"Best Poetry"

Answering a question that Prof. Talbird brought up in his most recent post, "These are, according to Gioia and Lehman the "best" poems of 2018. Can you generalize about what it takes to write a "best" poem?". I'm not going to answer this question the way it was proposed, however I would like to explain my thoughts on why Gioia and Lehman picked the poems included in their anthology. I have a couple possible reasons as to why these consider the best poems of 2018. I think the major reason that they consider these poems the best of "2018" is that they challenge the reader. If poetry was easy to understand then it would not really be a popular literary genre to write in. Good poetry challenges the reader, as I mentioned in an earlier post, reading poetry is like trying to get in the mind of the writer, but only being able to see their face. Some poems you might not ever get the true point of. If you want a better explanation of why I think this, just think back to class, when we analyzed poems and, as Prof. Talbird stated in class, came to a consensus about what the poems meant. We came to a consensus because we could not figure out what the writer truly meant, which is why I think that Gioia, and Lehman picked these poems to include in their anthology, because these poems us force to think analytically. The second reason I believe that Gioia and Lehman picked these poems is because the writer's of these poems wrote them in such a way that truly brought light to the concept that poetry is a reflection of the writer. The consensus's we came to in class where about what the writer has intended on us reading. Sure some poems can be analyzed and the meaning pulled right out, but where is the fun in that? These poems demonstrate that the writer encapsulated the idea of hiding themselves behind words while also making their poems interesting to read and analyze. These are my reasons as to why Gioia and Lehman included poems in their anthology.