The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

  NIN ANDREWS was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1958. She is the editor of a book of translations of the French poet Henri Michaux, Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press). She is also the author of several books, including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, The Secret Life of Mannequins, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? Her newest full-length collection, Southern Comfort, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2009.

  Of “The Art of Drinking Tea,” Andrews writes: “I have long been fascinated and entertained by the idea of enlightenment. I think my first exposure to the concept was Ram Dass’s purple book, Be Here Now, which I bought for the symbolic price of $3.33 back in 1971. My brother liked to read it aloud and laugh hysterically. For months he would shout out to me: Nin! Be here now!

  “If only I could not be here, I would think.

  “A few years later I attended Zen meditation classes in the frigid upstairs of a frat house. All we do is breathe here, the bearded college professor would say. No thoughts, just breaths. I would sit on the hard wooden floor and stare at a white wall, thinking, This is the dumbest thing I have ever done. But I loved it all the same.

  “I especially loved it when the meditation instructor would talk about Zen koans and mix them up with quotes from philosophers such as Heidegger’s Being is what determines beings as beings. Or Hegel’s Pure being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. Or Thich Nhat Hanh, Your being is like the tangerine.

  “I loved then as I love now the combination of the mystical and the absurd.

  “One night the Zen teacher lectured on the Japanese tea ceremony. He explained that the simple act of drinking tea can be transformative. While I remember nothing about the details of the tea ceremony, I remember everything about an attractive, long-haired man who was seated beside me. As the teacher discussed the drinking of tea, I fantasized about the long-haired man.

  “In my notes from that night I wrote: You might be only a sip or kiss away from nirvana.

  “It is that memory which inspired me to write ‘The Art of Drinking Tea.’ ”

  JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, and lived there for much of the next decade. His many collections of poetry include Quick Question (2012), Planisphere (2009), and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. He has translated a number of French authors, including Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, and Pierre Martory. Ashbery has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek; he exhibits his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He taught for many years at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Bard College, and in 1989–1990 delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (receiving its Gold Medal for Poetry in 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990; most recently, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2011) and a National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama at the White House (2012). His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He was the guest editor of the inaugural volume in The Best American Poetry series. He lives in New York. Additional information is available in the “About John Ashbery” section of the Ashbery Resource Center’s website, a project of the Flow Chart Foundation, www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc.

  WENDY BARKER was born in 1942 in Summit, New Jersey, and grew up in Arizona. She moved to Berkeley, California, in 1968, teaching ninth graders at Berkeley High School’s West Campus. In 1981 she received her PhD from U.C. Davis, where she studied with Sandra M. Gilbert and with Ruth Stone. Since 1982, she has taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she is poet-in-residence and the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Professor of Creative Writing. Her collections of poetry include a novel in prose poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years (Del Sol Press, 2009), Poems from Paradise (WordTech, 2005), Way of Whiteness (Wings Press, 2000), Let the Ice Speak (Ithaca House, 1991), and Winter Chickens and Other Poems (Corona Publishing, 1990). She has also published a selection of poems accompanied by autobiographical essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002). Her translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) from the Bengali of India’s Nobel Prize–winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (George Braziller, 2001), received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987) as well as coeditor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). She is poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online literary journal for women over sixty. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. She is married to the critic and biographer Steven G. Kellman.

  Of “Books, Bath Towels, and Beyond,” Barker writes: “I was working on a collection of poems about texts and teaching and wanted to write about a student’s hostile question in an American Lit class (sometime in the ’80s): ‘Are we ever going to read any normal people in this class?’ Then in 2009, when Steve and I were settling back into our recently remodeled house (built in the early ’50s and in desperate need of repair), I was somewhat embarrassed that, while I had long railed against our country’s conspicuous consumption, I became obsessed with buying new towels. Usually I abhor shopping, but here I was, traipsing from strip mall to strip mall, bringing home sample washcloths to try their colors against our new glimmering tiles. Had I become too ‘normal’? But then, returning to one of my nagging questions about Whitman’s Song of Myself (why does that ‘loving bedfellow’ leave ‘baskets covered with white towels’?), I came to a new appreciation of the poem, and also of my own life. Steve and I had wanted to clean out old, no-longer-needed items—we gave away twenty huge bags of ‘stuff.’ We were starting anew in many ways when moving back to our new/old house. But can we ever start ‘clean,’ without the baggage from the past weighing us down? That’s the old Hawthornean question the poem addresses, ultimately deciding that Whitman was onto something—even ordinary, fresh white towels might help.”

  JAN BEATTY was born in Pittsburgh in 1952. She is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Switching/Yard (2013), Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her limited-edition chapbooks include Ravage (Lefty Blondie Press, 2012) and Ravenous, winner of the 1995 State Street Prize. For the past twenty years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on the NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She has worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum-security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. She is a professor of English at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, where she directs the creative writing program, runs the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops, and teaches in the MFA program.

  Of “Youngest Known Savior,” Beatty writes: “I wanted to write about the extreme alienation of the adopted child, how she obsessively studies the physicality and the movement of her ‘relatives.’ The poem moves the reader to a point of anger and violence. What would it take for this child to imagine this? What would it take for you, the reader, to imagine this? She has a different path to socialization, as she has no grounding, no name or allegiance from which to work. I wanted to call into question the cultural myth of the lucky ‘
chosen baby,’ as I show her solving a problem alone. At what point does she cross the cultural lines of problem solving into pathology?”

  BRUCE BOND was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954. He is the author of nine published books of poetry—Choir of the Wells: A Tetralogy (Etruscan Press, 2013), The Visible (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), Blind Rain (LSU, 2008), Cinder (Etruscan, 2003), The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), Radiography (BOA Editions, 1997), The Anteroom of Paradise (QRL, 1991), Independence Days (Woodley Press, 1990)—and four chapbooks. His tenth book, The Other Sky (poems in collaboration with the painter Aron Wiesenfeld, with an introduction by Stephen Dunn), is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in 2014. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from the NEA, 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 of American Literary Review.

  Of “The Unfinished Slave,” Bond writes: “I have seen the unfinished slave sculptures by Michelangelo only once, as a kid in Florence on my way to the much renowned masterworks at the end of the hall. There, in the bad lighting of the corridor, it was the slave sculptures that haunted me the most, those figures trapped in the rough stone, effaced by it, forever caught in the storm of it. Perhaps it was the power of the faceless, the unresolved, the partially obscure, that drew me to these figures. Or was it the fear of being buried alive, high on my list of nightmares? Maybe I felt a little faceless myself, and still do. Perhaps it was the fascination with stillness as an ongoing process, death as horribly alive, the slaves as some mythic braid of opposites no logic could unravel. I suppose it was all those things, and so, when I learned how the slaves never made it to their destination as guardians of a patron’s grave, I wanted to say to them, oh, I know how you feel. I know how it is to never quite get there. Out of the human forehead comes this thing, this prow of anxiety and joy we call the future, and it pulls and pulls at the stone behind it, the skull, the anchor, and the heart quickens a little, chipping away at the life it makes. Given time, who would not feel ambivalent about dusting off their hands for good? Which is worse, the horror of incompletion or of completion, of being faceless or being locked to a face that never changes? My heart goes out to the slaves. Let David be awesome with his glass complexion and enormous hands. Let him be desired. I love him. I envy him a little. But my heart breaks for the slaves. It fears them, pities them, sinks into them. And when the lights go out in the long hall, it sinks a little deeper.”

  TRACI BRIMHALL was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1982. She has lived in ten cities in seven states and currently resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University. She is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton, 2012) and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). She has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Of “Dear Thanatos,” Brimhall writes: “At the time I wrote this poem, I’d finished my second book and I was having withdrawal from it. The only thing that helped me write was addressing poems to Thanatos, who was the personification of death for the Greeks and later came to stand for the human death drive. There’s something about the immediate intimacy of an epistle that has hooked me into poems when I felt stuck. Writing to the self-destructive urge appeals to me, because I’m attracted to what I fear. At the heart of my fears I often find rage, awe, powerlessness, or even desire.

  “As much as this poem is about risk, intimacy, and death, it’s also about play. Much of what drove the poem was rhyme. I wanted to see where associative rhyming could take me. And so this poem about the death urge is also about delight. It’s a nursery rhyme or a lullaby about the frustrations of obeying a power inside yourself that gives orders instead of answers.”

  JERICHO BROWN was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and once worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. He has received the Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. He is an assistant professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Ploughshares, Tin House, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award.

  Brown writes: “Since sound comes first for me, I thought more about the music of ‘Hustle’ than about its subject matter while I was writing it. The poem is now part of a longer series that explores and exploits mascon images (see Stephen Henderson’s ‘Understanding the New Black Poetry’). ‘Hustle’ is in the form of a ghazal, because I am a poet, which is to say I have an obsessive relationship with form. . . . I was taken by the idea of writing couplets, each standing alone yet depending upon one another for a larger poem tied by accumulation, rhyme, and a repeated word. (I know ‘word’ is the right word, but I really want to type ‘chorus.’) A word by which my family, friends, and I are wracked is ‘prison,’ which is the antithesis of a word like ‘freedom,’ which may be a synonym or antonym for a word like ‘America’ depending on your identity, your heritage, and your history.”

  ANDREI CODRESCU, author of “Five One-Minute Eggs,” writes: “The egg is the perfect food and one minute is the perfect time to cook it. Anything that has less nourishment or takes longer is dated, and should be discarded. My egg was fertilized in Transylvania in 1946, and I’m still in my cooking minute, as can be seen from my new books, Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes) (2013) and So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems (2012). If I’m ever done it will be the work of my enemies, and the reason will be xenophobia. I used to be a professor, so I’m quite sure that I just said what I did.”

  BILLY COLLINS was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–2013 (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011), Ballistics (Random House, 2008), The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006), Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001), Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Questions About Angels (William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003) and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House, 2005). He is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York) and a senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College. A frequent contributor to and former guest editor of The Best American Poetry (2006), he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He edited Bright Wings: An Anthology of Poems about Birds, illustrated by David Allen Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010).

  Collins writes: “Looking back at a poem I wrote with an eye to providing a comment usually brings to my mind lots of things that did not occur to me when I wrote it. ‘Foundling,’ now that I think about it, seems to be another iteration of the self-consciousness I have felt about being a poet, starting as early as high school. My nebulous but steadfast desire to write poems has always been accompanied by an uneasiness about the whole business. One cause must be the implied loftiness of the title, an unspoken claim to a high ground far above the level of prose, though my only strategy for handling this is to insist publicly on the superiority of poetry to the lesser forms of writing. (I fin
d myself skeptical of people whose ‘business’ cards feature the word ‘poet.’) Or is it the sheer egotism of the genre, which begins for me with Wordsworth’s excitement over those daffodils, that calls for the leaven of irony and self-deprecation? Surely the yawning gulf between how seriously we poets take ourselves and the relative indifference of the public toward what we do must be given some credit for this feeling of oddity about always ‘jotting down little things.’ (By the way, is anyone who is not a poet reading this?) So much for the self-examination of the poem’s opening. It’s not as easy to account for the imagined memory of the beginnings of all this fidgety creativity that follows, nor would I want to. The image of the baby and the snowflake could have its source in any number of black-and-white movies and Victorian novels. A ‘snowflake like any other’ might have better conveyed the little one’s ignorance of snowflake science, but let’s call that a fielder’s choice. And the final image of abandonment may be useful in answering that recurring question: ‘When did you start writing poems?’ ‘As an orphan,’ he answered wistfully.”

  MARTHA COLLINS was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1940 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. She is the author of White Papers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf Press, 2006); she has also published four earlier collections of poems and two collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of creative writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Of “[white paper 24],” Collins writes: “While I was writing Blue Front, which focused on a lynching my father witnessed as a child, I was thinking about how that experience might have affected him. But the more I wrote, the more I began to consider what this had to do with me, a white woman living one hundred years later. Shortly after the book was published, the term ‘white papers’ came into my consciousness and led me to begin what ultimately became a book of numbered but untitled poems that deal with race, addressing particularly the question of what it means to be ‘white’ in a multiracial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past. ‘[white paper 24]’ appears about halfway through the book, but was in fact one of the last I wrote. A number of the poems are personal, focusing particularly on my very white childhood; others, like 24, made use of historical information—much of it gleaned, in this case, rather accidentally, before I had even thought about writing the poem.”