The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

  Of “The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,” Kearney writes: “I tend to be series-oriented in my writing. Having the time and space to develop a number of ideas and images around a central one allows me to unsettle my own expectations around what poems can yield. For several years, I wanted to work with the Labors of Herakles. It would be great: there were twelve, so I had a positive constraint for, say, a twelve-poem series. But I never figured out a useful entry point for trotting out some more Greek mythology.

  “Then, the saloon doors opened and in walked Stagger Lee.

  “It occurred to me that I could take these two infamous badmen—Stagger and Herakles—and conflate them somehow. Both versions say interesting things to their respective cultures about the nature of violence, suffering, and the heroic. Thus, acting like some new jack Eurystheus, I sent Stagger Lee on his own version of Herakles’ labors. Of course, Herakles took on his work—many say—because he killed his family. The work Stagger puts in, in my series, is the killing of his ‘brother’ (see the language of Black uplift), Billy Lyons.

  “In ‘The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,’ we see Stagger and a fractalized kind of Erymanthian Boar. Yet, as is the case in the labors of antiquity, the pig can come to signify some culturally specific notions. I think they’re apparent here.

  “Oh! Last thing. At one point, this poem was, itself, divided into two sections. ‘Rooter’ and ‘Tooter’—a nod to an old expression about how much of the hog hungry black folks would eat. The ‘Tooter’ section lost track of Stagger completely and started riffing on Herakles and ‘That Scene’ from Deliverance. It was a jazz to write, but it jumped the shark. Utterly. I had clutched to it, unwilling to admit it wasn’t working. A chat with poet Jericho Brown helped cinch its excision.”

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’S books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. He has received numerous awards, including the William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally, and include Slipknot, Wakonda’s Dream, Nine Bridges Back, Saturnalia, Testimony, The Mercy Suite, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (with Chad Gracia). He teaches at New York University. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

  Komunyakaa writes: “ ‘Negritude’ is an improvised meditation on the term. In Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), Aimé Césaire defines negritude as ‘the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.’ It was, however, Wole Soyinka who said, ‘A tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey.’

  “Perhaps this poem, through a composite of images, underscores these vagaries within a state of being; perhaps we are, intellectually and spiritually, the summation of the inherited metaphors we can’t help but live by. The speaker seems to have been shaped by the basic rituals of earthy existence—the blues, hard work, dance, folklore, love, time, nature, and even gratitude; the sum total of his life has been a full-blown beckoning and a reckoning. This poem—in celebration of Césaire’s centennial—challenges his definition by suggesting that ‘negritude’ is not a decision, but a condition of the soul.”

  HAILEY LEITHAUSER was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1954. She is the author of Swoop, which was published by Graywolf in 2013. Her work was selected for The Best American Poetry 2010. She teaches at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Of “In My Last Past Life,” Leithauser writes: “I don’t remember much about how I came to write this poem except that the first line was buzzing around in my brain for several years, and that I always thought of it as a good line to open a villanelle. I do remember that I tried a few times to write it as a sort of humorous fairy tale, but those attempts never quite fell into place. It wasn’t until this last version, when the sea began returning in each stanza, that the poem developed the elegiac tone that was apparently the speaker’s proper voice.”

  LARRY LEVIS (1946–1996) published five collections of poetry during his lifetime. Elegy, a posthumous volume edited by Philip Levine, appeared in 1997, and Selected Levis, edited by David St. John, was published in 2000.

  David St. John writes: “ ‘Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It’ is, in effect, the title poem of Larry Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze: The Uncollected Poems of Larry Levis, forthcoming from Graywolf Press, which I edited. These ‘last’ poems were written almost entirely during the same time frame as those in his posthumous book, Elegy (1997). Many of the poems are longer, even operatic pieces that reflect Larry’s dramatic—and elaborate—narrative braiding, which became the poetic signature for much of his later work. Larry Levis died in May 1996, and what The Darkening Trapeze makes clear is that his poetry remains some of the most lyrically complex and consistently powerful work being published in this country.”

  GARY COPELAND LILLEY, a North Carolina native, lives and teaches in Winston-Salem. He received the 1996 and 2000 DC Commission for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, and earned his MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. He is a member of the Black Rooster Collective, is a Cave Canem fellow, and has taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College, and in the Great Smokies writing program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. He has been a faculty poet at the Port Townsend Writers Conference and a visiting writer at Colby College, the University of Arizona, Goddard College, and the Institute of American Indian Art. His books include High Water Everywhere (Willow Books of Aquarius Press, 2013), Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008), and The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004).

  Of “Sermon of the Dreadnaught,” Lilley writes: “I love the blues, and blues people. They’ve always been around me, and a few years ago a friend put a guitar in my hands. I play every day, both secular and sacred blues. I am a devotee, most happy when I am creating music and fueling my writing. I play on the streets in small towns, cities, churches, bars, and homes of inviting folks. I wanted this poem to capture some of that energy, some of the deep resonance of the dreadnaught-style acoustic guitar, and some images of the blues-people terrain. And yes, there were tunes running through my head when I was developing the poem. Old-time gospel songs that are starting to disappear even from the song lists of black churches, the songs of my grandmothers, and all the old people from the rural North Carolina community in which I grew up. I call them foundation songs. That dreadnaught guitar brought those songs back to me, and gave me the poem.”

  FRANNIE LINDSAY was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1949. Her four volumes of poetry are Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press, 2014), Mayweed (The Word Works, 2010), Lamb (Perugia Press, 2006), and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). She has won the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Washington Prize, the Perugia Prize, and the May Swenson Award. In 2008 she was chosen as the winner of The Missouri Review Prize in poetry. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a classical pianist. Over the last twenty years, she has rescued seven greyhounds. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Of “Elegy for My Mother,” Lindsay writes: “I write many of my best poems in what I think of as a state of ecstasy. This, certainly, is far from unique among poets. Ecstatic pieces tend to announce their arrival at times when the act of writing is utterly inconvenient: in the shower, walking the dog, any circumstance in which I am without paper and pen. ‘Elegy for My Mother’ is one of these. I have only a few minutes to capture these poems, and getting them down requires nothing short of blind trust. I don’t have time to question a word, a phrase, or a line. I have to write fast. I often abbreviate words or scribbled graphic symbols. Usually, I revise them only a little or not at all.

  “In order to write this way, one has to listen, surrender, and then just plain t
ake dictation. The lines and images may be overtly relevant to one another or not (often the less relevant, the better). What binds them at first is merely the speed and certainty with which they arrive, and sometimes this remains the primary commonality; sometimes this connective tissue was nothing more than filaments. So much the better: the writer is left with a poem that is illuminated by just the right madness.”

  PATRICIA LOCKWOOD was born in a trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1982, and grew up in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the poetry collections Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012) and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin Books, 2014).

  Lockwood writes: “I wrote ‘Rape Joke’ because I wanted to know if it was possible. (Most poems are not possible, and this one seemed even less possible than usual.) When the conceit presented itself to me, I saw that if I did it correctly, I could write a poem that was personal, true, appalling, and even occasionally funny. If I did it correctly, it would speak straight out of the mouth of the event but still be recognizable as a poem. It seemed like a high-wire act. I wanted to know if I could do it.”

  NATHANIEL MACKEY was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which are Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006) and Nod House (New Directions, 2011); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fourth and most recent volume is Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2008) and whose first three volumes have been published together as From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1–3 (New Directions, 2010); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). He received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 1993, was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001, won the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem in 2006 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.

  CATE MARVIN was born in Washington, DC, in 1969. She is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where she has taught creative writing since 2003. World’s Tallest Disaster (2001), her first book, was selected by Robert Pinsky for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and went on to receive the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is coeditor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, appeared from Sarabande in 2007. A Whiting Award recipient, Marvin has a third book of poems, Oracle, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2015. She is a cofounder, with Erin Belieu, of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization that seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women.

  Of “An Etiquette for Eyes,” Marvin writes: “I like to think the voice of this poem goes off the rails in a manner similar to that of the French Surrealist poet Louis Aragon in his ‘Poem to Shout in the Ruins.’ Ultimately, ‘An Etiquette for Eyes’ advocates for the plain. Anyone with brown eyes knows the drill. The majority of people the world over have brown eyes, yet there exists an insufferable number of people with ‘blue,’ ‘green,’ and ‘hazel’ eyes who love to elaborate upon the changeability of the varying colors, hues, and shades of their respective irises. Being on the listening end of this species of self-appraisal can be pretty tedious when one’s own eyes can only be described as ‘brown.’ In this sense, ‘An Etiquette for Eyes’ is quite simple. It’s an argument for being ordinary, launched against an individual the poem’s speaker once regarded as extraordinary.”

  JAMAAL MAY was born in 1982 in Detroit, Michigan, where he has taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His first book, Hum, received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

  Of “Masticated Light,” May writes: “When I was a member of the 2012 NYC louderARTS Poetry Slam Team I wrote a collaborative poem with a young poet named Mokgethi Thinane. We told stories to each other until several bridges were welded between us. Turns out we both have screwed-up eyes and that led to a poem about sight in its various meanings and registers. After the National Poetry Slam concluded, I sat with the pieces of the poem that were mine and was pleasantly disturbed by some of what was there. Working through the subject matter alongside Mokgethi had allowed me to tap into something I couldn’t reach on my own. The difficulty of collaboration as a framework, combined with my terror of it, contributed to what broke me open. With those pieces to start with, I constructed the last poem to be added to Hum.”

  SHARA MCCALLUM was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972. She is the author of four books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, 2011); Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. She received the 2013 Witter Bynner Fellowship. She is director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  McCallum writes: “In ‘Parasol,’ images from childhood and fairy tales led me to mull over the idea that metaphor, storytelling, and memory are entwined. They seem to be ways we can suspend and widen time in order to revisit other moments and selves we’ve been. This process is an act of the imagination, not the same as lived experience, and the poem registers the paradox that what might ‘console’ us is often that which we cannot hold onto. Poems about the past run the risk of becoming sentimental. At the time I wrote this poem I didn’t consider point of view consciously. Now, on looking at it again, I imagine that the direct address to a ‘you,’ who I think is fairly obviously the poet-speaker, might also create a distance between speaker and subject that complicates the tone, helping the poem avoid diving headfirst into nostalgia.

  “Lastly, rhyme played a significant part in the writing of this poem. I like to write from my ear, and with ‘Parasol’ associations of sound were particularly instructive, directing several turns and guiding the poem’s insights.”

  MARTY MCCONNELL was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1973. She currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, where she works in fundraising and strategic planning for a youth and family center. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, was published in 2012 by EM Press. She cofounded the louderARTS Project in New York City and returned to Chicago in 2009 to create Vox Ferus, an organization dedicated to connecting individuals and communities through the written and spoken word.

  Of “vivisection (you’re going to break my heart),” McConnell writes: “I’m forever in pursuit of never writing another break-up poem, and here it is in Best American: a break-up poem. Appropriate, then, that this poem should actually deal with that very thing: the desire to be done with love and heartache, and the knowledge that given my nature, I’m unlikely ever to be done with it entirely. My first year in high school, we had to dissect a frog, and often when I am split open painfully by love, what flashes across my interior vision is that image, a creature so neatly dead and arrayed to be educational, useful, purposed. The whole thing is so delicate and gruesome, and simultaneously so absolutely ordinary.”

  VALZHYNA MORT was born in Minsk, Belarus (then part of the former Soviet Union), in 1981. She moved to the United States in 2005. Her two American collections, both published by Copper Canyon Press, are Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011). She has received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. She is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

  Of “Sylt I,” Mort writes: “This poem was written on the island of Sylt, in the North of Germany, a two-hour boat ride south
of Copenhagen. Sylt has been a nudist destination for decades.”

  HARRYETTE MULLEN’S poetry collections include Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002). She teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012 by University of Alabama Press. Her most recent poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, was published by Graywolf Press in 2013.

  Of “Selection from Tanka Diary,” Mullen wrote in the Harvard Review: “My tanka diary began with a wish to incorporate into my life a daily practice of walking and writing poetry. Usually I go for short walks in various parts of Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica, or longer hikes in the canyons with friends. I also regularly lead student poets on ‘tanka walks’ in the Mildred Mathias Botanical Garden on the campus of UCLA. At other times I stroll through unfamiliar neighborhoods as I travel. These poems are my adaptation of a traditional Japanese form of syllabic poetry. Usually a tanka is thirty-one syllables, often written in five lines.”

  Asked to elaborate, Mullen adds the following under the heading “Urban Tumbleweed & the spirit of tanka”: “The spirit of tanka interests me more than following rigid conventions. Succeeding generations rediscover and renew the form so that it retains its vitality. With Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, my intention was not to write waka in a different language, not to replicate Japanese tanka, or translate the technicalities of that traditional form into a language with a different structure. Tanka is well suited for diary writing. It’s a concise and efficient form of creative note-taking for sharpening daily observation and capturing the fleeting moment.