I recently learned how to use spreadsheets, and despite my own self-warnings about abstraction and its dangers, the ability to manipulate vast rows of numbers is beguiling to me.

Using my newfound ability, I have created a rather uncomplicated formula to get this list of the 10 “most popular” posts in 2010. It’s too simple just to use “hits” or pageviews. Lots of people accidentally surf into a website and surf out as fast as they came (Google giveth and Google taketh away). My formula takes unique hits, time spent on a post, as well as bounce and exit rate all into account. All answers, of course, are functions of the question, so…take this list with a grain of salt.

1. Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry is not a Project or Cutting More Lines in the Cosmic Divide by Ben Fama

Dorothea Lasky’s  made huge waves when debuted at this years AWP. The newest book on ‘s Dossier imprint, Lasky lays out, in 19 quick pages, a theory of poetry that reaches back through High Romanticism into a more hermetic time. Illustrated beautiful throughout by, Lasky’s theory pushes against the limits set out by conceptual writing, striding toward a more cosmic and otherwordly approach to artistic creation. There’s a lineage of deep thought coming from poets back from Blake to Spicer’s ideas of poetic dictaction and Barbara Guest’s short collection of writing on art, Forces of Imagination. I was graced with the wondrous task of editing this book, and I present to you a soundbytey narrated version of the greater text, so you can get a flavor of what’s happening here.

2. The Ill-Wrought Urn? A Literary Critical Debate in Truth & Beauty, Part 1 by Adam Fitzgerald

One of the most debated poems of the 20th century wasn’t written by a modernist, nor was it even penned in that century. John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn was written in May 1819, published a year later (Keats died in February 1821) alongside the other Great Odes—one of the most considerable series of poems in the entire English language, and certainly the cornerstone of Keats’ reputation as a poet.

3. Holy Saturday by Adam Fitzgerald

Today is Holy Saturday, perhaps the least thought upon, least looked upon day in the Easter Triduum. But it has in the last few years come to epitomize for me my own life, spiritual and otherwise, where the pomp and majesty of supernatural events ceases; no gods dying, no gods reborn—merely dormancy on all fronts. This is the day when Jesus lay within his tomb; when the great hoax of the messiah was over; when if there was a hell, Christ descended.

4. Alexander McQueen, RIP by Stuart Krimko

I’m don’t consider myself a comfortable elegist (is anyone?), but reading of Alexander McQueen’s death this morning forces me to take up the mantle. I’m not a huge fashion-buff, but I made the walk past the McQueen store on 14th Street a highlight of my daily commute when I worked in Chelsea. His clothes seemed to me wild and well-tailored in the English way. His suits would have fit beautifully in  show at the V&A in London a few years back; he’s one of the only contemporary designers who would have fit, I think; and I mean fit while also doing his own, completely contemporary thing. That show, by the way, was a revelation.

5. Andrei Tarkovsky and the Visionary Experience by Stewart Lundy

We modern people forget how extraordinary it is for us to have such extravagant colors in our everyday lives. Even a hundred years ago, this was not the case. Common place things like big red barns were not painted that way to exhibit color, but because red paint was the cheapest at the time.

6. Some Sort of Truth: Dorothea Lasky’s BLACK LIFE Hurts Like Joy by Lonely Christopher

Dorothea Lasky is a poet of petulant grace. The particular way she does is she carves into the alphabet for poetry’s hurtfully buried, metastasized epiphanies of black life. Thence comes the fragments of jagged wonder she strings together to decorate her verse with pretty conflict. Her wonder (love and awe) is heavy and plain, stilted like she’s writing after a concussion, but the generalness of language (many fundamental ideas repeating, put forth directly) is thick—it spills over the edges of its meaning into the scary beyond. She meets herself in conversation with the space outside experience’s edges. That is the damaged holiness brought out: a haze of dirty purity like a cough toward an inaccessible God. It hurts like joy.

7. Theory of Everything Abridged by Ben Fama

Ben Luzzatto’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED (UDP, 2010) is one of those rare artifacts that transfers its own actual magic—and it is real magic—until the possessed begins to lift a bit toward the sky.

8. AN AGREEMENT REQUIRES / AN OFFER AND ACCEPTANCE by Emily Pettit

I came here to get you excited.
We have an accidental stare-down.
No bees, no money. No one says this.

9. “Prepare for Peoplery” by Christie Ann Reynolds

I assemble flapping into a mechanical bird.

10. Aesthete and Propagandist: An Interview with Gene Tanta by Brooks Lampe

To put it as pompously as a I can: I intervened in the rich multicultural sonnet tradition by inventing the 13-line sonnet form because I needed a practical way to determine when a poem was done without relying on the Romantic standby of intuition or epiphany or other gestures of closure. The limited lines offered a grid that freed me to attend to other aspects of the poem construction process such as how sound relates to sense within an aleatory composition. Finding the 13-line grid was certainly an example of limitations proffering freedom.

And for good measure I’m going to throw in number 11 because I loved this post:

11. Here Be Dragons by Colie Hoffman

We all have our ways of dealing with the unknown, I guess. Apparently cartographers used to write “Here be dragons” on sections of uncharted territory, especially oceans, where they drew pictures of giant sea serpents. One ancient Roman map cautioned travelers about the presence of dog-headed beings. Another 15^th-century map warns of men with horns.

tagged as best of, most popular posts, Poetry Blog, top 10