Mary Jo Salter on what makes a poem good

As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2024, Mary Jo Salter spent last year scouring literary journals for 75 of the best poems from 75 different poets. To appear in the volume is a coveted honor, but to be selected as editor is a venerated position awarded only to an elite few; past editors include Louise Glück, John Ashbery, and Terrance Hayes. Salter, a professor emerita in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, joins them for the anthology's 39th edition, a volume that stands as proof of poetry's enduring relevance and power.

"Poetry should speak about contemporary matters and to one's contemporaries," Salter says. "On the other hand—and poetry's full of paradoxes—it should also deal with something that is more universal or eternal."

The resulting collection, released in September by Scribner, reflects our modern routines and anxieties. Poets scan QR codes to order matcha lattes (Jessica Greenbaum, "Each Other Moment") and relegate emails to their spam boxes (Jeffrey Harrison, "A Message from Tony Hoagland"). In Chris Childers' "Miasma," the COVID pandemic inspires both tedium and horror, while in Sarah Luczaj's "Shopping Lists," the poet wonders which supplies to send a friend in war-torn Ukraine. The contemporary fits comfortably alongside the classical; for every poem about COVID or Ukraine, there's a mention of Ulysses, an allusion to T.S. Eliot.

Johns Hopkins Magazine recently sat down with Salter to discuss the collection and poetry's place in our rapidly changing world.

As an editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, you're used to what I imagine is a difficult task: whittling down a group of great poems to the best ones. What is this process like for you?

It really was fun. I worked on three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, but in each case I had two collaborators. Editing The Best American Poetry 2024 was interesting because I was the only person to make the final call. David Lehman, the series editor, invented this whole series 37 years ago, and he's had 38 different guest editors. He gives us suggestions, but he always says that the decision's up to you [the guest editor], so the biggest change for me this time was just that it was entirely my own taste. I also had the freedom of choosing only poems that were published in 2023. It's understood by the reader that I am not trying to make a canon of world poetry; I am simply saying this is what I personally liked this year.

What did you look for in poems? What, for you, constitutes an enjoyable poem?

Part of it is a feeling of surprise, or that I didn't see where the poem was headed. Part of it can be humor, which I think is hugely important in poetry and undervalued by some readers. If I can read a poem three or four times and it's still amusing, that's a sign of a sensibility that I would like to be in communication with. I was also looking for a range of ages, a range of experience writing poetry. I wanted some very young voices in there. There were also voices that are even older than I am. I wanted it to be a cross section of the different kinds of poets who are writing right now.

There are six poems by Writing Seminars alumni: Armen Davoudian, Gabriella Fee, Chris Childers, Stephen Kampa, Richie Hofmann, and Claire Wahmanholm. What's it like for you to be able to uplift your former students?

I so much admire all these poets that you just named. They're writing poems that I wish I could write. And that's what I feel about the other people in the book, too. The truth is that each one of them is utterly unique. They're not me. They're just doing their own thing.

As a poet yourself, what is it like creating a book out of other people's poems?

It brings me pleasure. There are many excellent poets writing today, and when I was working on The Norton Anthology, I could only include a handful of people who are still living and writing. This book was a way to celebrate what other people are doing. Rather than feeling guilty that I was leaving a lot of people out—which is how I felt with [The Norton]—with this one, I just felt like I had this secret, like I'd been buying birthday presents for 75 people and none of them knew yet that I was doing it.

While reading your introduction, I was really struck by your thoughts on artificial intelligence and the future of poetry. You wrote, "Today, the poems that machines write … are usually considered bad by humans. But in the near future some machines will begin to write better and better poetry, or at least poetry that humans like (and what's the difference?). Poems written as collaborations between machines and humans will be increasingly liked by humans."

I have no idea whether my predictions, which are rather dire, are going to be fulfilled. But it does seem to me that the glee with which AI is generally welcomed by so many people is a problem. There are ways AI has saved lives and is going to make a huge positive difference. There's no question about that. But when it comes to intellectual work—this is relevant at Hopkins—professors are having to tell their students either not to use ChatGPT or to learn how to integrate it with their own work. The fact that we often can't tell the difference between creative work that's written by a machine and written by a person is not because people don't generally write better than machines; it's that what is being uploaded into those machines is mostly junk. I'd be very interested to see what the output would be like if the AI only employed, for example, data from the very best poets as generally understood by humanity over the last however many hundred years. That would be a really interesting experiment.

There's a trend that I've noticed, both in this collection and in contemporary poetry in general, where people write a lot more about the mundane than they used to. You never had Keats, for example, writing about doing household chores, but in this anthology there's a poem by Brandel France de Bravo called "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry." What do you think about this shift?

What poetry does, among other things, is force us to slow down and recognize that we haven't been paying attention. If we're going to the laundromat every Tuesday, we're likely in a rote mindset where we don't observe certain things. Depending on the poet, you're either saying after the ecstasy, the laundry, or after the laundry, the ecstasy. But in any case, life frees itself from the banal when we stop thinking or feeling in automatic ways. When we're surprised by feeling, that tends to produce a better poem than if we're not.