The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

“To round it out, I needed to come up with some poems of happiness, or at least the absence of unhappiness. This presented a problem, since, as I’m always telling students, successful poems are born of uncertainty, interior conflict, the modes of struggle that lack clear solutions. I went back and forth between two selves: the editor, whose vision for the collection required some happier poems, and the poet, who raged against the affront of an assignment so lacking in ambiguity. How, argued the poet, can happiness, gratification, or success be complex enough to give life to a poem?

  “Eventually, the answer came with a shift in setting. If the poem could be about writing, conflict would be inherent in the question. So I gave myself permission to write about writing. Now that I had a conflict, the road to the poem appeared.”

  JAMES TATE was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. His newest book is The Ghost Soldiers (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2008). He teaches in the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. An interviewer once asked him whether he had any advice for young writers starting out. “No,” he answered, “if a writer is going to get anywhere, he doesn’t listen to anybody.” He has also said, “Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” Tate was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1997.

  EMMA TRELLES was born in Mercy Hospital, Miami, Florida, where she grew up with her brother and Cuban immigrant parents. She is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011)—winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award in poetry—and the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS183, 2008). She received an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University in 1999 and has worked since as an arts journalist, a writing instructor, and an editor. She has been a featured reader at the Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC, the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Miami Book Fair International, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. In 2013, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. She lives with her husband in the state with the prettiest name.

  Of “Florida Poem,” Trelles writes: “The natural world images in this poem come from my childhood, when I had time to watch plants shoot out of the ground or tiny creatures settle in the mesh of our screen door. I wonder now if they were looking for a cool place to pause, just like the rest of us. Many years later, some friends gave me a Devil Girl Choco-Bar, basically a candy bar but with a wrapper illustrated by R. Crumb in lurid purples and reds and a savagely sexy woman on the front claiming, ‘It’s bad for you!’ I liked the drawing so much I never ate the chocolate and just let it disintegrate on the kitchen shelf so I could look at the artwork every day. That grinning girl floated around my brain for a while, and then, through the inexplicable alchemy of poem writing, she became the face of Florida’s summer heat. It, too, is part seduction, part wrath.”

  DAVID TRINIDAD was born in Los Angeles in 1953. Dear Prudence, a volume of new and selected poems, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2011. Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera was published by Turtle Point in 2013. He is the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011). He lives in Chicago, teaches at Columbia College, and coedits the journal Court Green.

  Trinidad writes: “This excerpt is from a ‘haiku epic,’ Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera. Over the course of three and a half years, I watched all 514 episodes of the infamous 1960s primetime soap opera and wrote a haiku for every one. I’d wanted to watch the series when I was a teenager, but it was considered too ‘adult’ and came on past my bedtime. Almost five decades later, watching every minute of the show (sometimes past my bedtime), it was hard to take the fraught relationships, courtroom cliffhangers, and sensational story lines seriously. Writing hundreds of haiku, I learned, can be hazardous to your mental health—long breaks between TV seasons are advised.”

  JEAN VALENTINE was born in Chicago, earned her BA from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book, Dream Barker and Other Poems, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Valentine was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

  Valentine writes: “1945 was, of course, the last year of World War II. Many of the military all over the world were sent or made their way back to their countries, many (if not all) of them, as in this poem, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  PAUL VIOLI was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up in Green-lawn, Long Island. He went to Boston University and served in the Peace Corps. He made maps in uncharted regions of northern Nigeria and traveled through Africa, Europe, and Asia. Upon returning to New York he worked for WCBS-TV News and was managing editor of Architectural Forum. His books include In Baltic Circles (Kulchur Foundation, 1973; rpt. H_NGM_N BKS, 2011), Splurge (Sun, 1982), Likewise (Hanging Loose Press, 1988), Breakers (Coffee House Press, 2000), and Overnight (Hanging Loose, 2007). Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes, a prose collection, appeared from Hanging Loose in 2002. He taught literature and writing at The New School, at Columbia University, and at New York University. In an interview with Andrew McCarron, Violi said he associated “the pleasure of writing poems” with the transmutation of feelings. “Otherwise where’s the challenge? I mean, just writing things down the way they are, you’re more of a scribe of your self-absorption as opposed to, say, making something that didn’t exist before.” The humor in his poetry is, he said, “based on the contradictory aspects of my own nature as well as the way things happen. Good things happen; great things happen; sad, tragic things happen. I think my humor is tied in with that. And if it’s harsh at times, it’s because I’m pretty harsh on myself. But if it’s benign, that’s because I have an understanding of myself as a mere mortal.” Violi lived with his wife in Putnam Valley, New York. In January 2011 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on April 2, 2011.

  DAVID WAGONER was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. He has published twenty books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. In 2007, his play First Class was given forty-three performances at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.

  Of “Casting Aspersions,” Wagoner writes: “Writers like me who aren’t classical scholars become wary of Latin derivatives, especially nouns ending in ion because, for us, their roots have no connotations, have little or no figurative effect in poems. So when somebody told me I’d cast aspersions on him, I decided to dig up some roots to help me use concrete images in reply.”

  Born in 1977 and raised in Hauppauge, New York, STACEY WAITE has published three chapbooks: Choke (Thorngate Road Press, 2004), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2006), and the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), in addition to one full-length collecti
on of poems entitled Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013). Waite has won the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry, the 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award, the Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Teaching Award, and a National Society of Arts & Letters Poetry Prize. Waite is assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has also published essays on the teaching of writing in Writing on the Edge, Feminist Teacher, and Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy.

  Of “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV,” Waite writes: “Some poems find their origins in our imaginings, and some, like this one, can feel inextricable from experience—the poem began unfolding as soon as this kid at the DMV made his declaration to his mother. Sometimes I hear or see some possible truth, something so obvious and simple that it had never occurred to me before that moment. This poem begins in a moment like that; it begins with a child’s insistence that human beings can actually be two seemingly contradictory (or two seemingly mutually exclusive) things at once. For weeks, the child saying, ‘Mommy, that man is a girl’ repeated in my mind—not because it was cruel or even erroneous, but because of how true it was. I found myself laughing aloud as I washed the dishes or cut back the hedges. The line just stayed with me. In this sense, some small boy with a big mouth at a DMV in Lincoln, Nebraska, is responsible for this poem. He asked me, as poems often do, to see myself as I am. So the poem is what the experience revealed. The poem is, yes, about me, but it is also about gender, about the stories we tell ourselves (and our children) about what gender is. The poem is about bathing in the light of contradiction and uncertainty.”

  RICHARD WILBUR was born in New York City in 1921 and brought up in rural New Jersey. His father was a portrait painter, and his mother came from a long line of journalists. A graduate of Amherst College (class of ’42), he served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. Having taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith, he now coteaches once a week at Amherst. With his late wife, Charlotte, he lived year-round in Cummington, Massachusetts (which is still his home), and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. His latest book of verse is Anterooms (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); his Collected Poems 1943–2004 appeared from Harcourt in 2004. He has won two Pulitzers. He wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and his translations from seventeenth-century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely here and abroad.

  Wilbur writes: “Whenever possible, I have lived in the country. The late Francis Wells of Cummington, Massachusetts, schooled me in the art of maple-sugaring.”

  ANGELA VERONICA WONG was born in Texas in 1983. She is the author of one full-length collection of poetry entitled how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books, 2012) and several chapbooks, including the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship winner, Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter.

  Of “It Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a Narcissist,” which she wrote in collaboration with Amy Lawless, Wong writes: “[cont. from Amy Lawless] out, how we want. The poem emerges from individual experiences in large cities and the ways we tether to each other, small i’s to small you’s.”

  WENDY XU was born in Shandong, China, in 1987, and raised in Iowa. She is the author of the full-length collection You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and two chapbooks. She teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and is the coeditor/publisher of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry/iO Books. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Xu writes: “ ‘Where the Hero Speaks to Others’ is from a loose series of ‘hero’ poems, a bundle of which were published in 2011 by H_NGM_N as a chapbook titled just that, The Hero Poems, and others I still find myself writing now and then. But most were written in 2010, when I had a bedroom window from which I could see my mailbox, and whenever I noticed the little red ‘there is mail in here’ flag up I would feel irrationally excited; other days I sat and watched wistfully as the mail truck drove by. I was never waiting for anything ‘important,’ but I do think for that year, I thought a lot about correspondence and speaking and distance, so consequently the hero poems did, too. I remember writing this particular poem after watching a movie about people who are getting a divorce, but I don’t remember the movie. I also don’t remember what I learned about divorce, but I did feel sad, and I did want to give myself permission to explore and complicate that sadness, like maybe it had a lot to teach me. Maybe I also just wanted to confirm that there are no simple, clear feelings, and thank god. Sadness is so relentlessly interesting. It is so close to a weird, uncomfortable joy.”

  KEVIN YOUNG is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for the National Book Award, both from Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, edited with Michael S. Glaser (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Young’s recent book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011.

  Young writes: “ ‘Wintering’ is taken from a series of poems that The American Scholar prefaced as ‘a compact daybook of grief.’ This seems exactly, almost intuitively right: ‘Wintering’ and its fellow poems chart several seasons of grief since the death of my father; they will soon appear in a volume called Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014).

  “It was spring, but still chilly—the cruelest month—when he died. Such weather, both literal and emotional, makes its way into the poem. The title is meant to convey winter as not just a time but a process, one of hunkering down yet hoping for a break in the cold. I also wanted to name and even celebrate some part of that process of grief as distinct from a more immediate mourning—whether that means welcoming gray hairs or ‘the long betrothal’ that is bereavement.”

  MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). He is also, along with historian Radu Ioanid, the cotranslator of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2008). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives in Oakland, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR Palm Desert’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. His new book of poems, Sun Bear, is forthcoming in 2014.

  Of “Albert Einstein,” Zapruder writes: “When as so often is the case I feel totally devoid of inspiration, I will try to think of something so familiar and habitual that it could not possibly be the stuff of poetry, and then begin. In this case it was that ubiquitous absentminded genius, whose name is so familiar to me that I hardly even notice it. It seems like a silly and unpromising subject for a poem, both too grandiose and also somehow too empty. There were many false starts. When at some point I wrote the word ‘relativity’ I realized that I did not really understand what it was. I also remembered that my late father used to keep books about Einstein next to his bed, and try to explain relativity to us when we were kids. From there I just followed the poem where it led. It was hard to find the end of the poem, and when it revealed itself as a love poem to my wife, I was surprised, and grateful.”

  MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEM WERE FIRST PUBLISHED

  AGNI, poetry ed. Lynne Potts. Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215.

  Alaska Quarterly Review, ed. Ronald Spatz. University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508.

  The American Poetry Review, eds. Stephen Berg, David Bonnano, and Elizabeth Scanlon. 320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102.

  The American Scholar, poetry ed. Langdon Hammer. 1606 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009.

  The Antioch Review, poetry ed. Judith Hall. PO Box 148, Yellow Spri
ngs, OH 45387.

  The Awl, poetry ed. Mark Bibbins. www.theawl.com

  Barrow Street, eds. Melissa Hotchkiss, Patricia Carlin, Lorna Blake, and Peter Covino. www.barrowstreet.org

  The Believer, poetry ed. Dominic Luxford. www.believermag.com

  Boston Review, poetry eds. Timothy Donnelly and Barbara Fischer. www.bostonreview.net

  Carbon Copy Magazine, eds. Abby Blank and Matt Zambito. www.carboncopymagazine.com

  Columbia Poetry Review, Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605.

  The Common, poetry ed. John Hennessy. www.thecommononline.org

  Conduit, ed. William D. Waltz. 788 Osceola Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105.

  Court Green, eds. Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad. Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605.

  Ecotone, poetry ed. Regina DiPerna. Department of Creative Writing, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403-5938.

  FIELD, eds. David Young and David Walker. www.oberlin.edu/ocpress/field.html

  Fifth Wednesday Journal, ed. Vern Miller. www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com

  Five Points, eds. David Bottoms and Megan Sexton. Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3999, Atlanta, GA, 30302-3999.

  The Georgia Review, ed. Stephen Corey. The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-9009.

  Granta, ed. John Freeman. www.granta.com

  Gulf Coast, poetry eds. Kimberly Bruss, Michelle Oakes, and Justine Post. Department of English, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-3013.

  Gulfshore Life, www.gulfshorelife.com

  Hanging Loose, eds. Robert Hershon, Dick Lourie, and Mark Pawlak. 231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217.

  Harper’s, ed. Ellen Rosenbush. www.harpers.org

  Harpur Palate, poetry eds. Nicole Santalucia and Abby E. Murray. harpurpalate.binghamton.edu