by David Lehman
Of “Helianthus annuus (Sunflower),” Greacen writes: “My ninth-grade algebra teacher was obsessed with the twelfth-century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, and in particular the number sequence for which he is most famous, in which each number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc). I barely scraped a passing grade in that class, but later, her reverent mutterings about the golden mean and packing density and Fibonacci sequences dictating forms in nature began to come back to me. Fibonacci series occur, for instance, in the scales on pinecones and pineapples, the shell of the chambered nautilus, and perhaps most famously in the seed head of the sunflower. I was taken with the idea of the golden mean being represented by this golden flower, and with the fact that the mean is represented by the Greek letter Φ, which if you squint at it you might see as an abstracted sunflower, a large disc on a straight stem. Being a bit of a nerd, I decided to see what would happen if I followed the Fibonacci sequence in my lines and discovered that it determined a certain pleasing packing density even on the page. (Mrs. G., if you’re out there—I get it now!) The ‘weary of time’ reference comes from William Blake’s poem ‘Ah! Sunflower.’ Contradicting Mr. Blake felt even more dangerous than passing notes in that algebra class, but with all due respect, it made more sense to me to see the sunflower as a supplicant to the sun god, Apollo, who is often associated with order and with the golden mean.”
JAMES ALLEN HALL was born in Columbus, Indiana, in 1976. His book of poems, Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the 2011 recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam, in upstate New York.
Of “One Train’s Survival Depends on the Other Derailed,” Hall writes: “One night I was at a bar in Tucson called Plush, drinking whiskey with some poets. One young woman—not a poet, but flush with artistic air—told a story about her childhood pet, Bluebird, who was set free one evening from its cage by the babysitter, despite the child’s prolonged pleas to keep the latch locked. The bird flew directly into an electrical socket and committed suicide. We were shocked, and not just because she’d prefaced Bluebird’s tale with ‘Here’s a funny story.’ The comedy existed in the prolonged pleas from the child, who was wise and wanted to keep her Bluebird alive. It seems she knew all along what the animal wanted.
“The next day, I drafted the poem. I’d been rereading poets I admire for their ability to pressurize story with lyric description and sonic texture, and went back to Susan Mitchell’s Rapture, an important book in my development as a poet. I love—and borrowed—her maximalist sensibility, her use of the speaker’s body as oracle, this choir-of-one who sings multiple experiences. The poem tries out her leaping connections, dizzyingly spun, so that the voice is changed by what it sings.”
TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He won the 2010 National Book Award in poetry for his book Lighthead (Penguin). His other books are Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005), and Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002). His other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a USA Zell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hayes writes: “ ‘The Rose Has Teeth’ takes its title from the brilliant 2006 Matmos album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast—which takes its title from a passage in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. ‘Most artists are converted to art by art itself,’ Lewis Hyde says in The Gift. My poem found its bones after I read Matthew Zapruder’s marvelous poem ‘Never to Return,’ in the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry. My poem found its breath at the piano I have been trying to play since 1999, the year my daughter was born.”
STEVEN HEIGHTON is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and translator. He has received four gold National Magazine Awards in Canada, where he lives. His novel Afterlands (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) was published in six countries and has been optioned for film. His poetry collections are Patient Frame (House of Anansi Press, 2010), which includes the poem chosen for this year’s Best American Poetry, The Address Book (House of Anansi Press, 2005), and The Ecstasy of Skeptics (House of Anansi Press, 1994). He has a website: www.stevenheighton.com.
Of “Collision,” Heighton writes: “Kneeling next to a large doe as she lies dying beside a highway at two in the morning, after you’ve run into her with your car, is an experience most people would prefer to forget. I would prefer to forget it myself, but in my capacity as professional melancholic I’ve kept compulsively returning to the crash and its aftermath, trying for over a decade to make poetic sense of it.
“A number of tentative, groping first drafts went nowhere. Then, a few years ago, while reading Les Murray’s volume of selected poems Learning Human, I discovered his remarkable ‘The Cows on Killing Day.’ In this poem the author, son of a dairy farmer, attempts to render a bovine perspective on . . . well, the title says it vividly enough. Murray’s speculative ventriloquism led me to re-broach my own experience and try inverting the perspective from human to nonhuman. ‘Collision’ is the result.
“To some, the idea of writing seriously—as opposed to comically, mythically, allegorically, or in story-book fashion—from a nonhuman point of view might seem fatuous, if not slightly deranged. To me it seems a natural extension of the imaginative writer’s staple project: that of trying to inhabit with sympathy the solitude of another being.”
BRENDA HILLMAN is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Cascadia (2001) and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), which received the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and Practical Water (2009). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she is Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry.
Of “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump,” Hillman writes: “Poets and others can engage their powerful imaginations both in their writing and in direct action protests. These actions can be ceaselessly inventive, since authority knows how to respond to predictable behaviors, but the unpredictable cannot be tamed. Since the BP disaster, the oil companies have posted the largest profits in history. Not only must we cut our use of gas and find alternative energy, but surely we can also invent more anarchic protest actions against the destructive extraction of petroleum—actions that include discomfort and embarrassment outdoors. I decided it is a good form of street theater to moan audibly when pumping gas; tonally anarchic, the action is funny but includes tragedy and horror. I chose a prose-poem form because it conveys the feeling of an irreverent political tract. At the urging of Laura Mullen, I included some lines from a previous poem written after the first Gulf War, ‘Cheap Gas’ (from Loose Sugar, Wesleyan University Press, 1997), as well as a transcription of the vowel-moan itself.
“At the time I was writing and revising the poem, I was engaged with several poets—Nick Flynn, Dorianne Laux, Fred Marchant, Laura Mullen, and Patricia Smith—in a dialogue about the tragedy for the magazine Gulf Coast. The epigraph comes from a beautiful essay by Nicole Loraux from The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, in which she notes that open mourning was prohibited for a while in ancient Greece because it was regarded as threatening. Jonathan Skinner reprinted the piece in Interim as part of his eco-activism issue; he encouraged poets to visit their representatives to protest offshore drilling.”
JANE HIRSHFIELD was born in New York City in 1953 and has lived in Northern California since 1974. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). The Heart of Haiku (Amazon Kind
le Single, 2011) is an introduction to Basho¯ and haiku. Earlier books include After (HarperCollins, 2006) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001). She is the author of a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and four books collecting and co-translating the work of poets from the past. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy and given the third annual Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Poetry Award. This is her seventh appearance in The Best American Poetry.
Of “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed,” Hirshfield writes: “I am interested in wick and fuel. Jane Brox’s nonfiction book Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light holds a description of early torches as irresistible to my jackdaw muse as a list of the Chinese names for jade once gathered from a dentist office’s National Geographic or the painters’ term bonnarding, learned from a friend. Each of these windfall images was mentally pocketed, held for some certain but unknowable future poem.
“There are times when something noticed provokes writing at once. So it was when I walked into a kitchen unmistakably fragrant. The mushrooms were gone—found, cleaned, carried elsewhere by a friend. The friend was gone, too. But I knew with surety something about the invisible past, and this raised in me a happiness somewhere between that of a truffle pig and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.
“The poem started by this perception drew into itself the implausible sources for lamplight. Wild-found mushrooms are the opposite of torches: subterranean, secretive, damp. Shy of surface, their sense-realm is not the visual. Yet like any who traffic in the realms of existence and propagation, of eating and being eaten, they make themselves known—in this instance, by scent. I have long loved D. W. Winnicott’s description of childhood: ‘It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.’ This poem began in outer facts, events, and observation, but its doorknob is to be found in the third stanza.”
RICHARD HOWARD was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. He teaches in the writing division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and continues against all odds to translate works of literature from the French. The most recent of his fifteen books of poems, Without Saying, was published in 2008 by Turtle Point Press. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1995. “A Proposed Curriculum Change” will be published by Turtle Point Press in his forthcoming book, Progressive Education. “Arthur Englander’s Back in School,” an earlier poem in the sequence, appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009.
Of “A Proposed Curriculum Change,” Howard writes: “Progressive Education is a series of communications from the twelve members of the fifth-grade class of Park School in Sandusky, Ohio. In this case, the communication is a letter to the school principal, Mrs. Masters. The students at Park School, even or perhaps particularly those in the fifth-grade, are evidently proud of their vocabulary and their mastery of grown-up English.”
MARIE HOWE was born in Rochester, New York, in 1950. Her books of poetry are The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1997), and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2008). She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. She lives in New York City.
Of “Magdalene—The Seven Devils,” Howe writes: “It occurred to me, walking through the city one day, that Mary Magdalene, who has been so often depicted and characterized by men, was a woman bedeviled—and then a woman clarified, integrated. What might have been the seven devils she was said to have been possessed by? And then, what are the devils we are possessed by? Then the poem began to speak.”
AMORAK HUEY was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1969, and grew up outside Birmingham, Alabama. A decade ago he wound up back in Michigan, where he lives with his wife and two children. He spent fifteen years as a reporter and editor before leaving the newspaper business in 2008. He is now an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, teaching creative and professional writing. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, and he blogs at his website, www.amorakhuey.net.
Of “Memphis,” Huey writes: “I have been working on a collection of poems about blues music and musicians, about the South, about rivers. When I visited Memphis, all of those themes collided in one place. The whole place felt like a crossroads. The ghazal form seemed a great way to explore my fascination with this city. This poem is about longing, and temporariness, and being a tourist: the sense that we never entirely belong to any place or time. At least, I hope it’s about those things. And music. Always music.”
JENNY JOHNSON was born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1979. After earning a master of teaching degree from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in the Bay Area. She then earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Currently, she is a visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh.
Of “Aria,” Johnson writes: “As a record collector and a fan of all sorts of music, I love thinking about the relationships between sounds and bodies. One way to think about ‘Aria’ is as seven meditations on this theme. In the opening sections, I was thinking about the music that arises out of the body. I also thought about plural pronouns, the turn toward a ‘you,’ the use of ‘we’ to capture what theorist Ann Cvetkovich calls ‘public feelings.’ When I refer to ‘dance interludes’ in sections 6 and 7, I am interested in music’s ability to rattle bodies in public spaces, too. Specifically, I drew inspiration from Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, a book that opens with a personal experience of a Le Tigre concert, a space where Cvetkovich felt a vital queer and lesbian subculture had formed in response to trauma. Having seen this band live, I knew what she meant and tried to write into this sensation.
“I also decided while working on ‘Aria’ that metrically I did not want to prioritize unity over disjunction. Rather, what I was most interested in was playing with the sounds and restraints that emerge from a queer body, the sounds that emerge from a queer collective, a body or voice that has the potential to be unified by its disjunctions.”
LAWRENCE JOSEPH was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. He attended the University of Michigan, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of five books of poetry: Into It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Before Our Eyes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), Curriculum Vitae (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), and Shouting at No One (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He has also written Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), a book of prose, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan Press, 2011). He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, where he teaches courses on labor, employment, tort and compensation law, legal theory, jurisprudence, and law and interpretation. He has won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and has taught creative writing at Princeton University. Married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem, he lives in downtown Manhattan.
Joseph writes: “There’s a couplet in the opening poem of Wallace Stevens’s last book of poems, The Rock: ‘The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings, / Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.’ The whole of my work is my ‘whole peculiar plot.’ I see myself—as Stevens and as Eugenio Montale and Louis Zukofsky did—writing, plotting, one long poem.
“‘So Where Are We?’ is the title poem of my next book. My last book, Into It, contains poems, or parts of poems, which touch on the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. My reaction to the terrorist bombings has an intensely personal dimension. My wife and I live a block from Ground Zero. Shortly before the first plane hit on the morning of September 11, I left her to go to St. John’s University in Queens, where I teach. Nancy spent that night in our apartment. More than twenty-four hours went by before I saw her ag
ain. We were evacuated from our apartment for over two months.
“Before I write a poem, I usually try to imagine the form or shape it will take. I feel the form or shape visually (‘conversation as design’ was one of William Carlos Williams’s definitions of poetry). Then, in effect, I load the shape or form with parts of the entire world of my subjects—with my ‘whole peculiar plot.’ I imagined ‘So Where Are We?’ in couplets. I also envisaged it as the second part of a diptych, the first part being ‘Unyieldingly Present,’ a poem in couplets in Into It written as a compressed, collective portrayal of the terrorist attacks.”
FADY JOUDAH was born in Austin, Texas, in 1971. Married with two kids, he is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston, Texas. The Earth in the Attic, his first poetry collection, was selected by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2008. His two translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry (from Copper Canyon in 2007 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010) received a TLS/Banipal prize from the United Kingdom and a PEN USA award for translation, respectively. His second book, Alight, is due from Copper Canyon Press in 2013. And his most recent translation of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, is available this year from Yale University Press.
Of “Tenor,” Joudah writes: “In George Oppen’s ‘Semite’ these lines always haunt me: ‘Think // think also of the children / the guards laughing // the one pride the pride / of the warrior laughing so the hangman / comes to all dinners.’ To say that I had the children of Gaza in mind when I wrote ‘Tenor’ would be as accurate as saying Oppen had only one child in mind in his poem. War not only kills children, any children, but also destroys childhood, all childhood.”
