by David Lehman
As a graduate student living in New York City, I flirted with the idea of working in advertising. I freelanced as a low-level assistant for a marketing research group that was conducting focus groups for teeth-whitening products. (This was the mid-1980s, a decade and a half before Crest Whitestrips.) My job was to collect the responses of people who were questioned about the brightness of their smiles. In the first group of interviewees, no one cared so much about the color of their enamel; the people in the second group, who were given dime-sized bright white plastic discs to hold against their own front teeth, were a bit concerned and started doubting that their smiles were up to par; the people in the third group, who were given that same bright white disc and shown a film about the psychological power of celebrity teeth, all said that they would indeed buy a tray with bleaching gel and dutifully put it into their mouths if they could afford to do so. And how could they not? I worked on a similar campaign to sell running shoes (which the first focus group found terribly ugly) to women who would soon be wearing them, carrying their heels in a bag to work. The running shoes didn’t change to fit the desires of women—the focus group questions changed to fit the fears of the women who would eventually buy the sneakers. How could they run if an attacker came after them? Weren’t they wearing out their expensive pumps on unforgiving, cracked pavements? What about mud and puddles?
Though I gave up on advertising myself, poets, as concise image makers, are well suited for the job, so I wasn’t surprised that Matthew Dickman was listed as cocopywriter of a Chrysler commercial that aired during the 2012 Super Bowl. Clint Eastwood delivered the script of the two-minute-long commercial as if he were reading a poem, saying, “It’s halftime in America, too.” The ad inspired in me the same fascination I felt with advertising as a child, not quite connecting the slogan to the product. For example, I took delight in the Doublemint twins, though I had never tasted the gum. I was mesmerized by the Marlboro Man, though I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I enjoyed the cartoon-come-alive quality of the Weinermobile, though I didn’t like hot dogs. I heard verse in Miss Clairol’s “Does she or doesn’t she?” echoing “To be or not to be.” Image and wordplay had captured my attention and, without the means to buy things, I was content consuming the ads themselves. In his prose poem “The Moon,” translated by J. R. Hays, Juan Ramón Jiménez asks, “Is it the moon or just an advertisement for the moon?” I find in this question an excellent attempt to capture the essence of true poetry, a form that promotes images that are not for sale.
Merriam-Webster.com announced that “socialism” and “capitalism” were the two words most often searched in 2012. John M. Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster, said, “It’s clear that many people turned to the dictionary to help make sense of the commentary that often surrounds these words.” While a great poem is timeless, the poems collected here also say something about the times in which we live. Many, in fact, take on the perplexing realities of capitalistic contemporary America and its effects on literary diction. In Major Jackson’s “Why I Write Poetry,” the speaker offers a compelling list of reasons, this among them:
Because I wish I could speak three different languages but have to settle for the language of business and commerce.
Other images that take into account commoditization include Seshadri’s “knockoff smart phone” and what I take to be Lasky’s imaginary sexts to Anne Sexton; Kirby’s “so-called / organic vegetables” and Shippy’s “Cheetos dust”; Anderson’s Mariners and Madrid’s Hoosiers; Barker’s “MasterCard” and Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s TV commercial, “Do you need a loan fast?”; Hennessy’s “yoga pants” and pharmaceuticals; Rosser’s “distressed denim,” Koethe’s “Diesel jeans,” and Smith’s “Diesel ads.” Andrei Codrescu’s “Five One-Minute Eggs” imagines a broker who reassembles his own body into an androgynous “herm” who “franchised copper on mars and sold / the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus.” Addonizio’s speaker watches “DVDs that dropped / from the DVD tree.”
All contemporary poets know that visual media is the dominant art form in our culture whereas poetry remains what Muriel Rukeyser called “the outcast art.” Yet poetry and film are both “dream factories,” places of intense magic. Frank O’Hara famously rooted for the power of cinema in “Ave Maria”:
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images. . . .
O’Hara’s poetic progeny are represented in these pages with poems directly in dialogue with the moving image. You’d be mistaken if you think they watch passively. A. Van Jordan’s “Blazing Saddles” is a bristling, brilliant look at the 1974 comedy, in the terminology of contemporary identity politics: “You see, what’s so funny about racists, / is that they never get the joke, because / the joke always carries a bit of truth.” A leading lady haunts Anna Journey’s “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned.” The newly married speaker’s exuberance is tempered by “lingering // shapes the coroner found—the drowned / actress’s scratch marks” on a dinghy. David Trinidad’s “from Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, Season Two, 1965–1966” encapsulates episodes 139–158 into seventeen syllables each. The sublime splash of Bashō’s frog is transformed into hilarious cliffhangers such as “Oh goody, Stella’s / lies are beginning to catch / up with her. Squirm, bitch!”
The “dream factories” of poetry and the moving image seldom meet, but in 2012, there were two significant examples of successful pairings. On the NBC show Smash, William Butler Yeats’s “Never Give All the Heart” was appropriated for a moving ballad (lyrics by Marc Shaiman, music by Scott Wittman) of the same name. An episode of the fifth season of Mad Men took its title from Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.” But more often than not, it is impossible for a poet to “sell out.” This is not because she is morally superior to her fiction and nonfiction counterparts. It’s just that not many poets have had their poems optioned for movies or TV shows. “Poetry cleanses” precisely because it is so far away from corporate power.
While I am cheering on the earnest and sincere, I am well aware that these qualities alone do not make good poetry. Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” David Lehman remembers Harold Bloom taking Wilde to heart in his introduction to The Best of the Best American Poetry, published in 1998 on the occasion of the series’ tenth anniversary. Indeed, there is a nakedness and humiliation in a flopped sincere poem—perhaps this is the most embarrassing verse of all. My friend John Dufresne says that there is no poem bad enough that it can’t be published somewhere. The amount of amateurish poetry represented in magazines—especially online—can be discouraging. Readers new to contemporary poetry might be overwhelmed. I have had undergraduates try to one-up me after a workshop, saying something along the lines of, “Well, just so you know, the poem you ripped apart was published!” Of course, with a tiny bit of prodding, I find out that the poem appeared in a slipshod journal or site, or worse, a vanity press. This kind of publishing is a disservice to young writers—the reward of being published in a substandard way is no reward. It is not that bad poetry hurts anyone, but it does fool a writer into thinking she is better than she really is and, more important, makes it more difficult for the serious reader to find quality.
I contend that Bloom called for a too narrowly defined excellence, referring to himself as “Bloom Brontosaurus.” Much has been written about his controversial introduction and comments on the volume Adrienne Rich guest edited in 1996. I don’t have much to add here that hasn’t already been said, except that, as the 2013 guest editor, I feel I have been the beneficiary of those controversial editions and cantankerous responses. In the past fifteen years, the United States has seen a true shift—few of us
in 1996 or 1998 would have predicted a United States president of color or that Hillary Clinton would become secretary of state for Obama’s first term. This edition represents excellence and inclusivity, neither at the expense of the other.
While the selection grew organically, I do wish to note that some of my favorite poets are not included as they had very few or no published poems in 2012. And, as he is the series editor, David Lehman has, since 1989, ruled his own poems ineligible. (I initially met David’s work not through this series but through his poetry book Operation Memory.) If his poems were available to me, I would have chosen “Any Place I Hang My Hat,” published in The Atlantic, and I encourage readers to seek it out. Two poets, Adrienne Rich and Paul Violi, are published posthumously. Forty other poets have graced these pages before; some are writing at the height of their powers. Thirty-four poets, many whose work is completely new to me, have not been included in previous editions of The Best American Poetry. I know firsthand the excitement of being in this anthology and remember the initial times my work appeared in its pages. My poem “Feminism” was chosen by Louise Glück in 1993, and “Bulimia” by A. R. Ammons the next year. I am grateful to those guest editors who chose an unknown poet’s work that was decidedly female in its subject matter. At the time I had tacked above my desk Muriel Rukeyser’s quote, “What if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would break open.” I believe the world has indeed cracked open, more than a little, and I am pleased to include some women who, to cite Rukeyser again, “breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”
Amy Gerstler’s “Womanishness” confronts the “shrill frilly silly / drippy prissy pouty fuss of us.” Rebecca Hazelton’s “Book of Forget” introduces her readers to someone who dances for “men in the audience, their hands hidden” and tries to leave behind a time when she believed “the world is full of women who can halve themselves. / My talent is in looking like someone you want / when the lights are on and like anyone who’ll do when they’re off.” In “This Need Not Be a Comment on Death,” Daisy Fried’s speaker is a mother who has taught her young daughter “Happy tears!” and, inadvertently, “I’m stoic!” This poem of domestic space takes the shape of a refrigerator, quoting Camille Paglia writing about William Carlos Williams’s “icebox.” In “Divestiture,” Connie Deanovich offers couplets about an uncoupling:
yesterday I devirginized
my own story
stuck my fingers in and out of my own future
until I broke its promise
“Lake Sonnet” by Anne Marie Rooney is full of female vulnerability held tight by its form. The poem begins, “It was July. It was my birthday. I / was still drinking then. I went with the men . . .” The lake, like the sonnet itself, is a container in which events unfold.
The natural world plays a significant role in several of these poems. The meticulous rhyming of Richard Wilbur’s “Sugar Maples, January” and the lush elegance of Emma Trelles’s “Florida Poem” are both examples of stellar metaphor-making and the power of each author, as Samuel Johnson wrote, to make “familiar things new.” Jesse Millner’s “In Praise of Small Gods” is comprehensive in its tribute, encompassing even the mosquitoes that “buzz like tiny angels.” In Noelle Kocot’s “Aphids,” nature becomes a true companion and guide: “I // Don’t know where I’m headed, but the star-lit trees / Above my path never go out. They sing songs to me. . . .” The fragility of the environment is evident in Campbell McGrath’s prose poem “January 17,” part ode and part elegy to a strawberry field in peril because of a “a tidal wave of human habitation, a monocultural bumper crop.” Stephanie Strickland’s “Introductions” contrasts the urban “ruinful ruinous ruin us Noo Yawk” with the persistence of flowers:
garnets grenadine black currant eyes in a twirl
Upon twirl of lace Queen Anne’s in a meadow o
Of course not a meadow
Some back lot some abandoned weed field
Walt Whitman knew that in order to have great poets we need to have great audiences. The readership of The Best American Poetry series is that audience. It is my hope that you will find America here. In Salt, the Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace writes that “if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace.” It is my belief that the poems gathered here contain grace.
It goes without saying that I took this guest editorship seriously, but I also chose these poems knowing that there would be guest editors after me who might have an entirely different take. One of the wonderful bonuses of this work is to know that the poems in this anthology will be in dialogue with past and future editions. I’m reminded of Wisława Szymborska again, who ends her poem “Love at First Sight” with the lines
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
I wish to thank Florida International University’s MFA program, the English department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and Matt Balmaseda, my student assistant, who spent much of his time at a Xerox machine copying many more poems than you will find here. The Best American Poetry 2013 easily could have been twice this size. Its fraternal twin is out there in the mind or files of a hypothetical editor. Like guest editors before me, I asked David Lehman if there was any chance of including more than seventy-five poems. Of course, I understood he had to stick to the rules. But as Robert Frost reminds us, the extra poem in the book should be the book itself. I present you this book of poems—which is one supersized American poem. Yours, sincerely.
KIM ADDONIZIO
Divine
Oh hell, here’s that dark wood again.
You thought you’d gotten through it—
middle of your life, the ogre turned into a mouse
and heart-stopped, the old hag almost done,
monsters hammered down
into their caves, werewolves outrun.
You’d come out of all that, into a field.
There was one man standing in it.
He held out his arms.
Ping went your iHeart
so you took off all your clothes.
Now there were two of you,
or maybe one, mashed back together
like sandwich halves,
oozing mayonnaise.
You lived on grapes and antidepressants
and the occasional small marinated mammal.
You watched the DVDs that dropped
from the DVD tree. Nothing
was forbidden you, so no worries there.
It rained a lot.
You planted some tomatoes.
Something bad had to happen
because no trouble, no story, so
Fuck you, fine, whatever,
here come more black trees
hung with sleeping bats
like ugly Christmas ornaments.
Don’t you hate the holidays?
All that giving. All those wind-up
crèches, those fake silver icicles.
If you had a real one you could stab
your undead love through its big
cursed heart. Instead you have a silver noodle
with which you must flay yourself.
Denial of pleasure,
death before death,
alone in the woods with a few bats
unfolding their creaky wings.
from Fifth Wednesday Journal
SHERMAN ALEXIE
Pachyderm
1. Sheldon decided he was an elephant.
2. Everywhere he went, he wore a gray T-shirt, gray sweat pants, and gray basketball shoes.
3. He also carried a brass trumpet that he’d painted white.
4. Sometimes he used that trumpet as a tusk.
5. Then he’d use it as the other tusk.
6. Sometimes he played that brass trumpet and pretended it was an elephant trumpet.
7. Every other day, Sheldon charged around the reservation like h
e was a bull elephant in musth.
8. Musth being a state of epic sexual arousal.
9. Sheldon would stand in the middle of intersections and charge at cars.
10. Once, Sheldon head-butted a Toyota Camry so hard that he knocked himself out.
11. Sheldon’s mother, Agnes, was driving that Camry.
12. Agnes did not believe she was an elephant nor did she believe she was the mother of an elephant.
13. And Agnes didn’t believe that Sheldon fully believed he was an elephant until he knocked himself out on the hood of the Camry.
14. In Africa, poachers kill elephants, saw off the tusks, and leave the rest of the elephant to rot.
15. Ivory is coveted.
16. Nobody covets Sheldon’s trumpet, not as a trumpet or tusk.
17. On those days when Sheldon was not a bull elephant, he was a cow elephant.
18. A cow elephant mourning the death of her baby.
19. In Africa, elephants will return again and again to the dead body of a beloved elephant.
20. Then, for years afterward, the mournful elephants will return to the dead elephant’s cairn of bones.
21. They will lift and caress the dead elephant’s ribs.
22. By touch, they remember.
23. Sheldon’s twin brother died in the first Iraq War.
24. 1991.
