by David Lehman
Praise for The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
—Robert Pinsky
“The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman’s ‘state-of-poetry’ forewords and the guest editors’ introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
—Academy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness . . . in all of these volumes . . . there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
—The Villager
“A year’s worth of the very best!”
—People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
—Booklist
“Certainly it attests to poetry’s continuing vitality.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
—The Washington Post
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CONTENTS
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Foreword by David Lehman
Introduction by Edward Hirsch
Christopher Bakken, “Sentence”
Catherine Barnett, “O Esperanza!”
Rick Barot, “Whitman, 1841”
Jill Bialosky, “Daylight Savings”
Paula Bohince, “Fruits de Mer”
Michelle Boisseau, “Ugglig”
Marianne Boruch, “I Get to Float Invisible”
David Bottoms, “Hubert Blankenship”
Joseph Chapman and Laura Eve Engel, “32 Fantasy Football Teams”
Michael Collier, “Last Morning with Steve Orlen”
Allison Davis, “The Heart of It All + A Free Beer”
Olena Kalytiak Davis, “On the Certainty of Bryan”
Natalie Diaz, “How the Milky Way Was Made”
Denise Duhamel, “Humanity 101”
Lynn Emanuel, “My Life”
Claudia Emerson, “Cyst”
Martín Espada, “Here I Am”
Peter Everwine, “The Kiskiminetas River”
Alexis Rhone Fancher, “When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:”
Charles Fort, “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing”
Emily Fragos, “The Sadness of Clothes”
Amy Gerstler, “A Drop of Seawater Under the Microscope”
Dana Gioia, “Meet Me at the Lighthouse”
Jorie Graham, “Reading to My Father”
Juliana Gray, “The Lady Responds”
Linda Gregerson, “Font”
Jennifer Grotz, “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City”
Mark Halliday, “Doctor Scheef”
Jeffrey Harrison, “Afterword”
Terrance Hayes, “Barberism”
Tony Hoagland, “Bible Study”
Cynthia Hogue, “The Unwritten Volume”
Garrett Hongo, “I Got Heaven . . .”
Erin Hoover, “Girls”
Richard Howard, “85 Off & On”
T. R. Hummer, “Minutiae”
Ishion Hutchinson, “Morning Tableau”
Major Jackson, “Aubade”
Lawrence Joseph, “Visions of Labor”
Julie Kane, “As If”
Suji Kwock Kim, “Return of the Native”
Loretta Collins Klobah, “Tissue Gallery”
John Koethe, “The Swimmer”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “The Fool”
Keetje Kuipers, “We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,”
Deborah Landau, “Solitaire”
Li-Young Lee, “Folding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet”
Philip Levine, “More Than You Gave”
Larry Levis, “If He Came & Diminished Me & Mapped My Way”
Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
Thomas Lux, “Ode While Awaiting Execution”
Paul Mariani, “Psalm for the Lost”
Debra Marquart, “Lament”
Cate Marvin, “High School in Schuzou”
Morgan Parker, “Everything Will Be Taken Away”
Hai-Dang Phan, “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981)”
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “The First Last Light in the Sky”
Stanley Plumly, “Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Five Flights Up’ ”
James Richardson, “Late Aubade”
Patrick Rosal, “At the Tribunals”
David St. John, “Vineyard”
Brenda Shaughnessy, “But I’m the Only One”
Anya Silver, “Maid Maleen”
Taije Silverman, “Grief”
Tom Sleigh, “Prayer for Recovery”
A. E. Stallings, “Alice, Bewildered”
Frank Stanford, “Cotton You Lose in the Field”
Susan Stewart, “What Piranesi Knew”
Nomi Stone, “Drones: An Exercise in Awe-Terror”
Adrienne Su, “Peaches”
James Tate, “Dome of the Hidden Temple”
Lee Upton, “The Apology”
C. K. Williams, “Hog”
Eleanor Wilner, “To Think of How Cold”
Al Young, “The Drummer Omar: Poet of Percussion”
Contributors’ Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
Acknowledgments
About David Lehman and Edward Hirsch
David Lehman was born in New York City, the son of Holocaust survivors. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. Two prose books appeared in 2015: The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014 (Pittsburgh), comprising the forewords he had written to date for The Best American Poetry, and Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Lehman teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
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by David Lehman
If our age is apocalyptic in mood—and rife with doomsday scenarios, nuclear nightmares, religious fanatics, and suicidal terrorists—there may be no more chilling statement of o
ur condition than William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Written in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the epoch-ending disaster that was World War I, “The Second Coming” extrapolates a fearful vision from the moral anarchy of the present. The poem also, almost incidentally, serves as an introduction to the great Irish poet’s complex conception of history, which is cyclical, not linear. Things happen twice, the first time as sublime, the second time as horrifying, so that, instead of the “second coming” of the savior, Jesus Christ, Yeats envisages a monstrosity, a “rough beast” threatening violence commensurate with the human capacity for bloodletting.
Here is the poem:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
As a summary of the present age (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”), stanza one lays the groundwork for the vision spelled out in stanza two, which is as terrifying in its imagery as in its open-ended conclusion, the rhetorical question that makes it plain that a rough beast is approaching but leaves the monstrous details for us to fill.
As an instance of Yeats’s epigrammatic ability, it is difficult to surpass the last two lines in the opening stanza: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The aphorism retains its authority as an observation and a warning. Think of the absence of backbone with which certain right-minded individuals may be said to have met the threats of one bloody ism or another since the 1930s. Or consider our self-doubt and shaken confidence today, our lack of unity, the stalemate between rival factions. (In at least one sense, our House is divided against itself.) On the opposite side, jihadists and advocates of Sharia are rightly known for their extreme zealotry. All totalitarian regimes are based on dogma, and all dogmas demand of their followers a “passionate intensity” capable of overwhelming all other considerations.
Yeats works by magic. He has a system of myths and masks—based loosely on dreams, philosophy, occult studies, Celtic legend, and his wife’s automatic writing—that he uses as the springboard for some of his poems. In a minute I will say something about his special vocabulary: the “gyre” in line one and “Spiritus Mundi” eleven lines later. But as a poet, I would prefer to place the emphasis on Yeats’s craftsmanship. Note how he manages the transition from present to future, from things as they are to a vision of revolution and destruction, by a species of incantation. Line two of the second stanza (“Surely the Second Coming is at hand”) is syntactically identical with line one (“Surely some revelation is at hand”), as if one phrase were a variant of the other. It is the second time in the poem that Yeats has managed this rhetorical maneuver. The first occurs in the opening stanza when the “blood-dimmed tide” replaces the “mere anarchy” that is “loosed” upon the world. In both cases the second line intensifies the first by substituting something specific for something abstract or general.
The phrase “the Second Coming”—when repeated with the addition of an exclamation point—is enough to unleash the poet’s visual imagination just as, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the word “forlorn” concluding the poem’s penultimate stanza returns at the start of the final stanza, governing the dramatic final transition in Keats’s poem. In “The Second Coming” the bestial image that follows, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,” is all the more terrifying because of the poet’s craft: the metrical music of “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”; the unexpected adjectives (“indignant desert birds,” “slow thighs”); the haunting pun (“Reel shadows”); the oddly gripping verb (“Slouches”); the rhetorical question that closes the poem like a prophecy that doubles as an admonition.
In a note written for a limited edition of his book Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Yeats explained that “Spiritus Mundi” (Latin for “spirit of the world”) was his term for a “general storehouse of images,” belonging to everyone and no one. It functions a little like Jung’s collective unconscious and is the source for the “vast image” in “The Second Coming.” Yeats writes in his introduction to his play “The Resurrection” that he often saw such an image, “always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast that I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction.”
As for “gyre” (pronounced with a hard g), in Yeats’s system it is a sort of ideogram for history. In essays on Yeats I have seen the gyres—two of them always—pictured sometimes vertically, in the shape of an hourglass, and sometimes horizontally, as a pair of interpenetrating triangles that resemble inverted stars of David. The gyre represents a cycle lasting “twenty centuries.”
But I maintain that knowledge of the poet’s esoterica (as set forth in his book A Vision) is, though fascinating, unnecessary. Nor does the reader need to know much about falconry, a medieval sport beloved of the European nobility, to understand that there has been a breakdown in communications when the “falcon cannot hear the falconer.”
Read “The Second Coming” aloud and you will see its power as oratory. And ask yourself which unsettles you more: the revolutionary monster “slouching toward Bethlehem” or the sad truth that the best of us don’t want to get involved, while the worst know no restraint in their pursuit of power?
I have begun my foreword with Yeats’s poem for two reasons. The first is that I can think of few works so eerily prophetic—and so apt for us today. The second is that we who work on The Best American Poetry mean to honor the great poems of the past even as we celebrate the vitality of verse in our time.
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Edward Hirsch was my choice to edit the anthology this year because my admiration of his poems is matched by my respect for his skills as a critic, a teacher, and a judge—all that goes into the editing of an annual anthology that does its best to promote the art itself and showcase some of the poems that have moved or amused us. When Kobe Bryant announced his retirement from basketball with a poem, I thought of “Fast Break,” one of the highlights of Hirsch’s Wild Gratitude (Alfred A. Knopf), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. “Fast Break” consists of one sentence stretched across thirty-six lines beginning with a hook shot that “kisses the rim and / hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop” to the other side of the court where the power-forward makes his lay-up but falls to the floor “with a wild, headlong motion / for the game he loved like a country // and swiveling back to see an orange blur / floating perfectly through the net.”
In his career as a professor (at the University of Houston) and as president of the Guggenheim Foundation, Eddie has found a way to blend the tasks of pedagogy and critical judgment while relentlessly pursuing his passion for poetry. He has won widespread acclaim most recently for his book about the death of his son, Gabriel: A Poem (Knopf, 2014). At the same time he has written about poetry in essays and reviews, columns filed on a weekly deadline (The Washington Post),
and an ambitious Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); he has found time to edit a slender volume devoted to the nightingale in poetry, to introduce an anthology emanating from the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day project, and to keep a demanding travel schedule. We compared notes and enthusiasms frequently and I know it gave him great pleasure that a significant number of poets in this volume have never previously appeared in The Best American Poetry.
Important poets have died in the last two years. Philip Levine, C. K. Williams, Claudia Emerson, and James Tate are four whose work appears in this year’s BAP. I feel a special sorrow at the passing of Jim Tate, who was the guest editor of the 1997 volume. I got to talk to Jim on the phone regularly during the whole of 1996 and felt like a partner in the making of a brilliant anthology. He was real—he spoke mildly but knew what he wanted poetry to do. In his own work he was funny, very funny—funny, seemingly without effort. He helped people realize that humor is as compatible with the lyric impulse as the metaphysical wit of seventeenth-century poets such as Donne and Marvell. And he continually widened the possibilities of poetry in prose.
My favorite memory of Jim is from early May 2001. Jim and Dara Wier had organized and were hosting the Juniper Festival at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. They invited me to be the keynote speaker. One evening Dara hosted a party at her place and invited my wife, Stacey, and me to come. I asked Jim for directions. “Would you like me to draw a map for you?” he asked.
“That would be good,” I said.
“Look at my palm,” he said, turning up his right hand and using a left-hand finger as a pointer.
I looked at his palm and suddenly we were in a James Tate poem.
“Do you see this line?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s your lifeline.”
“Well,” he said, “you go up this line and then you hang a left up here.”
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“Not long,” he said.
And the amazing thing is . . . on the basis of these directions . . . we got there. Safe and sound.
