Fessler Professor Karl Elder’s “Everything I Needed to Know,” from his forthcoming book from Marsh River Editions, Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums, has been chosen by Paul Muldoon for The Best American Poetry 2005, due out from Scribner in the fall of this year. Muldoon, recipient of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is a native of Northern Ireland and has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.”
Elder, whose “Alpha Images” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2000, said of the 2005 selection, “Inclusion in the series a second time is as sweet as the first. For one thing, after four years, I’d begun to think of myself as a one-shot wonder. Second, as Beth Ann Fennelley, who also has work chosen this year for a second time, said to me over the phone, ‘I think of it as such an honor, coming from Paul Muldoon.'”
Elder’s piece, archived along with others of his Mead poems, can be accessed both on Poetry Daily at www.poems.com and on the Beloit Poetry Journal website at www.bpj.org .