Best American Poetry 2016
Page 3
The reclamation of the democratic “I” is an implicit critique of the critique about poetry. It advances against the “advance-guard” and recovers poetic territory that has been prematurely relinquished. The responsive or revitalized “I” is not naïve but encompassing. Some of our poets are working in modes that have pushed beyond the formulas of postmodernism. They blow open the old-fashioned idea of a unified self, while also retaining what poetry does best, which is to press down on the present moment, to pursue meaning out of experience. There is genuine suffering in the world, the suffering of actual people, and poetry addresses this suffering almost better than anything else. We are not passive but active subjects both of personal and social history. Experience does not come to us prepackaged. It demands our attention, our intervention. Losses accrue, memory is a responsibility. We have not entirely abandoned our posts. Some of our poets have decided to answer the call for a poetry of clarity and mystery.
This book is multitudinous. A number of these poets I’ve been reading for decades, others are entirely new to me. I made many discoveries—at least they were discoveries to me—and I am glad to introduce a group of tough-minded younger poets, who are bringing news from the front. There are at least three generations represented here. And I am grateful to be able to include six poets who are no longer alive—Frank Stanford, Larry Levis, Claudia Emerson, James Tate, C. K. Williams, and Philip Levine—but whose work continues to live. Charlie Williams and Phil Levine were two of my dearest friends and role models in poetry, and I especially mourn them.
Kenneth Burke calls literature “equipment for living.” It is precisely that. Every couple of years someone comes along and enthusiastically pronounces that poetry is dead. It is not. On the contrary, it is an art form that continues to thrive in unexpected ways, engaging and evading its own history, setting out on unknown paths. We live, perhaps we have always lived, in perilous times, and stand on the edge of an abyss, which absorbs us. We are called to task. Poetry enlarges our experience. It brings us greater consciousness, fuller being. It stands on the side of life, our enthrallment.
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN
* * *
Sentence
No one predicted we’d be sitting there,
just come in from a blizzard to that bar,
and three beached fishermen in the corner
would interrupt their beans to stare at us,
then return to eating, since we were strange,
but cold enough to be left alone,
and that to expect their calm dismissal
of our being there showed we understood
how things worked then, in the dead decades,
after most of the city had vanished
on trains, or had been drowned in foreign ports;
and therefore, when the priest arrived
with his ice-crusted shawl and frozen cross,
crooning mangled hymns, his head gone to praise,
we’d think it right to offer him a seat,
would carry his stiff gloves to the fire,
and fill his glass with wine and pass him bread,
and would suffer the blessings he put
upon the empty wombs of our soup bowls;
and who knew we’d pretend to sing each verse
of the tune he’d use to condemn us,
but would have no answer to his slammed fist,
nor the thing he’d yell to be overheard
by everyone there—when you stand this close
to the other side, don’t embarrass yourselves
with hope—as if that would be saying it all,
as if he knew we already stood there,
as if we could mount some kind of defense
before snow turned back to water in his beard.
from Birmingham Poetry Review
CATHERINE BARNETT
* * *
O Esperanza!
Turns out my inner clown is full of hope.
She wants a gavel.
She wants to stencil her name on a wooden gavel:
Esperanza’s Gavel.
Clowns are clichés and they aren’t afraid of clichés.
Mine just sleeps when she’s tired.
But she can’t shake the hopes.
She’s got a bad case of it, something congenital perhaps.
Maybe it was sexually transmitted,
something to do with oxytocin or contractions or nipple stimulation,
maybe that’s it, a little goes a long way.
Hope is also the name of a bakery in Queens.
And there’s a lake in Ohio called Hope Lake where you can get nachos.
I’m so stuffed with it the comedians in the Cellar never call on me,
even when I’m sitting right there in the front row with a dumb look of hope on my face.
Look at these books: hope.
Look at this face: hope.
When I was young I studied with Richard Rorty, that was lucky,
I stared out the window and couldn’t understand a word he said,
he drew a long flat line after the C he gave me,
the class was called metaphysics and epistemology,
that’s eleven syllables, that’s
hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope.
Just before he died, Rorty said his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope
that someday our remote descendants will live in a global civilization
in which love is pretty much the only law.
from Tin House
RICK BAROT
* * *
Whitman, 1841
I don’t know if he did or did not touch the boy.
But the boy told a brother or a father or a friend,
who told someone in a tavern, or told someone
about it while the men hauled in the nets of fish
from the Sound. Or maybe it was told to someone
on the street, a group of men talking outside
the village schoolhouse, where he was the teacher.
And what was said brought everyone to church
that Sunday, where the preacher said his name
from the pulpit and the pews cleared to find him.
He was twenty-one, thought of himself as an exile.
He was boarding with the boy and his family.
The boy was a boy in that schoolroom he hated.
Not finding him in the first house, they found him
in another and dragged him from under the bed
where he had been hiding. He was led outside.
And they took the tar they used for their boats,
and they broke some pillows for their feathers,
and the biography talks about those winter months
when there was not a trace of him, until the trail
of letters, articles, stories, and poems started
up again and showed he was back in the big city.
He was done with teaching. That was one part
of himself completed, though the self would never
be final, the way his one book of poems would
never stop taking everything into itself. The look
of the streets and the buildings. The look of men
and women. The names of ferry boats and trains.
The name of the village, which was Southold.
The name of the preacher, which was Smith.
from Waxwing
JILL BIALOSKY
* * *
Daylight Savings
There was the hour
when raging with fever
they thrashed. The hour
when they called out in fright.
The hour when they fell asleep
against our bodies, the hour
when without us they might die.
The hour before school
and the hour after.
The hour when we buttered their toast
and made them meals
from the four important food groups—
what else could we do to ensure they’d get strong and grow?
There was the hour when we were spectators
at a recital, baseball game,
when they debuted in the school play.
There was the silent hour in the car
when they were angry. The hour
when they broke curfew. The hour
when we waited for the turn of the lock
knowing they were safe and we could finally
close our eyes and sleep. The hour
when they were hurt
or betrayed and there was nothing we could do
to ease the pain.
There was the hour
when we stood by their bedsides with ginger-ale
or juice until the fever broke. The hour
when we lost our temper and the hour
we were filled with regret. The hour
when we slapped their cheeks and held
our hand in wonder.
The hour when we wished for more.
The hour when their tall and strong bodies,
their newly formed curves and angles in their faces
and Adam’s apple surprised us—
who had they become?
Hours when we waited and waited.
When we rushed home from the office
or sat in their teacher’s classroom
awaiting the report of where they stumbled
and where they excelled, the hours
when they were without us, the precious hour
we did not want to lose each year
even if it meant another hour of daylight.
from Harvard Review
PAULA BOHINCE
* * *
Fruits de Mer
2011
A swirling blackness in the 20th, only the eyes visible,
or Le Monde on a historic morning, ink-heavy headline heaving
on the ground like a soldier who cannot stop the dark
from leaving his body. At Père Lachaise,
a coven of teenagers in black trench coats gathers,
like unfurled umbrellas, at Jim Morrison’s grave,
there to light a candle to their idol’s bones. A former America’s
Sweetheart played his girlfriend in the biopic.
Shocking to see her on heroin, whining Jim, Jim, with beads in her
hair. Another image-makeover, and she’s a slain Army
captain in Kabul, or was it Baghdad, or elsewhere? She kept at it
until youth left her, and now her face is ruined.
At Les Invalides, a taxidermied horse is the last sight
at the end of a corridor, a prize or cordial for enduring the war
placards. In cardinal red, the general is bemused, assured,
landing like a gangster bird anywhere he fancied.
Better an actual cardinal than more bloodshed.
Better a dove or a hawk, the predator caught on video attacking,
with talons, a drone, which seemed a victory for Nature.
This is the Age of Photographs, blown-up
Syrian children on the Pont des Arts where initialed locks
promise unbreakable love, keys scuttling through the Seine.
In flock-formation, helicopters arrive in Pakistan.
Bin Laden’s dead, Justice est faite, served like something delicious.
Justice as a concept is both annealing and a terror. Let’s go,
instead, to that place where Hemingway wrote and order
fruits de mer, its extravagant seduction, prelude to
buttery lovemaking. It’s so outrageous, if we had to pay first
we’d never do it. But oh how the oyster trembles in the throat,
prawns like mistresses in the bed of a lobster king, bewitching him.
Towering rubble of mussels, the Belgians eat the rest by
using the first one’s shell as a pincer. They held the Maginot Line
for three days before it was broken, becoming a historical joke.
Three days is nothing, a Memorial Day weekend, digging clams
at the seashore and laughing at how fast it goes.
from Parnassus
MICHELLE BOISSEAU
* * *
Ugglig
Clock in the hall, tea in cups, Henry James
has come to call on George Eliot. “To begin with,”
he writes his father, “she is magnificently ugly,
deliciously hideous.” James is twenty-six—
forgive him for flexing his wit as his pen
strides under a lamp burning with whale oil,
and let’s go where ugly began, Old Norse,
Iceland riding a gash in the earth’s crust
so that slow kisses burble the stinking mud
and hot goo geysers in hairy splendor.
Off-shore, the whale-roads are so thick
with monsters that were you nimble enough
you could dash across their breaching. Ugly,
ugglig, the choke and glub of drowning,
overcome outside your element
among the flowing families of swimmers
with faces not meant to be looked at.
Ugly is the mother of the sublime—dreadful
and magnetic, it sucks you over edges
with the torque of awe, so much like love
it must be love. “Now in this vast ugliness,”
James continues, “resides the most powerful
beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth
and charms the mind, so you end as I ended,
in falling in love with her.” And Eliot
in her horse-faced glory? All her life she’s watched
faces recoil and collect, pulling down their shades.
Her eyes open farther and farther, terrorizing
with tenderness as she peers through the viscous
heat that ego sizzles in, the flaps of pride
and currents of loneliness nursed on dumb hurts.
She reaches in and grabs the beating soul.
from The Gettysburg Review
MARIANNE BORUCH
* * *
I Get to Float Invisible
Someone’s sister in Europe writing her
adultery poems late night, half bottle
of wine pretty much required.
And they’re good, they really are—
The things one hears in an elevator.
Perfect strangers. I’ve always loved
the perfect part, as if news of the world is
a matter of pitch, and pure.
Maybe the desire of others only
simplifies me, seems generous that way.
It’s the distance, an intimacy
so far from here I get to float invisible
all over, over again like I never
lived this life. What could be
lonelier, more full of
mute ringing than what
she’s writing. That, and the wine.
Thus we pass the minutes,
ground to five, then six. And the door opens
because someone else pressed
the button first.
All along dark and light
take turns falling to earth.
And the sister
having sipped from a glass
and left behind such small shocks
is no doubt
asleep by now. I forget. Given
the time change.
from The Georgia Review
DAVID BOTTOMS
* * *
Hubert Blankenship
Needing credit, he edges through the heavy door, head down,
and quietly closes the screen behind him.
This is Blankenship, father of five, owner of a plow horse and a cow.
Out of habit he leans against the counter by the stove.
He pats the pockets of his overalls
for the grocery list penciled o
n a torn paper bag,
then rolls into a strip of newsprint
the last of his Prince Albert.
He hardly takes his eyes off his boot, sliced on one side
to accommodate his bunion, and hands
the list to my grandfather. Bull of the Woods, three tins
of sardines, Spam, peanut butter, two loaves of bread (Colonial),
then back to the musty feed room
where he ignores the hand truck leaning against the wall
and hefts onto his shoulder a hundred-pound bag of horse feed.
He rises to full height, snorting
but hardly burdened,
and parades, head high, to the bed of his pickup.
from The Southern Review
JOSEPH CHAPMAN AND LAURA EVE ENGEL
* * *
32 Fantasy Football Teams
1. The Grackles
2. The Receivers Not Taken
3. A Season in Hell
4. Love’s Austere and Lonely Offensive Linemen
5. I Have Wasted My Draft Picks
6. The Zukofsky’s A’s
7. Because I could not stop for Penalties—
8. Letters to a Young Punter
9. The Center Cannot Block
10. The Newark Wastelands
11. [Bird Metaphor]
12. The Gloaming
13. I am large, I contain multiple playbooks
14. This Is Just to Sack
15. 13 Ways of Rushing Your Blindside
16. F=O=O=T=B=A=L=L
17. The End Zone Oath
18. La Fantasy Team Sans Merci
19. Iambic Puntameter
20. The Wildcards at Coole
21. Concussed, I is an other
22. Bengal Bengal, burning bright
23. my playing career did this to me
24. Leda and the Sweep
25. The Washington Hiawathas