David Lehman


David Lehman is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry. He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.

Career

Born in New York City, David Lehman grew up the son of European Holocaust refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England on a Kellett Fellowship. On his return to New York, he received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant. Lehman's poem "The Presidential Years" appeared in The Paris Review No. 43 while he was a Columbia undergraduate.
His books of poetry include Playlist, Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, The Evening Sun, The Daily Mirror, and Valentine Place, all published by Scribner. Princeton University Press published Operation Memory, and An Alternative to Speech. He collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, and with Judith Hall on a book of poems and collages, Poetry Forum. Since 2009, new poems have been published in 32 Poems, The Atlantic, The Awl, Barrow Street, The Common, Green Mountains Review, Hanging Loose, Hot Street, New Ohio Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, Sentence, Smartish Pace, Slate, and The Yale Review.
Lehman's poems appear in Chinese in the bilingual anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, published through a partnership between the NEA and the Chinese government, and in the Mongolian-English Anthology of American Poetry. Lehman's work has been translated into 16 languages overall, including Spanish, French, German, Danish, Russian, Polish, Korean and Japanese. In 2013, his translation of Goethe’s "Wandrers Nachtlied" into English appeared under the title "Goethe’s Nightsong" in The New Republic, and his translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s "Zone" was published with an introductory essay in Virginia Quarterly Review. The translation and commentary won the journal's Emily Clark Balch Prize for 2014. Additionally, his poem, "French Movie" appears in the third season of Motionpoems.
Lehman is the series editor of The Best American Poetry, which he initiated in 1988. The prestigious annual series has 33 volumes published ; the current volume was edited by Major Jackson. Further, Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
He is the author of nine nonfiction books, including, most recently, "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir", "The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014", and A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, for which he received a 2010 ASCAP Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Sponsored by the American Library Association, Lehman curated, wrote, and designed a traveling library exhibit based on his book A Fine Romance that toured 55 libraries in 25 states between May 2011 and April 2012 with appearances at three libraries in New York state and Maryland.
In an interview published in Smithsonian Magazine, Lehman discusses the artistry of the great lyricists: “The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy... these lyricists needed to work within boundaries, to get complicated emotions across and fit the lyrics to the music, and to the mood thereof. That takes genius.”
Lehman's other books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library; The Big Question ; The Line Forms Here and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder, was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. A new edition of The Perfect Murder appeared in 2000. In October 2015, he published Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, which Geoffrey O'Brien in "The New York Review of Books" praised as an "engaging, playful, deeply personal, and elegantly concise tribute."
Lehman made his living primarily as a journalist and free-lance writer for fifteen years. His by-line appeared frequently in Newsweek in the 1980s and he has continued writing for general-interest magazines and newspapers, among them The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, the Washington Post, People, and as well as various scholarly and literary publications. The Academy of American Poets, National Public Radio, Salon, Slate, Smithsonian, and Art in America. He has been a contributing editor at The American Scholar, since 2009, where he acts as quiz master for the weekly column Next Line, Please, a public poetry-writing contest, in addition to writing various articles. The first project was a crowd-sourced sonnet, "Monday," which was completed in August 2014. There followed a haiku, a tanka, an anagram based on Ralph Waldo Emerson's middle name, a couplet, and a "shortest story" competition. Lehman devises the puzzles — or prompts — and judges the results.
The Library of Congress commissioned an essay from Lehman, “Peace and War in American Poetry,” and posted it online in April 2013. In 2013, Lehman wrote the introduction to The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo. He had previously written introductory essays to books by A. R. Ammons, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Alfred Leslie, Fairfield Porter, Karl Shapiro, and Mark Van Doren.
In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series, a position he held for twelve years. In 1997 he teamed with Star Black in creating and directing the famed KGB Bar Monday-night poetry series in New York City’s East Village. Lehman and Black co-edited The KGB Bar Book of Poems. They directed the reading series until 2003.
He taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and served as poetry coordinator from 2003 to 2018. In an interview with Tom Disch in the Cortland Review, Lehman addresses his great variety of poetic styles: "I write in a lot of different styles and forms on the theory that the poems all sound like me in the end, so why not make them as different from one another as possible, at least in outward appearance? If you write a new poem every day, you will probably have by the end of the year, if you’re me, an acrostic, an abecedarium, a sonnet or two, a couple of prose poems, poems that have arbitrary restrictions, such as the one I did that has only two words per line."
Lehman has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the NEA, and received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. Lehman divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City. He is married to Stacey Harwood.

Poetry

;Collections
;Anthologies and edited collections of other poets
;The Best American Poetry with guest editors:
;Other
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
It could happen to you2017

Critical studies, reviews and biography