by David Lehman
DAVID HERNANDEZ was born in Burbank, California, in 1971. His collections include Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), Always Danger (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). A recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship in poetry, he teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and University of California, Irvine.
Of “All-American,” Hernandez writes: “Around the time that I had written this poem, I was reading and rereading Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room.’ I was, for some reason or other, enthralled with the poem. I even went so far as to obtain a copy of the National Geographic (my only eBay purchase) that the poem references. It’s that transcendent moment, the near-evaporation of the speaker’s identity that mesmerized me: ‘you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them. / Why should you be one, too?’ With ‘All-American,’ I was aiming for a full-evaporation of the speaker—a collective ‘we’ who is a citizen of this country—which allowed me the freedom to say things that I vehemently oppose and wholeheartedly support, oftentimes in the same breath.
“This poem owes a debt to the sprawling landscape of Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West, as well as the population list of American cities that I found online. There are numerous cities and towns that sound like flowers, several that didn’t make it into the final cut of the poem. O, Abilene, you were so close!”
TONY HOAGLAND was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1953. After teaching in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, New Mexico, and Maine, he moved to Houston in 2002 to teach in the University of Houston graduate writing program. His work has received the Mark Twain Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. His most recent books of poems are What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Gray-wolf, 2010). He is interested in theater and has started Five Powers Poetry, a program for coaching high school teachers in the teaching of poetry in the classroom.
Of “Wrong Question,” Hoagland writes: “Certainly I believe that innumerable poems are hiding, concealed, camouflaged, in our daily lives and conversation, and I suppose this poem would be an example of those poetry-mayflies that swarm right at the surface. ‘Look at your hand,’ said the poet. ‘These are the kinds of facts / that habit leaves in the dark.’ Long tendrils of neurosis lead down into the not-so-dark of the subterranean human core. It’s so ordinary and so humorous. It is paradoxical that most of what passes for consciousness is repetitious trash and garbage, but that the very garbage surrounding us in social life is rich with ore. I imagine most people recognize that being asked the question ‘Are you all right?’ is both a gracious gesture on the part of the asker, and an opportunity for endless self-indulgence. So often when being asked that question (and I seem to invite it), I feel troubled by the implications (that I seem to invite it).
“Of course, as everyone knows, in writing it is important to keep leaning on a poem until it gives up its last secret, the one drop of whale oil at its core. In this case, that drop is clearly in the last handful of lines. That is what pays the poem’s rent, by which I mean the rent of a reader’s attention. I used to feel (and I still do) that if the poem hasn’t cost the writer something real—if the poem has not broken up a little of the ego-crust, has not hurt a little in the making—it is probably not a real poem. This is an arguable contention, of course—there are many kinds of poems—but I like poems on which the blood is wet.”
ANNA MARIA HONG was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1966. The 2010–2011 Bunting Fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University and an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American, an anthology of fiction and memoir published by William Morrow and Avon Books (1994). She has had residencies at A Room of Her Own Foundation, Yaddo, Djerassi, Fundación Valparaíso, and Kunstnarhuset Messen. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington and Eastern Michigan University and currently teaches poetry writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
Hong writes: “I wrote ‘A Parable’ toward the end of a seven-year run of writing sonnets, which culminated in my recently completed collection The Glass Age: Sonnets. Not a sonnet, the poem wanted to be longer, more narrative than lyric, and in tercets. When I drafted it, I was working with overrhyming—using excessive internal rhyme to deliberately torque the sonnet, giving the form more of what it demands—and that technique manifests in this poem, too.
“ ‘A Parable’ conveys an overt moral, assimilating the patterns of fairy tales and myths, which I had been working with throughout The Glass Age. I had also been thinking and writing about the relations between personal greed and societal failure and how easily even those with the most sensitive proclivities can be conscripted by a little bullying, assorted threats, and blandishments.”
MAJOR JACKSON is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010) and Hoops (2006), both from W. W. Norton, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the poetry editor of Harvard Review.
Major Jackson offers this “Why I Write Poetry” statement:
Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this
mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to
writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries
and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through
the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to
stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The
kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and
reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative
pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest
pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike
that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being
startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up
here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an
orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some
firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change
it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me
here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my
gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and
interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the
mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.
MARK JARMAN was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, in 1952. He is the author of ten books of poetry: North Sea (Cleveland State University Press, 1978), The Rote Walker, Far and Away (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1981, 1985), The Black Riviera (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), the book-length narrative poem Iris, Questions for Ecclesiastes, Unholy Sonnets (published by Story Line Press in 1992, 1997, and 2000, respectively), To the Green Man, Epistles, and Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2004, 2007, and 2011). He has published two books of essays and reviews: The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001) and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series, 2002). With Robert McDowell, he wrote
The Reaper Essays (Story Line Press, 1996), a collection of essays that initially appeared in their magazine The Reaper during the 1980s. With David Mason, he edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press, 1996). Jarman has received a Joseph Henry Jackson Award, the Poets’ Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He is an elector of the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City and Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Of “George W. Bush,” Jarman writes: “Some years after he left office, George W. Bush appeared on a Fox News feature that covered a mountain bike trek he was taking in Texas with veterans of the war in Iraq. At one point the Fox journalist asked him if, considering that some of the men he was riding with had suffered dire injuries in the war, he felt any responsibility for what had happened to them. He had been their commander in chief, after all, and had ordered them into battle. It was odd to hear him say that he did not feel responsible for what had happened to his soldiers in combat, since they had all volunteered for duty, but his response, ‘I bear no guilt,’ struck me as particularly strange for a number of reasons, which the poem tries to investigate. ‘George W. Bush’ is part of a series I am writing about people who, if asked, would say they were Christians.”
LAUREN JENSEN was born in Cadillac, Michigan, in 1982. A graduate of the Virginia Tech MFA program, she lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she manages a local bistro and serves as assistant editor to the online literary journal Toad.
Of “it’s hard as so much is,” Jensen writes: “You can’t teach a fish to fly, but some take flight, gliding up to 200 meters before reaching the surface again. I begin again in that you can’t teach a fish to fly as much as I haven’t been able to teach my heart to send postcards or a carrier pigeon or pretty much anything polished to the page. Everything a red balloon floating between point Alpha Bravo Echo Mike. Everything in that I wake up and write and some days my words find the end and most days they don’t. Most days I meander until it’s time to run and the poetry continues here along the river until I’m home again or just too tired to care. I care a lot about a lot to be specific. I remember writing this poem and liking this poem, which is the most I can ask for on any given day.”
A. VAN JORDAN was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1965. He is the author of four collections: Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001) and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), Quantum Lyrics (2007), and The Cineaste (2013), all from W. W. Norton. He has been awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a United States Artists Williams Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Michigan.
Of “Blazing Saddles,” Jordan writes: “Beyond the jokes, while I wrote this poem, I considered both the issues central to the story and the voices of the characters in the film. It would be easy to call Mel Brooks a genius based on his comedic writing alone, but it would also be a disservice to the scope of his work. Brooks delves into social politics like no other American filmmaker, whether that filmmaker is primarily dramatic or comedic in approach. This film—like Brooks’s version of To Be or Not to Be, which he wrote, produced, and acted in, and which, in my opinion, holds up better over time than Lubitsch’s original—not only handles the politics of race in the mid-’70s but it also tackles the politics of sexual orientation. These are two tough subjects for people to talk about; that he is able to make us think about them and to laugh through the thinking is, yes, genius.”
LAWRENCE JOSEPH was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948, and was educated at the University of Michigan (BA in English), at Cambridge University (MA in English), 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 (FSG, 2005), Before Our Eyes (FSG, 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 is also the author of Lawyerland, a book of prose, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1997, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, published by the University of Michigan Press in its Poets on Poetry series in 2011. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, where he teaches courses on labor, employment, and tort and compensation law, legal theory, and law and interpretation. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. Married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem, he lives in downtown Manhattan.
Joseph writes: “ ‘Syria’ bears witness to certain language that we often hear, read, speak, and think about. The way in which the poem’s language is composed reveals its moral values—to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, it’s that kind of language. The poem begins and ends with ellipses to convey the chronic flow of the realities that the poem expresses. Metaphorically, ‘Syria’ could be any place—in the poem’s opening words—‘when, then, the imagination is transmogrified / into circles of hatred, circles of vengeance / and killing, of stealing and deceit. . . .’
“There is another dimension to the poem. My grandparents, Lebanese and Syrian Catholics, emigrated to the United States a century ago (Lebanon was then still a part of Ottoman Syria). My parents were born in Detroit; they, and their brothers and sisters, married Lebanese and Syrian Catholics. My Lebanese and Syrian heritage has been a subject of my poetry from the start. Within the context of my work, ‘Syria’ also contains a particular personal meaning.”
Born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1980, ANNA JOURNEY is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She has received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Of “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned,” Journey writes: “Putting a drowning actress who claws the side of a boat in a poem meant to be a tender epithalamium may seem like a strange move, especially if you dedicate the piece to the man you married just a few weeks ago on a seaside cliff. Let me explain: I’d hoped to present my husband with a poem written in honor of our elopement ceremony in Catalina: that rocky, picturesque island, in the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Los Angeles. I decided to invent a scenario in which the newlyweds in the poem sit on their hotel balcony and share a bite to eat. I began typing the title, grounding the couple in the place and dramatic context: ‘Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean . . .’ I paused. I typed the rest of it: ‘. . . in Which Natalie Wood Drowned.’ So much for a warm and fuzzy epithalamium!
“Perhaps because of all the summer salads I’d been making that June, I’d been thinking about using an heirloom tomato in a poem as a way to structure time and braid two different narrative strands in an elliptical lyric. I liked knowing the lumpy, pastel tomatoes I toted home from Whole Foods originated from a seed that stretched back decades. I decided that, in my poem, I’d evoke a sort of grotesque spiral in which swirl both the newlywed couple and the drowning actress, Natalie Wood, who died when she fell off her yacht anchored in the waves off Catalina, in 1981. I liked the notion that the speaker and her husband, through swallowing the tomato, could link the present moment with the cinematic instant of Wood’s death. As they bite into their tomato, they imagine Wood clawing the side of a rubber dinghy, the pleats in the side of the fruit beginning to resemble the scratch marks on the side of a boat. The two worlds become linked by the weird specterly generations of an heirloom tomato’s DNA. And even though the poem is unabashedly dark, I like to think that it’s still an epithalamium, that it honors the bride and bridegroom through its explorat
ion of time and what links us to the past—in all its complications and peculiar darknesses—and, most important, what binds us to one another.”
LAURA KASISCHKE was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1961. She grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan. She has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her most recent collection, Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).
Of “Perspective,” Kasischke writes: “The poem was inspired by what the poem’s about: I was told, for better or worse, a secret, and the new knowledge revised a number of events in my life, in retrospect. Perspective. In other words, what I thought was happening was and also wasn’t what I thought it was. It’s confusing to think about or explain, which is why I wrote a poem. . . .”
Born in New Jersey in 1984, VICTORIA KELLY received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her BA from Harvard University, and her MPhil in creative writing from Trinity College, Dublin, where she was a U.S. Mitchell Scholar. Her first chapbook, Prayers of an American Wife, will be released in 2013 from Autumn House Press. She teaches creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia, where she lives with her husband, a U.S. Navy F-18 pilot.
Of “When the Men Go Off to War,” Kelly writes: “I began writing about my experience as a military wife while my husband was deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2011. In Virginia Beach, where we were stationed, very few families actually live on base, and I was living alone in a house near a beach crowded with happy tourists and sometimes feeling very alone, despite regular get-togethers with other spouses from my husband’s squadron. The day my husband left I realized that that evening when I took the dog out he wouldn’t be there anymore, or the next two hundred nights after that. One of the other wives had pointed out that our husbands, leaving in May, would in fact be gone for part or all of four seasons, and it was difficult to stand outside in the hot night and think that when they got home it would be December and all the tourists would be long gone and there would be lights and wreaths on all the houses. You can’t help thinking how everything, including yourself, will be two hundred days older.
