by David Lehman
to seek you in the dark water. And there
it is: faint, an echo, faster and further
away than mother’s, all beat box
and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing
hip-hop for the first time—power
hijacked from a lamppost—all promise.
You couldn’t sound better, break-
dancer, my favorite song bumping
from a passing car. You’ve snuck
into the club underage and stayed!
Only later, much, will your mother
begin to believe your drumming
in the distance—my Kansas City
and Congo Square, this jazz band
vamping on inside her.
from The New Yorker
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS
SHERMAN ALEXIE was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals. His most recent books are the poetry collection Face, from Hanging Loose Press (2009), and War Dances, stories and poems from Grove Press (2009). He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.
Of “Terminal Nostalgia,” Alexie writes: “For such a young country, the United States is intensely nostalgic. And Internet culture—with its endless remixes of pop culture—is even more nostalgic. As for the particular brand of nostalgia that afflicts Native Americans? Well, it has a lot to do with romanticizing pre-Columbian culture. Thinking about all this, I thought I’d write a ghazal (a seventh-century Arabic poetic form) that combined American pop culture nostalgia with Native American cultural nostalgia. The result is, I believe, funny and sad at the same time, although, when I’ve performed it live, it seems that people are afraid to laugh.”
KAREN LEONA ANDERSON was born in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1973. She is the author of Punish honey (Carolina Wren Press, 2009) and is an assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Of “Receipt: Midway Entertainment Presents,” Anderson writes: “A few years ago, I started using my cash register receipts as occasions for poems, a practice that has proven to be both revelatory and embarrassing. This poem in particular was based on a ticket stub from the county fair in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, which is a lot like the fairs I used to go to in eastern Connecticut and southwestern Minnesota. I’m a former 4-H member (I mostly entered marigolds and cake), and I always liked the mobility of being at the fair—moving like money from the surreal mash-up of those intense local contests to that other economy in the parallel universe of the midway.”
RAE ARMANTROUT was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947. She teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. Her most recent books are Money Shot (2011), Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and Next Life (2007), all from Wesleyan University Press. Just Saying, the manuscript containing “Accounts,” will be published by Wesleyan in 2013.
Armantrout writes: “Like many of us, I have been fascinated with physics, as I encountered it in popular books such as Brian Greene’s, for many years. In the summer of 2010, I invited a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego, Brian Keating, to lunch, hoping he could help me understand the origin of matter in the early universe. The poem is not a transcript of our conversation, but rather an absurdist account of my attempts to visualize what Brian was saying. At times it takes the form of two voices, one correcting the other. Such visualizations and corrections could go on indefinitely.”
JULIANNA BAGGOTT was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1969. She is the author of eighteen books, mostly novels, under her own name as well as the pen names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode. Three of her books are collections of poetry: This Country of Mothers (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), Lizzie Borden in Love (SIU Press, 2006), and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees (Pleiades Press/Louisiana State University Press, 2007), which is a manual on how to write poems, written in poems. An earlier version of the poem in these pages appeared in a desktop calendar published by Alhambra. Baggott’s most recent novel, Pure (Hachette, 2012), is the first in a postapocalyptic trilogy. She teaches at Florida State University.
Of “For Furious Nursing Baby,” Baggott writes: “First, I should confess: I can be contrary. I wrote a poem called ‘Q and A: Why I Don’t Write Formal Poetry,’ and realized, by the end of it, that I’d challenged myself into some kind of formal duel. I started writing sonnets. At first, I was very strict then loosened. ‘For Furious Nursing Baby’ was originally a sonnet—you can still hear it echoing—that eventually simply looked too confined and bound-down on the page. The poem is about the wildness of a nursing baby—a poem undeniably of the flesh. I felt compelled to unclasp the lines . . . and so now, when I look at it on the page, it appears sprung loose, as the flesh of nursing breasts tend to do when unbound, unclasped.”
DAVID BAKER was born in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and has lived since 1984 in Granville, Ohio. He teaches at Denison University, where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham endowed chair of English, and also teaches regularly in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. The latest of his fourteen books are Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets (University of Arkansas Press, 2012) and Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.
Of “Outside,” Baker writes: “Where does art live? It tends to live indoors—inside massive buildings like mansions, monasteries, and museums, or inside fussy little buildings like galleries and academies. But in my small village in Ohio art also lives in trees, in reconstituted toilets, out in the yard, even in the air—on the property of one citizen, who lives inside my poem ‘Outside.’ A few years ago this fellow moved himself onto an acre of his family’s old farm site, outside, I mean; when the weather is bad he stays in farm buildings. And he has moved his utilities outside, his sink and stove and such, and some of these also house his art.
“By outsider art we usually mean the works created by people who are not typical or mainstream artists, whose work may be folk art, or whose reputations are not respectable within the cozy confines of ‘fine art.’ Outsiders are outside the field. But my neighbor is an actual outsider. He lives outside in a real farmyard. His art lives outside. And this is where he is at home.
“My poem barely touches upon all the idiosyncratic, inventive, and nonce creations he has made. Some are functional. Some are ‘pure’ art. And my friend finds no difference between function and purity, between his living and his making, or between his inner world and his outside existence.”
RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University. He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008), which won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and at Warren Wilson College.
Of “Child Holding Potato,” Barot writes: “The painting referred to in the poem’s title is by Giovanni Bellini, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Recently, I was at a dinner party and discovered that the woman sitting across from me had worked as a docent for decades at the Met. It was fun to talk to someone who could conjure up in her own mind the paintings that I loved at the museum. When I mentioned the Bellini, she said she didn’t think it was a potato in the child’s hand, though she wasn’t sure what it was. I made a mental note then to look into books about Bellini and find out exactly what the object is. To my eye the object had looked like a gold potato, though I suppose now that it coul
d be any number of other things: another tuber, maybe, or a pear, or a stone. I still haven’t looked it up. And, in any case, the misreading now seems an important part of my relationship with the painting and the poem that came out of it. In the state of mind I was in while looking at the painting, a pear or a stone would have been just as dire as a funny little potato.”
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS was born in Oceanside, California, in 1980. He is the author of a memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin, 2009), and a poetry collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010). He has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Married, the father of two sons, he lives in Clinton, Maryland.
Betts writes: “ ‘At the End of Life, a Secret’ started with a story I read about a dying person, weight that was unaccounted for, and a claim that this weight was that of the soul. At the time the Supreme Court was hearing, or had just heard, Steven Spears v. the United States, the case that declared unconstitutional the 100:1 disparity in crack-cocaine sentences and powder cocaine sentences. The case had me thinking about the weight of crack, both the physical weight and the weight of its impact on the communities I grew up in and on the American legal system. As I worked on the poem those two things collided—though not until the very end. While the poem might seem the product of a plan, that is a mirage of hindsight. The end product is always an artifact, implying a logic that the poet composing it did not yet have. Composition, in my experience, is play, is riffing, is taking an image (in this case the man working with the cadaver) and working it over and beyond the idea until I land at a place that I didn’t expect.”
FRANK BIDART was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939. He didn’t escape until 1957, when he began to study at the University of California, Riverside. “Escape” is an exaggeration; childhood and youth take too long, perhaps everywhere. He began graduate work at Harvard in 1962, studying with Reuben Brower and Robert Lowell. His books include Star Dust (2005) and Desire (1997), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003) and has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. Rosanna Warren has called him an “occult Poundian,” adding: “At every level of Bidart’s poems—syntactic, prosodic, prepositional—contradiction provides the emotional fuel.” Bidart lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Of “Of His Bones Are Coral Made,” Bidart writes: “I’ve written little prose about poetry, but can’t seem to stop writing poems about poetics. Narrative is the Elephant in the Room when most people discuss poetry. Narrative was never a crucial element in the poetics surrounding the birth of Modernism, though the great works of Modernism, from The Waste Land to the Cantos to ‘Home Burial,’ Paterson, and beyond, are built on a brilliant sense of the power of narrative. What Modernism added was the power gained when you know what to leave out. Narrative is the ghost scaffolding that gives spine to the great works that haunt the twentieth century.
“A writer is caught by certain narratives, certain characters, and not by others. Prufrock is relevant to our sense of Eliot. He could be a character in Pound’s sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, but if he were, it would be without the identification, the sympathy and agony. Eliot had to go on to Gerontion and Sweeney and Tiresias, each trailing a ghost narrative. They are as crucial to Eliot’s vision as Bloom and Stephen Daedalus are to the vision, the sense of the nature of the world, of Joyce.
“In my poem, ‘the creature smothered in death clothes’ is Herbert White, the title character in the first poem in my first book; ‘the woman’ two stanzas down is Ellen West, from the second.
“Two more allusions. The ‘burning / fountain’ refers to this passage in Shelley’s poem ‘Adonais,’ his elegy for Keats:
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.—
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same. . . .
“The ‘burning fountain’ is a metaphor for the power that generates, that fuels and animates life. It is the title of a book about the poetic imagination by Philip Wheelwright, who taught me philosophy as an undergraduate (The Burning Fountain, Indiana University Press, 1954).
“My poem’s title comes from one of Shakespeare’s greatest short lyrics, in The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
“My poem is about transformation, the bones of the poet made up out of the materials, the detritus of the world, that he or she has not only gathered but transformed and been transformed by.”
BRUCE BOND was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954. His collections of poetry include Choir of the Wells (a tetralogy of new books; Etruscan Press, 2013), The Visible (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009), Blind Rain (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Cinder (Etruscan Press, 2003), The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), Radiography (BOA Editions, 1997), The Anteroom of Paradise (QRL, 1991), and Independence Days (Woodley Press, 1990). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Institute of the Arts, and the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. He is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and poetry editor for American Literary Review. His work has appeared twice previously in The Best American Poetry.
Of “Pill,” Bond writes: “I recall a particular morning-after, when I was in the shower at Pomona College some thirty-seven years ago. It struck me then that feeling high is highly overrated, largely because it alters and destabilizes the norm. What if it were the norm? What would people pay for the chance of two minutes of sobriety? What wouldn’t they pay? But then this poem is one that I could have written only much later in life. For now sobriety suggests to me that post-midlife turn back to the dailiness of one’s world and one’s finitude within it. Suffice it to say that I have made my share of mistakes. Join the club, say my mistakes. If, beyond the bare necessities required to survive, anxiety is the fundamental human problem (which I believe it is), then the courage to regard the fullness of one’s nature remains its central difficulty. And if conversation with (and transfiguration of) the wounded places is what experience craves, that does not preclude its craving of denial and the grandiosity of the child. To be high is to stand above the real somehow, above others. But to be ground level is to acknowledge a bit more of both our connectivity and our aloneness: as Stevens put it, our ‘island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.’ So much depends upon those twin commas after ‘free’ and ‘water.’ A confession: I have had my problems with sleep. Now, oddly, when I lie down, I say the word ‘nothing’ in my head. That’s where I came from, where I’m headed. It’s OK. I say. Nothing. And then I feel a little gratitude. And then I fall.”
STEPHANIE BROWN was born in 1961 in Pasadena, California, and grew up in Newport Beach. She has degrees from Boston University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of two books of poetry, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A curator of the Casa Romantica Reading Series for poets and fiction writers in San Clemente, California, from 2004 to 2010, she has taught creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Re
dlands, but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager. She is currently a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in Southern California. She is also a book review editor of the online journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and poetry editor of the Zócalo Public Square website.
Of “Notre Dame,” Brown writes: “I’m always looking for ways to make myself write. The first draft is the hardest. One year I placed a random list of A–Z words in my Outlook reminder box at work, to have a daily prompt pop up for twenty-six workdays. On the third day, the word was ‘cathedral,’ and this was the poem I wrote from that prompt. This poem wrote itself very much as it exists now on the page. The moment of discovery in the writing was when I got to the line that begins, ‘It was a terrible summer.’ Until that point, I was writing the poem as if angels were its subject, but then I saw that it was meant to go in a different direction and I let it go there. I didn’t do much revision, though I took out some stage-setting lines at the beginning. The title came last. I couldn’t call it ‘Cathedral’ because that made me think of Raymond Carver’s seminal book of short stories, Cathedral. I toyed with the idea of calling it ‘Paris’ but ultimately chose ‘Notre Dame,’ because the poem is about faith more than anything else, and Notre Dame stands as a symbol of faith. I do love the ‘thoughtful gargoyle’ at the top, who rests his chin in his hand and contemplates the city spread out before him. When I think of Notre Dame, I think of the rose window, the candles burning, the beautiful façade, and that gargoyle.”
ANNE CARSON was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950. She teaches ancient Greek at various places, now at New York University. Her most recent book is Nox (New Directions, 2011).
Carson writes: “ ‘Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences’ was part of a sonnet cycle I wrote once when invited to Harvard to give a lecture on pronouns. The sonnets were performed as part of a collaborative composition that included choreography by three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Company—Rashaun Mitchell, Julie Cunningham, and Andrea Weber—with sound design by Stephanie Rowden and video by Sadie Wilcox. Harvard was baffled but appreciative.”
