Jayne and Duncan, I can understand and sympathize with a desire to argue about the quality of poems chosen for a "best" anthology. I often think that's the purpose of the American BAP--to stir up curiosity and argument, because that probably gets more people to buy the book!
I understand that the objection is to the imbalance, the preponderance of free verse and the paucity of meter and rhyme. But that really wasn't what I was getting at. What I'm talking about is each person's willingness to appreciate more kinds of poems.
Tim is a poet who writes a great deal of free verse (when he isn't writing fiction) and who has contributed quite a bit of critique to the Nonmet board. He's gone out of his way to give us useful information about the state of publishing in the UK. To me it feels a little less than collegial to use this thread as a place to lament the hegemony of free verse, as if none of our colleagues wrote free verse.
But that's enough out of me.
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