75 Poets Fighting for Room : THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY, 1989 <i> edited by Donald Hall with David Lehman (Collier Books/Macmillan: $24.95, cloth; $9.95, paper; 293 pp.) </i>

In 1988, Donald Hall published “The One Day,� which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. As the guest editor of the second volume of the annual “Best American Poetry,� he’s done much better than John Ashbery did as guest editor of the first.

Reading the two annuals together, though, suggests some problems in their basic conception.

A year is too short a period in which to sample a nation’s poetry because the most important poetic achievement is perceived cumulatively. The best poets impress us most by how they develop--it’s this that reveals their integrity and their inventiveness. More even than most anthologies, which give 10 or 20 representative pages to important figures, these annuals lack that dimension. And this has the effect of selling American poetry short.

In his polemical introduction, Hall says: “I believe that the best American poetry of our day makes a considerable literature. ‘Best American Poetry, 1989’ cannot embody the whole argument, but ‘American Poetry After Lowell’ . . . could collect a large body of diverse, beautiful, intelligent, moving work--and work that will endure.�

Hall would win his “argument� with his “American Poetry After Lowell�--its larger perspective would eliminate the merely fashionable and the trivial. It could divide its pages discriminately rather than cramming together--as these annuals do--75 poets fighting for elbow room.

“Best American Poetry 1989� loses the “argument� because the annual concept mutes the major figures. So, for instance, as Hall admits, “Several American poets whom I admire are absent because they published nothing in 1988 or because they did not publish their best work.�

The 1988 and 1989 annuals both exclude, among others, Adrienne Rich, C. K. Williams, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski.

Those major figures who do appear are diminished by the policy of allowing each poet only one poem. This is especially damaging to those--A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Charles Simic and Gary Snyder--who create hermetic systems. Reading a short, isolated piece by one of them is like overhearing a single phrase from an unfamiliar language.

Of the other famous poets who appear, only Donald Hall himself, James Merrill, Sharon Olds and Mark Strand have good poems that are also characteristic. Those by Robert Creeley, Thom Gunn, Robert Pinsky and Richard Wilbur are interesting but atypical--a new reader would get a strange idea of those writers. The poems by Amy Clampitt, Karl Shapiro, W. D. Snodgrass and William Stafford slight their authors with their uncharacteristic thinness. And so on.

An annual like this, then, can’t suggest depth. Where Hall has done better than Ashbery, though, is in suggesting variety: He’s an experienced anthologist with a wider-ranging knowledge of contemporary poetry and a curiosity about new developments.

So the book is best regarded as a shallow cross section that reveals the simultaneous presence in 1989 of continuities, dead ends and new ground.

Continuity is in evidence, for instance, in the ghosts of Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell haunting, respectively, Donald Hall’s own “History� and Alan Williamson’s life study, “The Muse of Distance.� There’s even a genuine revenant in the form of a fine poem by Elizabeth Bishop (who died in 1979), discovered among her papers by Lorrie Goldensohn:

“And we imagine dreamily

How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning

Would be quite delightful rather than frightening.�

There’s continuity, too, in the hints that the anthology gives of a women’s tradition which, while connected in some way to the men’s, is in other ways separate, coherent and proliferating. Several of the chosen poems by women are fascinated by the body, male and female, and in the naming of its parts, and there’s a danger of this becoming a cliche. (Though I suspect, also, that the two male editors were drawn to poems of this kind, that they like to hear their women talk dirty).

But Suzanne Gardinier’s “Voyage� treats the obsession more substantially than most, concerned with exploring the role that physiological changes play in the process of becoming an adult. It’s an allegory, a kind of feminine revision of “The Ancient Mariner,� that depicts this process as a voyage of discovery of the self’s aloneness in the body. In this context, the poem’s references to menstruation--which seems rather routine at first--work to suggest how comprehending this aloneness requires a coming to terms with an otherness within the self.

Such a self-recognition is accompanied by recognition of the aloneness of others:

“I’ve started to remember

faces, and to use the shard of mirror

to find my own, with something like affection.

Stranded like anyone, the isolation

made solitude, I try to understand.�

“Voyage� is also an example o f the “new formalism� in American poetry, of which there are other examples in this book. It employs iambic meter, seven-line stanzas, and rhymes--though it would be overestimating the fraction to call some of these “half-rhymes,� and they finish a line before the stanza does (AABBCCD).

Perhaps she could learn something from an old formalist like John Hollander, whose “pantun� entitled “Kinneret� is a highly polished and ingenious machine. However, the 28-year-old’s more halting vehicle goes further in the end.

What the women don’t seem to write are those long discursive poems that seem to be so much in favor at the moment with the men. Hall has included a number of these, though fewer than Ashbery did. Most of their authors seem to have been mugged once by Derrida and won’t go anywhere now without their deconstructive armory.

Bob Perelman even wears the designer label--his “Movie� stars Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, “a woman/ who thought Derrida was an idiot.� There’s imagination at work here, and high intelligence, and the poem seems constantly on the edge of saying something fascinating. But he’s so concerned with telling us that his medium--and other media--are deviously opaque that the message collapses into devious opacity.

Perelman worries that all contemporary experience--because, in particular, of the dominance of TV--gets mistranslated into imagery, or “information,� that reality gets mystified by media rhetoric. He jokes that this leads to such indiscriminateness that we can’t tell Oliver North from Oliver Hardy (“was he/ the fat one or the thin one?�).

Other contributions to the book, though, suggest that some of the best American poetry in the future will be written by poets who have simply brushed aside Derridean anxieties like Perelman’s to write poems with a strong narrative line.

This book is valuable just for showing how this exciting development--which isn’t entirely new--is gathering momentum and quality. (And certainly “The Best American Poetry 1989� is much better at providing a platform for younger poets than it is at representing older ones).

These poems have their own, more hidden sophistication, which they use to evoke a sense of American landscape, culture and history. Robert McDowell’s “The Fifties,� for instance, has the scope of a novel and uses effects learned from cinema and Expressionist drama as well as poetry:

Alone, frightened, Boy opens his own mouth

And sings, off key, a favorite lullabye.

The morning light is gray. The room is cold.

Thunder builds on the far side of the wall.

Then Mother-Wife runs in and hugs him hard,

Rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed.

Father fills the doorway. Reaching down

He pries the two apart and lifts him up.

Father’s face is cruel and pitiful.

Boy wants to kiss and slap it all at once.