The declaration of support for a nation who suffered, and continues to suffer, atrocities at the hands of Hamas terrorists (5,000 rockets fired on Israel, innocent people abducted from their homes, beheaded babies, a music festival turned into a nightmare after the terrorists paraglided down and began murdering and abducting festivalgoers), was enough to cause an instant firestorm in the ideologically-captured community of poets. Calls for the cancellation of the publication and demands for mea culpas from the editors flew fast and hot on X. If you openly support Israel, the message is clear: You have no right to function as a poet or as an editor of a poetry publication. You’re a colonizer, after all, or at least colonizer-adjacent.
David Lehman, who founded the anthology and serves as its general editor, is Jewish. No mea culpas appeared. Instead, BAP’s account went dark, and the denizens of the poetry community ghoulishly celebrated, as they tend to do when one of their cancellation campaigns—a diabolical form of online bullying—is successful. (For another example: See the takedown of The Poetry Foundation in 2020, when pressure from BLM-associated poets caused the entire board of directors to resign, along with the editor of their esteemed magazine, Poetry).
The Best American Poetry Anthology has appeared annually since 1988 and quickly became a mainstream fixture in the world of poetry, an often maligned and forgotten branch of the literary arts. BAP has wide distribution and a readership that extends beyond the halls of literary academia. When a poet appears within its pages, it’s no small thing, and it helps bolster their CV as they seek employment in the Creative Writing MFA Industrial Complex.
The system of creative writing MFA programs that pumps out a few thousand fledgling poets and writers each year, fueled by far-left campus politics and guidance from professors too frightened to cause “harm” by giving them honest critique, has dramatically changed the field of poetry.
What’s changed? The art of poetry means little compared to the politics of the poet. Step out of line by declaring support for Israel, or stating that men are men and women are women, or mentioning President Trump in a vaguely favorable light, and you become a target for mobs of coddled half-poets, who are relentless in the execution of digital struggle sessions. These are the literary gatekeepers of today. Not the critics and the editors who’ve spent their lives studying poetry, but flocks of half-witted poetasters who rage online to compensate for their talentlessness.
Will The Best American Poetry Anthology survive the attacks? I think so. But not before editors of past editions, and poets who’ve appeared within their pages over the last 35 years, denounce the publication in a shame ritual we’ve all seen countless times online from neutered artists and writers. I suspect many of these statements will come from straight, white poets who know that if they don’t signal their alliance with the cancellation mob, they’re more likely to find a target on their head.
What they don’t know is that the target is already there. The target is on everyone’s head in the world of the arts. Unless you speak bravely and freely, without equivocation, and abandon the broken, hijacked literary world and forge your own independent path, you will live your life as a target whether you like it or not. Stop going dark, and stop apologizing, and for once, be a poet — stand your ground and speak!
