The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

  D. NURKSE was born in New York City in 1949. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, and The Fall, all from Alfred A. Knopf. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

  Nurkse writes: “ ‘Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes’ is an attempt to understand a species that can foresee and adapt to disaster, efficiently, but won’t change. You probably know that the acidification of the oceans will create a reign of jellyfish—perhaps the jellyfish remind the poem of humans: we’re defended by toxins but can’t determine our own direction. My own psychology baffles me: it’s as if the frog in the classic experiment, being cooked very slowly, responded by writing a poem about the experience.”

  ED OCHESTER was born in Brooklyn in 1939. His books of poetry include Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (Autumn House Press, 2007), The Republic of Lies, a chapbook (Adastra Press, 2007), The Land of Cockaigne (Story Line Press, 2001), Snow White Horses: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (Autumn House, 2000), Cooking in Key West (Adastra Press, 2000), Changing the Name to Ochester (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1988), Miracle Mile (Carnegie Mellon, 1984), and Dancing on the Edges of Knives (University of Missouri Press, 1973). He is the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is also the general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction at the press. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, he has received the George Garrett Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the “Artist of the Year” award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a major cash award given annually to one established artist in Western Pennsylvania. Educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin, Ochester was for twenty years the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the editor of American Poetry Now (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). He lives in the rural area northeast of Pittsburgh where the movie Promised Land was filmed.

  Of “New Year,” Ochester writes: “The poem was composed shortly after my mother died at the age of 101. As a reader might guess, it came to me in a dream; the poem was written rapidly the next day and needed few revisions. While it’s particular and personal, it also speaks I think to the ambiguities that exist in many family relationships.”

  PAISLEY REKDAL was born in 1970. She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012.

  Of “Birthday Poem,” Rekdal writes: “I wrote this poem while I was living in Paris. My language skills have never been good, and though I was taking intensive French lessons at the time (along with a group of eight tiny Nepalese nuns), I never seemed to learn, or remember, some of the more basic (if exotic to the American palate) items on the French menu. At the time, I was living near one of the few restaurants in Paris that offered a three-course prix fixe lunch menu for 15 euros: an unbelievable bargain, as eating out even semiregularly would cause the average bank account to bleed out like a hemophiliac. The only catch was that the daily special never seemed to be anything I actually wanted to eat. Nevertheless, every couple of weeks, I’d waddle into the café, gargle out some awesome French, and find myself served with a plate of shit-smelling andouillete, a heap of kidneys, or, yes, once a plate of sheep brains. And each time the waiter (who always recognized me) would smirk politely at my crestfallen expression while asking if, perhaps, I might need more wine. It went on like this for months: daily French lessons with tiny Nepalese nuns (one of whom cheated off my tests, by the way) followed by twice-monthly binges on offal. And still, I was having the time of my life. I want to thank Amy Lowell and the executors of Amy Lowell’s will for the fellowship that allowed me both to experience and to write about this, sheep’s brains and all.”

  ADRIENNE RICH was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1929. She went to Radcliffe College. In 1951, the year she graduated, W. H. Auden chose her book A Change of World for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In the 1960s, her poetry underwent a signal change; she outgrew her attachment to traditional formal structures and became increasingly committed to political and feminist causes. From 1984 until her death on March 27, 2012, she lived in California. She published more than twenty collections of poetry, several books of nonfiction prose, and achieved an international reputation. She received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her recent books, all from W. W. Norton, include Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999), Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 (2002), Fox: Poems 1998–2000 (2001), A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997–2008 (2009), and Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 (2011).

  ANNE MARIE ROONEY was born in New York City in 1985. She is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as the chapbooks The Buff (The Cupboard, 2011) and Shell of an egg in an effort (Birds of Lace, 2013). She has received the Iowa Review Award, the So to Speak Poetry Prize, a Barbara Deming Grant, and Poets & Writers’ Amy Award, as well as inclusion in the Best New Poets and The Best American Poetry anthologies. A graduate of Cornell University’s writing program and a cofounder of Line Assembly, Rooney lives in New Orleans, where she works as a teaching artist.

  Of “Lake Sonnet,” Rooney writes: “I love writing sonnets. I love playing in their constraints, seeing how much they will stretch without breaking. To me they are like bottomless bowls. And, like the rigor of the twelve-bar blues, or religious sacrament, they can exorcise trauma through their repetition, repetition, and then, finally, their slight shifts. A ritual. This one surprised me as I wrote it, and actually, finally, taught me something by the end.

  “The box of form can be like a diagnosis, only part of the story. But maybe in its fallacy it reveals the limits of language in telling these stories at all. Maybe, too, in its soft corners there is a freedom.”

  J. ALLYN ROSSER was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Her books are Foiled Again (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), Misery Prefigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), and Bright Moves (Northeastern University Press, 1990). She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Ohio University and is the editor of New Ohio Review.

  Of “Intro to Happiness,” Rosser writes: “I think when we teach, and especially when we teach ‘difficult’ material, it’s essential to relive our learning years; to reexperience our own naiveté and ignorance. The speaker of the poem, like most professors, may not have mastered her subject as thoroughly as she claims.”

  MARY RUEFLE was born in Mckeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013). Her Selected Poems was published in 2010 and a collection of essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012. She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

  Of “Little Golf Pencil,” Ruefle writes: “I can only say that the title came first, I was fond of it, and therefore had to write something to go with it—it’s as simple as that!”

  Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1947, MAUREEN SEATON grew up in New York state. She left the Bronx in 1991 for Chicago, moved to South Florida in 2002, and to New Mexico in 2007. A professor of English and creative writing at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, she is the author of five chapbooks and eleven full-length poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems (1991–2011) (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). She wo
n the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Furious Cooking (University of Iowa Press, 1996) and the Audre Lorde Award for Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004). A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), also won the Lammy. She writes “Glit Lit,” a column on poets and poetry (almostdorothy.wordpress.com) and can also be found at maureenseaton.com.

  Seaton writes: “I wrote ‘Chelsea / Suicide’ for a loved one whose life and absence have challenged meaning for me over the many years of elegies. I’ve come to understand something, but I’m not sure what. This, finally, is okay with me.”

  TIM SEIBLES was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. His first book, Body Moves, will soon be rereleased by Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of their Contemporary Classics series. In 2010, he was invited to be poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for a semester. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he was also awarded a writing fellowship by the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poem “Allison Wolff” was included in The Best American Poetry 2010. He is a visiting faculty member at the Stonecoast MFA Writing Program sponsored by the University of Southern Maine. He live in Norfolk, Virginia, and teaches at Old Dominion University.

  Of “Sotto Voce: Othello, Unplugged,” Seibles writes: “This poem began to take shape because of a conversation I’d had with a good friend. There was a woman he’d been pursuing who, herself, had another suitor. His discomfort made me think of Othello and how readily his feelings for Desdemona had been twisted into jealous rage by the clever Iago. In working through Othello’s voice, I began to see that such violence was more likely driven by narcissism, rather than by an overwhelming passion for the beloved. It seems so often that people consider jealousy a natural part of real love, when it’s equally probable that the ‘green monster’ is simply a marker of a felt loss of face.

  “With regard to the writing itself: I wanted the stanza variations to be the visual equivalent of the players: Othello alone, he and Desdemona, the couple, and, of course, the poison triumvirate. Otherwise, I merely wanted the lines to breathe as we might imagine sad Othello did, as he tried to make sense of his own actions. I’m not sure I would have ever begun to revise an idea of jealousy—or to rethink Othello—if it hadn’t been for my love-struck friend whose angst pushed me to begin this poem.”

  VIJAY SESHADRI was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, and came to America as a small child. He is the author of four volumes of poetry—Wild Kingdom (Graywolf, 1996), The Long Meadow (Graywolf, 2004), The Disappearances (HarperCollins India, 2007), and 3 Sections (Graywolf, 2013)—and many essays and reviews. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

  Seshadri writes: “I sat down to write ‘Trailing Clouds of Glory’ inspired, if that’s the word, by Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the draconian immigration measure of 2010, which among other things gives Arizona law-enforcement officials license to stop a person they deem suspicious and demand proof that he or she is in America legally. Somehow, though, I couldn’t while writing develop my antipathy to the law in a way interesting to me, so instead of sticking with the subject I let the poem meander, and it eventually meandered to the maternity ward where my son was born. What he says at the end, from the epigraph to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, gave me the idea for the title, which is also from the Ode. I was happy when I finished the poem because I felt I had found a new (for me) way to assimilate political subject matter, though I guess it could just as easily be read as a way to avoid, rather than address, the central issue.”

  PETER JAY SHIPPY was born in Niagara Falls in 1961 and was raised on his family’s apple farm. A graduate of Emerson College and the University of Iowa, he is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press, 2003), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007), and A Spell of Songs (Saturnalia Books, 2013). He has received fellowships in drama and poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachussetts, with his wife, Charlotte, and their daughters, Beatrix and Stella.

  Of “Western Civilization,” Shippy writes: “At home, my office window offers a view of my neighbors’ backyards. Because I live in Boston, most have replaced their grass with parking spaces. A few years ago, after a winter nor’easter, I looked out to see a white lea—all the cars were buried. A silhouette hovered on the snow: a parka, a man perched on the roof of what I knew was a green Fiat, smoking a cigar.

  “Was it his car? I hope not.

  “It wasn’t hard to compare this floater to a castaway, the Mariner or Crusoe (or Ballard’s Maitland) or a misadventurer angling for a kingdom to steal as his or her own.

  “My poem, ‘Western Civilization,’ wasn’t written that day. But I kept gnawing at that image, a figure on top of a car, at sea, a sea of snow, a sea of sand, and Cheetos dust, with Keith Moon and Li Po, of course.”

  MITCH SISSKIND was born in Chicago in 1945. He has published two books of short stories, Visitations (1984) and Dog Man Stories (1993). His poem “Like a Monkey” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. He lives in Los Angeles.

  Sisskind writes: “ ‘Joe Adamczyk’ was inspired first by memories of street corner taverns on the Northwest Side of Chicago: the pinball machines, the television sets, the beers—Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Old Milwaukee. There was a man who, after retiring from the post office, read Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel and began to have opinions on topics that had not previously interested him, and he also took up paint-by-numbers. I tried to imagine how this man’s life would change if he went from painting to philosophy and just didn’t stop. In the last stanza of the poem I tried to copy the final paragraph of Crime and Punishment, which (in my translation) refers to a ‘hitherto undreamed of reality’ and to another story that has not yet been written, but will be.”

  AARON SMITH was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1974. His full-length poetry collections are Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and Blue on Blue Ground (Pittsburgh, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. His chapbooks are Men in Groups and What’s Required. A 2007 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he is the poetry editor of the literary journal BLOOM and assistant professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

  Of “What It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith,” Smith writes: “Avoiding the personal has become the new cliché in contemporary poetry. I wanted to write a hyperautobiographical poem that basically said ‘fuck you’ to the voices that tell writers to keep the personal out of poems. Our bodies exist in public spaces, but the language about them, the openness toward what can be said about them, is often met with resistance or anxiety. I started the poem with the title and worked to capture Aaron Smith physically moving through New York City while also mentally moving through the landscape of his head. I wanted readers to feel like they were part of an immediate, uncensored thinking. The stuff that goes through my head is weird, and I imagine (hope) others are as weird as I am. Poems can contain all aspects of human experience. Any thoughts I felt myself resisting, I followed as far as I could. I deliberately wrote the poem in second person, taking the ‘I’ out, to show that even the removal of the ‘I’ doesn’t mean a removal of the personal. In the end, the poem became an ars poetica about self-censorship. Why choose to write about trees when you can choose pubic hair?”

  STEPHANIE STRICKLAND was born in Detroit in 1942. She is the author of six books of print poetry, most recently Zone : Zero, and seven electronic poems, most recently Sea and Spar Between, a poetry generator written with Nick Montfort using the words of Emily Dickinson and Moby-Dick. Her works include V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una—soon to reappear with a new mobile app—True North, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, and The Ballad of Sand and Ha
rry Soot. Her seventh book, Dragon Logic, will be published by Ahsahta in 2013. A member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, Strickland coedited Electronic Literature Collection/1 (2006). She has taught at many colleges and universities and now lives in New York City.

  Of “Introductions,” Strickland writes: “I find it hard to introduce myself because what I do, what I love, and what I write are all over the map. In this little poem, I touch on location (location, location, location: I am so at home in NYC), on the constraints of extended care for a child who cannot recover, and on childhood adventure with my co-conspirator grandmother.”

  ADRIENNE SU, born in Atlanta in 1967, is the author of three books of poems: Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She teaches at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she is poet-in-residence.

  Of “On Writing,” Su writes: “When I started assembling my newest manuscript, The House Unburned, I found it to be suffering from structural gaps and an excess of grief and regret. I’d anticipated the gaps, as I’ve always had to do some strategic writing to make a manuscript cohere, but I hadn’t foreseen the central emotions. Although the writing of the collection had begun in the wake of a tragedy, I had imagined the poems as a whole to be more affirmative than despairing.