When David Lehman, a poet then working as a book critic for Newsweek, proposed the project for The Best American Poetry anthology, he was searching for a national platform. His first anthology project, published by Macmillan in 1987, was a flop. But Lehman had an editorial vision. As he writes in the forewords to The Best American Poetry, collected in The State of the Art, he saw a flourishing in American poetry “despite unfavorable conditions” in university English departments. Lehman had quit his tenure-track teaching position years earlier, fed up with the turn toward literary theory in the “academic ghetto.” As he put it, “the war for the survival of the literary culture” is “the real culture war,” and poetry was under threat. The Best American Poetry would be an offensive maneuver in that battle, a “publishing experiment” committed to expanding poetry’s audience, honoring aesthetic excellence, and resisting the ideological mandate of politics. The latter is especially important to Lehman. As he said, “Harm can come from well-meaning efforts to turn poetry into an instrument for social change.” Fashioning himself as a commonsense humanist outsider, he believed “that many readers are prepared to embrace contemporary poetry—if only a discriminating editor showed them what to look for.” Lehman set out to be that editor.
Turned down by Houghton Mifflin and Viking, Scribner signed Lehman for a two-year contract with the first volume, guest-edited by John Ashbery, appearing in 1988. On the back of the already recognizable anthologies that served as its model, The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry was an immediate hit, selling out of its first three printings before the publication date. The rise of graduate programs in creative writing and downward trends in institutional support for small presses helped to create the conditions for the commercial publishing experiment to thrive. Lehman the poet-journalist was now series editor of a popular anthology, a prestige role that bred more prestige roles: judging the National Book Award for poetry, editing The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, and a 22-year position teaching creative writing at The New School. By handing over annual guest editorship of The Best American Poetry to prominent poets such as Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, Edward Hirsch, and Louise Glück, Lehman aligned the anthology series with a broad spectrum of influential and prize-winning poets whose “ecumenical” taste—Lehman’s favored descriptor for his guest editors’ disposition—became aligned with his own.