The Mark 2010

From head-scratching poems to social collapse, the best from the printed page.

New Year's Eve 2009 ended one of the most politically charged and aesthetically challenging decades in human history. What easier way to make sense of the endless ricochet of event and analysis than with a list?

Our contributors have chosen their top ten creative works of the decade, from artworks to albums, which we will publish on a daily basis.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (HarperCollins, 2001)
Published just before 9/11, Franzen’s elegiac masterpiece, equal parts Fitzgerald and James, prophesied the hysteric disorder of the decade in some of the most magnificent prose ever produced by an American: “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.”

Short Haul Engine by Karen Solie (Brick, 2001)
Reconstituting the spectral declamation of Anne Carson, the rough-and-tumble of Al Purdy, and the craftsmanship of Irving Layton at his best, Karen Solie’s debut announced the arrival of a major poet. Having since published two more astounding collections, Solie is well on her way to establishing an oeuvre of inestimable worth. If Babstock is the Whitman of contemporary Canadian poetry, Solie is our Dickinson. Together they are our chief linguistic romance.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (McClelland & Stewart, 2001)
Alice Munro is the best short story writer since Chekhov and this is her best book. A shoe-in for the Nobel Prize, all one can say is: read her; then read her again.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2005)
The late David Foster Wallace may be best known as the author of the colossal – and colossally difficult – Infinite Jest, but his essays, collected here in Consider the Lobster, and earlier in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, display his true genius. Funnier than Twain, smarter than Orwell, as erudite as Dr. Johnson, and more passionate and sensitive than post-modernism told us we could be, Consider the Lobster is a mind-bending, side-splitting triumph.

Collapse by Jared Diamond (Viking, 2005)
Twain wrote that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” When the residents of Easter Island realized that their forests (read: lives) were vanishing – the trees cut down for rollers used to transport their magnificent Maoi statues – their response was to build more Maoi in hope of appeasing the spirits of their elders, whose displeasure, they figured, was the source of their misfortune. Diamond’s book examines the collapses of once-invincible civilizations, the preludes to which rhyme with the harrowing harbingers of today. He reminds us that we are operating twenty-first century software on million-year-old hardware.

Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden ed. Stephen Burt (Columbia University Press, 2005)
Randall Jarrell was the most brilliant and eloquent reader of poetry that the twentieth century ever saw, and his chief obsession – and influence – was W.H. Auden. He had written so extensively on Auden that when it came time to assemble his collected critical prose, Jarrell thought the inclusion of his Auden essays would unbalance his landmark Poetry and the Age. Thanks to Stephen Burt, these conflicted, obsessive essays are finally available to us, and they’re some of the finest pieces ever written about poetry. When asked about Jarrell’s amorous attacks on him, Auden shrugged and said (in perfect iambic pentameter): “I think Jarrell must be in love with me.”

Poems 1968-1998 and The End of the Poem by Paul Muldoon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 and 2006)
The American critic Stephen Burt wrote that “coming to Paul Muldoon for the first time must feel like tuning in to an especially complicated, well-regarded television series midway through its seventh season.” Here’s a twofer: Muldoon’s first two decades’ worth of jaw-dropping, head-scratching poems, and his often bizarre, but always brilliant, collection of Oxford lectures. Combined, we have access to one of the most ecstatic imaginations of the last fifty years.

Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock (Anansi, 2006)
Ken Babstock is, pound for pound, the best poet writing in Canada today. Formally attuned, lexically alert, conceptually ingenious, Babstock has absorbed both the “lyric” and “experimental” traditions that have for so long eyed each other, cold war style, with mutual distrust. In this collection, Dennett meets Donne. Airstream Land Yacht is an enduring work of art; years on, it is still the most beautiful – and rewarding – book of poems published in ages.

Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich) (Overlook Press, 2007)
When Daniil Kharms died of hunger in a Soviet asylum in 1942, he was still a young man, an ascending writer who enjoyed a modest popularity in his native Russia as the author of children’s stories. It wasn’t until the 1970s that his work for adults – night-town fairy tales warped in a funhouse mirror – appeared in his home country. Finally, we have an English version. Kharms was a major writer who died too early, but the little he left us is haunting, deeply human, terrifying, and often hilarious.