The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

  JANE SPRINGER was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, in 1969. Her two collections of poetry are Dear Blackbird (which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in 2007) and Murder Ballad (Beatrice Hawley Award, 2012). She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. She teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she lives with her husband, her son, and their three dogs, Leisure-Lee, Azalea, and Woofus.

  Of “Forties War Widows, Stolen Grain,” Springer writes: “Milton has this remarkable example of epanadiplosis in Paradise Lost (Book IV, lines 639–52). I have long admired it, and I wanted to reinvent the technique for the war widows poem by raveling and unraveling synonyms (e.g., spatula becomes utensil), as opposed to repeating words more exactly. My poem also nods to George Herbert’s holy ‘Easter Wings’—ironic, since the shape of it is evocative of the SR-71 Blackbird war jet from the Cold War era. I hoped to acknowledge the women (those in my family as well as through the ages) who clean up what they can in the harrowing wake of wars past and present.”

  COREY VAN LANDINGHAM was born in 1986 in Ashland, Oregon. She is a Wallace C. Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University and is the author of Antidote (Ohio State University Press, 2013). She received her MFA from Purdue University, where she was a poetry editor for Sycamore Review. She lives in Oakland, California.

  Of “During the Autopsy,” Van Landingham writes: “While a student at Purdue University, I had the unusual opportunity to visit the cadaver lab for a project my professor, Marianne Boruch, was undertaking. The medical students walked us through the room, showing us various oddities and, with visible glee, watching our reactions. I had the instant urge to liken what I was seeing to something familiar. The bodies were detached from their persons, resulting in a new vision of the body. As a fact. As a warehouse. The cerebellum reminded me of the imprint of a pine-needle cluster. The brain, in my hands, seemed like some dull putty I had handled as a child. The heart was so meaty. I began to think about my reaction: was this something only we writers were doing, foreign as we are to the world of the body, more comfortable in language, in metaphor? I wondered whether the medical students, for whom the sight of cadavers may be tedious, ever transform the experience, in their minds, into the sensational, the strange? And so this poem took root there, in that body-clinging smell of the cadaver lab, where I imagined the enchantment, the wonder that I hoped one might find in the routine. I imagined the magic a body could reveal, and how it could become a fulcrum to this one man’s very existence. No, to his multitudinous existences.”

  A poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and actor, AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER (formerly Michael S. Weaver) was born in Baltimore in 1951; he graduated high school and entered the University of Maryland in 1968, when he was sixteen years old. In 1970 he left the university to work in factories for fifteen years. In 1985, he received an NEA fellowship in poetry and the contract for his first book of poems with Callaloo at the University of Virginia. In that same year he left factory life to enter Brown University’s MFA writing program, where he concentrated on playwriting, and he completed his BA at the University of the State of New York. His thirteen books of poetry include Water Song (University Press of Virginia, 1985), Multitudes (Sarabande, 2000), The Plum Flower Dance (Pittsburgh, 2007), The Government of Nature (Pittsburgh, 2013), and A Hard Summation (Central Square Press, 2014). He has received a Fulbright appointment (2002) to teach at National Taiwan University and, as a translator, he works with contemporary Chinese poetry. He holds the Alumnae Chair in English at Simmons College and is a visiting faculty member of Drew University’s low-residency MFA in poetry and poetry in translation.

  Weaver writes: “ ‘Passing Through Indian Territory’ is an American sonnet inspired by my visit in fall 2011 to the University of Oklahoma, where I noticed the presence of cowboys in Oklahoma’s history. As a young teenager, I learned a great deal about horses from a maternal uncle. He gave me an Appaloosa filly when I was fourteen years old, the subject of a poem in my early book My Father’s Geography.”

  ELEANOR WILNER was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937. She has published seven books of poetry, including Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010), The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004), and Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1998). She coedited with Maurice Manning The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process (University of Michigan, 2013). Her awards include a MacArthur, National Endowment for the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes. She teaches peripatetically and perennially in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

  Of “Sowing,” Wilner writes: “My poems tend to emerge from the imagination, which is to say, I make things up. But this one, uncharacteristically, comes direct from a personal memory, called up by the lines from a poem by Maurice Manning, which became the epigraph: ‘I can’t make up / a name like Turnipseed, or that // I knew a man who went by such / a goodly name . . . ’ And with that name came back, across the years, a young man, my concern about his fate, and with him, a whole era in American history, the crimes and the unthinkable waste resulting from U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s war.

  “From that name, Turnipseed, the poem emerged: like the disturbance that, as it moves through water, makes the waves, so one association awakened the next, even as Maurice’s description of a turnip seed brought on the incommensurate—the immeasurable value of a young man’s life, so expendable to the military machine of empire: ‘a little bit of hardly anything.’

  “A word about the poem’s final associative move into the Dreamtime of the West in its last stanza, as the ironic ‘bought the farm’ expression among soldiers in ’Nam for their dead comrades opened the field to the sowing of a different seed, in the furrow made by the plow of Cadmus in Ovid’s retelling of the Greek myths in his Metamorphoses.

  “As Ovid tells it, Cadmus, who was to found the ill-fated dynasty of Thebes, kills the sacred serpent-dragon of the war god Mars, who has destroyed his company of men. On the instructions of his tutelary goddess Athena, Cadmus ploughs the ground and sows it with the teeth of the dragon, and at once, from this dragon seed, spears arise, then helmets, and soon a field of warriors has risen full grown from the earth, and almost at once it becomes a killing field as they attack one another, until, with only five left, Athena intervenes, peace is made, and Thebes, like Rome, has its origin in brother murder and civil war—all under the red eye of Mars.

  “And, though I was not conscious of this when writing, it is obvious now that ‘fell like dominoes’ refers to the insane justification for the massive carnage, bombing, and defoliation of Vietnam—the theory that if the North Vietnamese won the war, the countries of Southeast Asia would fall to Communism like dominoes. Of course, it was the bodies that fell ‘to join the ranks of headstones, row on row on row . . . ’

  “It is my fond hope that Carl Turnipseed survived that bloody war, and, as to the flag-draped coffin, I believe its personal meaning for me in the context of this memory, was such a coffin at the funeral of Waters E. Turpin, my elder colleague at Morgan State, a kind and learned man who put up with my ignorance, and who, the year I was born, 1937, had published the first of his three novels, These Low Grounds, which, rare for that time in history, told it like it was.”

  DAVID WOJAHN was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953. His eighth collection of poetry, World Tree, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011 and was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His previous collection of poetry, Interrogation Palace: Selected Poems 1982–2004, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2006 and was a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Award. From the Valley of Making, a collection of his essays on poetry, will appe
ar from the University of Michigan Press in 2015. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College.

  Of “My Father’s Soul Departing,” Wojahn writes: “A few years ago, the poet Michael Waters asked each of a dozen or so poets to translate a work that may be the best known poem of the ancient world, Hadrian’s ‘Animula.’ Legend has it that it was written by the Roman emperor on his deathbed, and in it he bids farewell to his soul. The poem is a lovely bit of leave-taking to his ‘body’s companion and guest.’ The various translations that Michael solicited appeared together in a journal, The Great River Review. My version of the poem took several liberties with its content, and I later found myself wondering why I’d turned a work of great tenderness into something considerably more saturnine. ‘My Father’s Soul Departing’ was written in part to answer the question. My father, who died in 1990, was a greatly decent man, but afflicted by many things, not least of which was a lifelong battle with chronic depression and alcoholism. Like so many other children of the depression, he had a difficult childhood, characterized by poverty, an abusive father, a mother afflicted with mental illness, and an education that was cut short in the eighth grade. He served in the army in World War II, and was later employed for many years by the Great Northern Railroad, the creation of the Robber Baron James J. Hill, who nicknamed himself ‘The Empire Builder.’ And my father was among the last generation of old style Railroad Men. In 1970, he and many of his coworkers were permanently laid off from their positions, and my father’s final two decades were characterized by various mental and economic woes.

  “The purpose of ‘My Father’s Soul Departing’ is that of almost all elegies—to mourn and to dignify the departed. It’s a capsule biography, and the poem is interwoven with passages from my translation of Hadrian’s poem. My father was neither an emperor nor an Empire Builder, but one of my projects as a poet has been to do for my father—in a small way—what potentates have so often done for themselves: that is, to fashion a fitting and lasting memorial.”

  GREG WRENN was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1979. He is the author of Centaur (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and Off the Fire Road (GreenTower Press, 2008). He has received the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Stegner Fellowship, as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is at work on a second full-length collection, Homeworld, and a series of essays on coral reefs, climate change, artistic vision, and the impermanence of beauty. A graduate of Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis, he teaches at Stanford University.

  Of “Detainment,” Wrenn writes: “Unlike my first book’s title poem, in which a man travels to Brazil to be surgically transformed into a centaur, the speaker of ‘Detainment’—a suspected terrorist-poet—is kidnapped and brutalized. My aspirations for this poem are wide-ranging: that it express my ambivalence about language’s transformative possibilities; ironize the notion that good poems must arise from suffering; and critique the inhumanity of our criminal justice system and the War on Terror, including the practice of extraordinary rendition. An attempt to convey personal as well as national desolation and fragmentation, each of the scattered prose blocks is a kind of cell in which this dispirited, abused voice speaks to itself while in lockdown. For now, his abusers, his torturers, are gone.”

  ROBERT WRIGLEY was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1951. He is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and lives in the woods, near Moscow, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. His most recent books are Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2013), and in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013).

  Of “Blessed Are,” Wrigley writes: “On the mountain where I live, wild animals outnumber humans by a considerable margin. I see them a lot, and I write about them a lot, too. I published a book just over a decade ago called Lives of the Animals, which ought to have been called, according to a few of my witty friends, ‘Deaths of the Animals,’ given how many of the poems in that volume looked at, examined, meditated on, and, it seems, endlessly described dead beasts as their subjects. But a subject is not a poem, only the doorway through which the poet enters in search of the poem. Practically speaking, dead animals are easier to examine than living ones. They do not flee; they lie still to be studied. Winter is hard here, too, and among the wild populations are also predators. And they all die, even, I imagine, the ravens, although in all my years of walking through these woods, I have come across every sort of carcass but that of a raven. How can that be? They are highly intelligent birds. They can imitate other birds; they can even imitate human speech. Listening to them, I find it impossible to believe that they communicate less effectively than we do. As for the title and the last word, the less said by me the better.”

  JAKE ADAM YORK was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1972, and grew up in Gadsden, Alabama. He received a BA in English from Auburn University, and an MFA and PhD in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University. His collections of poetry include Abide, published posthumously (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014); Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois, 2010); A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois, 2008), which won the Colorado Book Award; and Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005), which won the Elixir Prize. He was an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he founded the university’s creative writing program, as well as the university’s national literary journal, Copper Nickel. Jake Adam York died suddenly on December 16, 2012, at the age of forty.

  DEAN YOUNG was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He is currently teaching at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent books are Fall Higher (2011) and Bender (2012), both by Copper Canyon Press. The Art of Recklessness (2010), a book of prose, was published by Graywolf.

  Of “Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns,” Young writes: “Like many of my poems, and most poems in general I think, this one is something of a list, a list of phenomena and reaction that may or may not lead to a conclusion. It’s not a story, it’s an arrangement. I hope to resist narrative and its numbing conventions that depend upon domineering logic, which to my mind is usually insufficient to the full welter of life. We don’t live narratives. We hop. I hope this poem conveys a series of amazements in each landing and takeoff. I hope it comes to a sense of an ending that isn’t necessarily completion but more like how a song ends, with a sense of sumptuousness achieved.”

  RACHEL ZUCKER was born during a blizzard in New York City in 1971. She attended Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then returned to New York. Her nine books include a memoir, MOTHERs (Counterpath Press, 2014), and The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), a double collection of poetry and prose. Museum of Accidents appeared from Wave Books in 2009. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and currently teaches poetry at New York University. She has also worked as a labor support doula and a childbirth educator.

  Zucker writes: “In ‘Mindful,’ I write explicitly about my relationship to New York City, where (except for college and graduate school) I’ve lived for more than forty years. I wanted the poem’s form, speed, and diction to mimic New York rather than refer to New York and to pursue a high-population density poetics.

  “When I wrote ‘Mindful’ I’d been listening to podcasts and audio books while traveling alone around the city. I was also using an app that announced my time, distance, and pace when I ran in Central Park. I thought pulling a bubble of sound round me would insulate me from the noise and chaos of the city. I thought RunKeeper would push me to go farther and faster. But rushing around in a moving cloud of narrative, filling all the waking silences, created a mental or emotional implosion. The experience was a more extreme version of my usual daily life in which I am interrupted by my children, my reading, my listening to the swirl of language all around me. I am lucky to have a full life and an active mind, but such fullness is also crazy-making.

&nb
sp; “ ‘Mindful’ plays with the recently ubiquitous word ‘mindful’ as it is used in yoga, parenting, health, and politics. Who doesn’t want to be more ‘mindful’? If we were all ‘mindful,’ we’d be slim, compassionate, spiritually centered, environmentally aware Buddhas. One reason I write poetry is that it helps me pay attention to where I am even when I want to escape. I believe in the importance of being present and attentive. I believe in the importance of being present, attentive, ‘mindful.’ But the catchword doesn’t acknowledge the problems of a full mind or the complex ways in which I try to pay more and less attention to the vividness of the world.”

  MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED

  * * *

  ABZ, ed. John McKernan. PO Box 2746, Huntington, WV 25727.

  The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, ed. Alex Dimitrov. www.poets.org

  AGNI, poetry ed. Lynne Potts. bu.edu/agni

  The American Poetry Review, eds. Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Elizabeth Scanlon. 320 S. Broad St., Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102. www.aprweb.org

  The Atlantic, poetry ed. David Barber. www.theatlantic.com

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

  The Baffler, literary ed. Anna Summers. www.thebaffler.com

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

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