"April 30," David Lehman

The universal language isn't music
it's sports or maybe it's English
as spoken on my block in New York
Harry who runs Silver Express next door
accepts UPS packages for me and
when I come in after a Knicks loss
he looks at me pained as if it were my fault
he's exulting now that we beat the Raptors
"but we still need a point guard"
while Nairobi native Abe who runs
the copy center up the block is
a Patrick skeptic who nevertheless likes
our chances against hated Miami
of course there is always an exception
in this case the Chinese laundry
of which I am also fond where
the radio transmits Chopin
and the lady from Shanghai
teaches me the words in Mandarin
Chinese (she knows no Cantonese)
for hello, thank you, no problem, and goodbye

From The Evening Sun: A Journal in Poetry, which Ace Boggess loved.

Lehman, who edits the Best American Poetry series, does his best to maintain a breakneck pace of a poem a day; consider the results from April 1998. Consider also "Jim Cummins and David Lehman Defeat the Masked Man" or Lehman's thoughts on George W. Bush's failure to invite a poet to the inauguration. In 2000, he spoke with Thomas Disch about his poems:

I was inspired by a statement Borges made in defense of some of his Ficciones. He said that the plot summary seemed to him an admirable form and that one could state very succinctly an entire plot or parable in a way that would make the composition of the actual book seem a needless extravagance. An assignment that I like giving myself, or to others, is to write the last paragraph of a non-existent novel. Or a first paragraph. Some sort of fragment that would eliminate the need to write the entire thing since one didn’t have time to do that. Often my poems are summary statements of longer works that, as a result of the poem, don’t have to be written. 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. If you do it for years, you’ll have a couple hundred poems in a great variety of forms and styles.