifogging meditations, 

no precious villanelles, they've all been hauled off 

to the ash leap of literary history, 

so long!, bon voyage, they'll be bulldozed 

into methane-wheezing landfills cherished 

only by misbegotten seagulls picking 

at the smoke-charred crematorium, 

no more love, no more lust, no more blessings, 

gone! Vamoose! No.This year it's all vituperative 

rants and monosyllabic chants, preternatural 

political rhetorics posited by 

post-Christian proselytes, and Occupy 

polemics hoisted on streetlights of the 

new American common ground, burning flags 

(there's even a typographical representation 

of the American flag -- a timely 

concrete poem if there ever was one! --

included in this volume), coffins of 

capitalists and the neo-captains of 

industry paraded through the city squares 

with blank verse mantras, chest-thumping poets 

demanding that someone, anyone, look not 

at the stars, Brutus, but ourselves. These poems 

collected here are not the byzantine beauties 

you're used to ogling, no, they're declarations, 

defamations, legal briefs, syllables 

scattered across the page like 52 pick-up, 

they're the skittering jalopies of 

hillbilly wordsmiths, punks drunk in their own 

neuroses, with form and content added 

on like this year's new infomercial gizmos. 

And so we can finally state that we've reached 

the acme of human achievement, readers, 

for there's no zeitgeist of meaning here, no, 

readers, these are vomited phrases, the 

curse of Babel, the scribblings of wanna-be saints 

and self-declared prophets and beatnik 

prattle-meisters, caveat emptor!, my friend, 

please read this year's offerings freed from the 

dead hand of the past, spurn them, rip them out 

and burn them if you must, for in this new 

era, this new time, our writers have resurrected 

us from all the -isms, with this new volume 

we're reborn with every droning delight, every 

plaintive chant, every carnival barker's 

promise, Step right up! Feast your eyes 

on platonic ideals once cherished for 

the ages now scrapped and sequestered to 

the reliquary! See the double-headed 

beast barking like a pathetic seal! See 

Lazarus, that great begrizzled bard,

bedazzle us with  his high-wire, death defying 

tropes! Enter if you dare, dear reader, and beware,

for the philistine ministers of culture 

are watching over your shoulder, safeguarding 

the temple of poetry, starving in 

their precious principles, imploring you, 

beseeching you, steer clear of this linguistic 

leprosy!, these expressions from ebola-

liquefactions gagging you and blinding 

you with their bombastic truth! Read on, 

dear reader, if you dare.