Sturgeon's Law

Scribner is proud to announce the launch of a new annual anthology: The Best American Poetry About Poetry. First-year guest editor (and movement godfather) John Ashbery, with series editor (and actual Godfather) David Lehman, has culled 75 of the best poems on poetry from the literally billions published each year. Fortunately, nearly half of those chosen were ported directly from The Best American Poetry 2007, further demonstrating that the best way to get into these anthologies, next to being one of 20 big names or a student of the editor, is to write navel-gazing poetry about the importance of poems to poets.

Among the notable poems on poets, poetry, or poetics you'll find in BAPAP 2007:

• A clever sestina about the difficulty of writing villanelles, in which the clever end-word "villanelle" is also cleverly written as "villain hell"
  
• An avant garde poem that uses the word "poem" in place of all nouns, verbs, and adjectives ("Poem a Poem Poems a Poemy Poem")
  
• A non-avant-garde poem that uses no nouns beside "poet" and "poem" as it tries to compare the writing process to joyous masturbation
  
• A naked attempt to get into Best American Poetry by writing something called "BAP"
• An antiwar poem that contemplates the futility of even starting an antiwar poem at the beginning of . . . here the copywriter loses track of what he's supposed to write
  
• A satire of a mysterious critic named Bilious Blowgan
• A cento of lines by Shakespeare, Cesar Vallejo, Gertrude Stein, and Jewel
  
• 22 ars poeticas, including two titled "Arse Poetica"
  

The volume also contains an index of namedropping references to dead poets and their vastly more successful poems, alphabetically from Auden through Yeats (sorry, no Z's) and chronologically from Homer through Creeley (who rose like Tupac Shakur to also contribute a poem to the anthology). Each author's note will include a defensive statement about why his or her poem is important, and how the idea arrived while he or she was writing a poem that wasn't about poetry, possibly while at Yaddo. Finally, the inside covers will contain handy charts tallying the number of times each poet, journal, and type of poem has appeared in the anthology. The winning poet, journal, and poem type each year will be recognized with grants from the Poety McPoem-Poetryson Foundation.

Come see theory and form overwhelm, uh, poetry! If we haven't gotten meta enough for you yet, wait until next year, when we launch The Best American Poetry About Poetry About Poetry (BAPAPAP). Billy Collins has already selected a triolet about writing sonnets about ballades, an elliptical poem no one was able to tell was about poetry about poetry until they read the accompanying blurb, and a work entitled "Yes, My First Two Published Poems Appeared in BAP Because I Studied With Heather McHugh, Fuckers!" The exclamation point is part of the title.