Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

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  CLAUDIA EMERSON (1957–2014) was raised in Chatham, Virginia. She wrote five books of poetry and taught creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, from 2012 until her death in 2014. A Guggenheim Fellow, she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her third collection of poems, Late Wife, and was appointed poet laureate of Virginia in 2008. Late Wife (Louisiana State University, 2005) deals with her experience of falling in love with a man whose wife had succumbed to lung cancer. “When someone is missing, their possessions take on meaning,” she said, echoing William Carlos Williams, who remarked that “one has emotions about the strangest things.” Emerson also drew inspiration from her Southern background. She wrote country music. Of teaching writing at universities, she said, “If they were students of guitar, I would be insisting similarly that they learn guitar, not just a song or two. You need to know how to play the guitar before you smash it to pieces onstage. If you can’t actually play, you’re just a vandal.”

  In a 2013 interview with Birmingham Poetry Review, Emerson remarked: “I have long thought that the urge people have to photograph and video every experience is borne of that anxiety to stop time and somehow save it, or ‘capture’ it as though it were a wild animal. My lens happens to be language, the highly ordered language of poetry. It’s a slow exposure, though, and a poem can take anywhere from days to years for me to bring it to its finest clarity.” Also, “We share this planet with all sorts of creatures whom we as human beings tend to see as not just other but lesser, and I have long been concerned with what I saw even as a child as a disharmony with the greater natural world of which we are part, and from which we are apart.”

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  LAURA EVE ENGEL has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is the residential program director of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop.

  See Joseph Chapman’s note for a comment on the poem Chapman wrote in collaboration with Engel, “32 Fantasy Football Teams.”

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  MARTÍN ESPADA was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He has published nearly twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His collections of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016), The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006), and Alabanza (Norton, 2003). He has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer, he is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

  Of “Here I Am,” Espada writes: “José ‘JoeGo’ Gouveia was a poet, cultural organizer, columnist, radio programmer, raconteur, and close friend. The son of Portuguese immigrants born in Taunton, Massachusetts, he lived many lives, from carpenter to biker, before earning an MFA from New England College. He had a genius for generosity. He served as the poetry curator at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, wrote ‘The Meter Man’ poetry column for The Barnstable Patriot in Hyannis, and hosted the ‘Poets’ Corner’ radio show on WOMR-FM in Provincetown. He also edited Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology (Archer Books, 2008). Gouveia published one full-length collection of poems, Saudades, with Casa Mariposa Press. He died in May 2014 at age forty-nine, one month after his book was published.”

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  PETER EVERWINE was born in Detroit in 1930 and raised in western Pennsylvania. He was educated at Northwestern University, U.S. Army (1952–54), University of Iowa, and Stanford. His most recent books are From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems (2004) and Listening Long and Late (2013), both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. A Small Clearing is forthcoming from Aureole Press. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in Fresno, California.

  Of “The Kiskiminetas River,” Everwine writes: “My grandparents were immigrants from the Piedmont region in Italy. They settled in one of the small towns along the river in a valley rich in coal mines and mills. I grew up there, in households in which the old dialect was still spoken. I’ve written about my family in other places. But I wanted to write something about the river, since it was so much a part of that world. Like many industrial rivers, it was polluted and ugly, and later in life I would see many beautiful and famous rivers. None touched me as deeply, or more often, than the Kiskiminetas. I felt I needed to write about it, especially since humanity, in this century, seems to grow more and more homeless. The river remains, but that world I love will vanish when I do.”

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  ALEXIS RHONE FANCHER is a lifelong Los Angeleno. She has a BA in theater from University of California at Santa Barbara. She is a professional photographer, and in her Los Angeles Poets Project she hopes to document more than two hundred Southern California poets. Her one-woman show at Beyond Baroque in April of 2015 featured the first thirty-five. Alexis is the author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, 2015). Since 2012 she has been poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes a monthly photo-essay, “The Poet’s Eye,” which documents her continuing love affair with Los Angeles. You can hear her on her website, alexisrhonefancher.com.

  Of “When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” Fancher writes: “Soon after the publication of my first book, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems, the book’s namesake, the real Michael Cohen, posted a review on Amazon. His words were complimentary. He gave the book five stars. His only complaint? He had ‘friended’ me on Facebook, and I had chosen to ignore him. He wrote that I might still be miffed over the ‘Debbie episode,’ when he’d slept with my younger sister. Only two years apart, Debbie and I were always competitive. Michael Cohen’s words brought back my adolescence with a vengeance. I now have eight ‘sister’ poems, and counting.

  “When Debbie read ‘When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:’ in Ragazine, she shared with me her memories of those turbulent years. We reminisced for hours. It was the closest we’ve ever been.”

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  CHARLES FORT was born in New Britain, Connecticut, in 1951. He taught at the University of Nebraska at Kearney as the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry (1997–2007). His books include Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz: New and Selected Prose Poems (Backwaters Press, 2013), We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2012), Frankenstein Was a Negro (Logan House Press, 2002), Darvil (St. Andrews Press, 1993), and The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press, 1985; Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series, 1991). The University of Nebraska at Kearney also brought out a number of his chapbooks in limited editions, including Blues of a Mumbling Train (2004) and As the Lilac Burned the Laurel Grew (1999). Fort’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry (2002 and 2003 editions) and The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal. He is the founder of the Wendy Fort Foundation Theater of Fine Arts. A MacDowell fellow, Fort is writing his first novel, The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut.

  Of “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing,” Fort writes: “I am writing 200 villanelles. The book is titled Sorrow Road, and its subjects include Stravinsky, Hendrix, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Van Gogh, the Beatles, Motown, Miles, Coltrane, Pinter, Manson, Charlie McCarthy, Woodstock, Coleridge, Little Black Sambo, Knucklehead Smiff, Bergman, Stephen Hawking, etc. My interest in poetic forms no doubt began with my first reading of A. E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’ when I was a lad at our working-class city’s public library in New Britain, Connecticut.

  “When I told a colleague I was writing 200 villanelles, he said in a soft yet desperat
e tone: ‘No. No. No.’ I am grateful to Fred Chappell and Sydney Lea for their enthusiastic support of Sorrow Road, which could have been a sonnet sequence (I’ve written two), a prose-poem sequence (I’ve written a trilogy), or several sestinas. My last attempt was a variant-triple-sestina full of odd and relentless repetends. Indeed, I wrote a letter to Stephen Hawking at Oxford, not to apply for the job opening to be his assistant, but to ask him if he would assist me in tracing the origin of the sixes in the sestina. The matter has yet to be settled.

  “I walked into a café ready to sit, read, and write. I observed what I assumed were a mother and daughter ordering their coffee. The daughter seemed distraught. They sat down, the daughter weeping and the mother not recognizing the face of her own daughter, nor the place where they sat and trembled with their simple cups. Over the next few days my poem emerged out of memory and imagination: ‘One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing.’ ”

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  EMILY FRAGOS has published two books of poetry, Hostage: New & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011) and Little Savage (Grove Press, 2004), and has edited five anthologies for the Everyman’s Pocket Library. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Witter Bynner Prize from the Library of Congress. She was born in Mt. Vernon, New York, and she teaches at NYU and Columbia.

  Fragos writes: “I discarded a bad poem, but retained one of its phrases: the sadness of clothes. This poem flowed from those four words. One can admire the narrator who tries to reason with and accept sorrow; but grief has the final say, as the inconsolable clothes assume their human shapes of despair.”

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  AMY GERSTLER was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. She writes poetry and prose and teaches in the MFA creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine. Her books of poetry include Scattered at Sea (2015), Dearest Creature (2009), Ghost Girl (2004), and Medicine (2000), all published by Penguin. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.

  Of “A Drop of Seawater Under the Microscope,” Gerstler writes: “The genesis of this poem is very simple, maybe rather childlike. Someone posted a photo on Facebook that I found so mysterious, beautiful, and arresting, of a drop of seawater under the microscope. If you are reading this now and get joy from such things, you can Google that phrase and peruse the images that come up. You get pictures of a crazy abundance of microorganisms. These images of what’s living and darting about in a drop of ocean water would make awesome wallpaper, or fabric designs. I’d love to have a dress with that print on it. Every time I peer at that busy, active image I am thrilled and sobered by awe and wonder. Some of the life-forms look like streamers, some like conical party hats, some like tiny doodles of eyeballs or breasts, or candies or fireworks or Japanese rice crackers. A drop of seawater as ultimate Rorschach inkblot. So many worlds we can’t see, writhing and seething and swimming inside and outside us all. I can never get over it.”

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  DANA GIOIA was born in Los Angeles in 1950. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf Press, 2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (Graywolf, 2016). His three critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (Graywolf, 1992). He has written three opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies. He served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. He holds the Judge Widney Chair of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he teaches each fall semester. In 2015 he was appointed the poet laureate of California.

  Gioia writes: “ ‘Meet Me at the Lighthouse’ describes a real nightclub on the Hermosa Beach pier in southwest Los Angeles—not far from where I grew up in Hawthorne. The Lighthouse Café never had much ambience, but it survived by showcasing West Coast jazz. The club had a terrific house band, the Lighthouse All-Stars, led by bassist Howard Rumsey. Over the years this smoke-filled, noisy joint featured nearly every major California jazz artist, many of whom recorded there.

  “A jazz fan will recognize all of the people named in the poem—Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, Hampton Hawes, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. I hope Mr. Yeats will forgive my twisting his famous line, but those six musicians do represent some of the ‘singing-masters of my soul.’ The unnamed ‘you’ in the poem is my cousin (and closest childhood friend) Philip Dragotto. Since his early death, I’ve never had the heart to revisit our old haunt. Mr. Bones should require no introduction.”

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  JORIE GRAHAM is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently From the New World: Poems 1976–2014 from Ecco/HarperCollins. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard University. She has received the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1990.

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  JULIANA GRAY is the author of Roleplay (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and The Man Under My Skin (River City Publishing, 2005). Born in Selma, Alabama, in 1972, she now lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

  Gray writes: “ ‘The Lady Responds’ came about when I was researching and writing the poems that eventually became my chapbook Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve (Winged City Chapbook Press, 2013). I was fascinated by the juicy rumor that Anne had had an affair with the poet Thomas Wyatt, and I wanted to give her the chance to respond to Wyatt’s overt misogyny in poems like ‘Whoso List to Hunt.’ The sonnet that resulted, however, didn’t fit with the loosely metered, persona-driven Boleyn poems I’d been writing, so I separated it from that project and sent the orphan into the world on its own. I’m grateful to River Styx for giving this poem a home, and to Richard Newman for his thoughtful editorial suggestions.”

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  LINDA GREGERSON was born in Elgin, Illinois, in 1950. She is the author of six collections of poetry: Prodigal: New and Selected Poems: 1976–2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), The Selvage (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), and Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon Gate, 1982). Waterborne won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

  Of “Font,” Gregerson writes: “The article about Baby 59 appeared in The Guardian one morning, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I trawled the Internet to see if I could learn more about the mother or her child. The accompanying ad was as described. What must we look like to the creatures from other planets who know us only by our algorithms?”

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  JENNIFER GROTZ was born in Canyon, Texas, in 1971. She is a professor at the University of Rochester and assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was named director of the recently established Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. The author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016), she has translated works from the French and Polish. Her most recent translations are the novel Rochester Knockings by Hubert Haddad (Open Letter, 2015) and Psalms of All My Days, poems by Patrice de La Tour du Pin (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). This is her fourth appearance in The Best American Poetry.

  Of “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City,” Grotz writes: “Ut pictura, poesis: as with painting, so with poetry, the saying goes, and perhaps this is why from time to time poets, like painters, use the exercise of the self-portrait to practice seeing. If either the poet or the painter is lucky, sight leads to insight. In this unabashedly autobiographical poem, I use a shop window on a busy street in Warsaw, not a mirror, to view myself, and though my poem aims for truthful perception, I think it renders what, I’m convinced more and more, poems are meant to achieve, that is: registering what it feels like
to pass through time.”

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  MARK HALLIDAY was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1949. Since 1996 he has taught in the creative writing program at Ohio University. His sixth book of poems, Thresherphobe, appeared in 2013 from the University of Chicago Press.

  Of “Doctor Scheef,” Halliday writes: “An unreasonable complaint can derive intensity from the speaker’s awareness that it is unreasonable. By giving form to such an entangled feeling, a poem can make it less inward-thorny. One good example is ‘My Mother’s Last Cigarette’ by BJ Ward. Another is Dickinson’s ‘Of course—I prayed—.’ And some percentage of the innumerable divorce poems in our world. Sometimes a refusal to forgive is what the spirit needs.”

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  JEFFREY HARRISON was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1957. He has published five books of poetry: The Singing Underneath (E. P. Dutton, 1987), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series; Signs of Arrival (Copper Beech, 1996); Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001); Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006); and, most recently, Into Daylight (Tupelo Press, 2014), the winner of the Dorset Prize. A volume of selected poems, The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2006 by the Waywiser Press in the United Kingdom. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in eastern Massachusetts.

  Of “Afterword,” Harrison writes: “The maple limb in the poem had cracked and fallen under the weight of a wet, heavy snow. It was a large limb, completely detached from the tree and lying on the ground beside a trail I walk on periodically in our local woods. I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought, but after walking by it for months I’m sure I’d come to think of it as a dead limb. So I was startled one spring day to walk by it and see it in full bloom with small, bright red blossoms (not the buds that become leaves but the tiny red tassel-like flowers that appear earlier). The sight was visually striking in a literal way but also seemed almost instantly emblematic of those moments of magical thinking when loved ones who have died and been separated from us forever suddenly seem to speak or signal to us from the beyond. I was probably thinking of my brother but left him out of this particular poem. Though I often tend to write narratively, this poem was short and more of a lyric from the start, perhaps because it was inspired by, and tries to enact, a sudden moment of recognition.”