Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

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  TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He is the author of How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015). His other books are Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He received a 2010 National Book Award and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.

  Hayes writes: “I hope ‘Barberism’ lives in the ear. I think of it as a fairly straightforward elegy riding a few rails of sound.”

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  TONY HOAGLAND was born in North Carolina in 1953. His latest book of poems is Application for Release from the Dream (2015). Others include What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010), and Donkey Gospel (1998), all from Graywolf Press. His work has received the Mark Twain Award, the James Laughlin Prize, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and other recognitions. His second book of prose, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays, was published by Graywolf in 2014. He teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

  Hoagland writes: “I wrote the poem ‘Bible Study’ during an especially lucid period a few years ago. I had the feeling that I had made unusual emotional and psychic progress in the preceding year or two, that I had turned a corner in my relations with other people. This had in part to do with friendships formed through my association with an entity called the Great Mother Conference, an annual arts and culture gathering founded forty years ago by Robert Bly. Though who can say about these sea changes of the inner landscape? Some degree of adventure had reentered my life, resulting in the measured optimism of the poem.

  “ ‘Bible Study’ has what I would call an accretive structure, a counterpoint arrangement of light and brooding tones, alternating ironic and hopeful inflections. Thus the abrupt jump from the wonder of stanza one to the darker tone of stanza two, with its dream image implying that severe damage is fairly inevitable. Similarly, the line that says ‘My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper’ implies a good news/bad news structure to experience: the nose may be broken, but it still works, and there’s meatloaf for dinner.

  “An accretive or composite poem is not quite like a narrative or discursive poem; it doesn’t transport the reader swiftly along in a forward direction; instead, it is like a chord of simultaneously played notes, and the poem’s force resides in the combined inferences of harmonic-disharmonic arrangement. And let me say that I myself am mistrustful of aesthetic explanations that sound as conceptual as this one: so much handicapped contemporary poetry uses such nerdy theoretical statements to argue for its own esoteric existence.

  “Nonetheless, as I’ve gotten older, I have found that the narrative modes are not always adequate for representing the layered ambivalences and doubled-creased knowledge that is consciousness past a certain age. Complexity of tone has become, increasingly, the most precious and exciting thing for me in poetry. Tranströmer, Miłosz, Szymborska, Anne Carson, and Fanny Howe—and many others—have become my mentors.

  “I’m conscious of the marvelous power of story, and I hope to return to it somehow, but for now it’s the music of complex tonal play that I’m drawn to. At the same time, I believe more than ever that emotional depth and its plaintive assertion is the greatest treasure most poems carry, the aspect of poetry that will never grow old or less than necessary for readers. That is the impulse in the last stanzas of ‘Bible Study.’ There are many ways of delivering the emotional moment of a poem, but I don’t think it can be counterfeited or artificed. In that sense, poetic work is always going to be tied up in self-work, or soul-work, if you care to put it like that. As a reader, I feel I can always distinguish between the poets who are standing with their feet in the fire, and the ones who are phoning it in from uptown.”

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  CYNTHIA HOGUE was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1951. She taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. She has published eight collections of poetry, three of which—Revenance (2014), Or Consequence (2010), and The Incognito Body (2006)—were published by Red Hen Press. Her ninth collection, In June, the Labyrinth, will be published by Red Hen in 2017. Since 2006, Hogue has been an active translator from contemporary French poetry. She is cotranslator of Fortino Sámano (The Overflowing of the Poem) by poet Virginie Lalucq and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, which won the 2013 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Hogue holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in modern and contemporary poetry in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.

  Of “The Unwritten Volume,” Hogue writes: “This poem is drawn from a book-length series, In June, the Labyrinth, composed of four untitled parts, part elegy and part pilgrimage. During the years in which I wrote the series, I visited and researched labyrinths, exploring the idea of the labyrinth as a figure for the poem (and for a life). That central trope emerges in ‘The Unwritten Volume,’ a poem that includes details from one of my first trips to Chartres Cathedral, as I was about to learn that a dear friend I knew to be ailing had died. The trip to Chartres triggered a kind of vague, initiatory idea: something has begun but you have no idea for some time where it’s going. Even, maybe, nowhere. You just have to find out, that much you know. Along with the literary allusions in ‘The Unwritten Volume,’ there emerge the odd or dissonant narrative elements, like the little boy scattering the rose petals, a remembered dinner in a termite-infested cottage, and the organist (who had been playing for a wedding) sticking around to practice his Bach. As the original loss of my friend deepened with other losses, the central character became a fictional composite, ‘Elle,’ whose story began to come to me quite separate from any life I knew my friend to have lived, except for the fact that she never had time to finish her book. Perhaps it’s obvious that my book isn’t hers, but it contains a palimpsest of the quest she undertook and didn’t live to finish.”

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  GARRETT HONGO was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, and grew up on the North Shore of O‘ahu and in Los Angeles. He was educated at Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Irvine, where he received an MFA. His latest book of poetry, Coral Road, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2011. He has also published two books of poetry, three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i (Knopf/Vintage, 1995). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Houston, UC Irvine, Vanderbilt, and the Universitá degli Studi di Firenze. A Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, he is at work on a book of nonfiction entitled The Perfect Sound: Confessions of an Audiophile.

  Of “I Got Heaven,” Hongo writes: “The poem came about in an unusual way. In January 2014 or so, the poet and HarperCollins editor Daniel Halpern asked me to contribute my original manuscript pages of a poem for an auction he was planning in support of the National Poetry Series—a very worthy cause. I thought I’d contribute the draft pages of a poem that had appeared in his magazine Antaeus back in the 1980s, but I couldn’t locate them. Instead, I found a file marked ’79 Drafts in ballpoint on the bent and fraying tab. It contained stray lines, on yellow sheets, that must have been my first attempt to write about the Obon festival in Gardena, California, where I went to high school. Gardena is a suburb of Los Angeles where, eventually, about sixteen thousand Japanese Americans came to live when they were released from internment camps after World War II—the highest concentration of Japanese Americans outside of Honolulu. It’s also right next to Compton, where my African American schoolmates got bused in to attend Gardena High. A flatland where once had been fields of strawberries and flowers, the
area is dotted with touches of Japanese culture everywhere—full-size front yard pines trimmed and twisted like bonsai, shops selling sushi and Japanese pastries, and traditional architectural structures like the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple on 166th Street. In midsummer, the church sponsors a ‘festival for the dead.’ People of all ethnicities from all over the community gather, wearing colorful happi coats, brocaded kimono with flowing sleeves, and summer evening robes of thin cotton, to dance in a joyous circle up and down the roped-off street next to the temple. The music has a heavy drum beat. The theology is that it’s to earn better karma for souls of the dead trapped in limbo, unable to reach nirvana. Your dancing frees them. I’d always wanted to write about that event, full of such splendor, and here, in draft pages, were lines from the first time I’d tried. They were scribbled down when I’d been a graduate student at UC Irvine, studying under the great poet Charles Wright. But they’d gone nowhere. I couldn’t find my way to a poem then. In times since, I’ve written other poems about Obon festivals in Kahuku, Waimea, and Hale‘iwa, all in Hawai‘i, where I lived as a child, but never from a festival in Gardena. But seeing these stray, effortful lines again, I knew immediately what to do. So I composed a new piece, resetting some of the lines and most of the images from this old draft. The poem came out easily. I sent the old manuscript pages, the one page of the new draft, and a typescript copy of the finished poem to Dan, and I think he incorporated them in his auction. ‘I Got Heaven’ is this poem.”

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  ERIN HOOVER was born in 1979 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. She has served as editor of The Southeast Review, a volunteer for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and cofounder of Late Night Library, a literary arts nonprofit organization. For about a decade she lived in New York City and worked as a communications director.

  Of “Girls,” Hoover writes: “Long before I thought I had any right to be a feminist poet and academic, I considered myself a feminist person—yet it was never clear to me how to be one on a daily basis. I knew what I believed, but not how to enact my beliefs with any decisiveness as a person in the world. When Lena Dunham and HBO launched Girls, I thought, yes, that’s what this show is about. The three waves of feminism exist on a continuum, and so do all the women who have ever stood at the back of a club waiting to get chosen by the band, in an environment which is fraught not only with the economies of sex and ambition, but also just plain wanting validation in whatever form it comes. The critical reaction to Girls reminded me of all the ways that women continue to have our actions defined for us by a culture that is extremely hostile if we won’t play the game. So when I say, ‘turn up the lights,’ I mean let’s acknowledge that all of this is complicated, and know that we can hold strong political beliefs and still desire attention and affection from others, sometimes under terms we don’t get to set. Both things are true.”

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  Born in Ohio in 1929, RICHARD HOWARD was educated in an intensely progressive institution called the Park School of Cleveland, thereafter graduating from Columbia College and receiving an MA from Columbia University, followed in 1953 by a fellowship at the Sorbonne. Remaining in Paris for several years, he later worked for three years as a lexicographer in Cleveland and New York, since then writing fifteen books of poems, several volumes of criticism, and some two hundred works of translation from French, including works by Gide, Roland Barthes, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. He has received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry. In 2014 his latest book of poems, A Progressive Education, was published by Turtle Point Press. For the last seventeen years he has taught literature to aspiring young poets in the School of the Arts, Writing Division, at Columbia. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1995.

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  T. R. HUMMER was born in Macon, Mississippi, in 1950, “and escaped from there with my soul hidden away in a Prince Albert can and stuffed in a tenor sax case in 1976.” His twelfth book of poems, Eon—which is the third in a cluster of three books, ten years in the making—will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2018. He teaches distantly for Arizona State University.

  Hummer writes: “ ‘Minutiae’ was born by accident, out of the ruin of a misguided attempt to write a poem about the songwriter Hank Williams. There are lines in his great song ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ that have long interested me as a poet: ‘Did you ever see a robin weep / When leaves begin to die?’ is surely (I have often thought) one of the most wretched couplets ever penned. No, I say, I never did see a robin weep. How would you know a robin was weeping? Would a great tear roll down his feathery cheek out there in the woods where the leaves of course are dying? But then Williams pulls it out: ‘That means he’s lost the will to live / I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ At that point we see perfectly how the ‘pathetic fallacy’ operates, how the personification is a perfect projection of the singer’s emotional disaster. The devil is in the minutiae, but the soul is revealed in the stark gesture: he’s lost the will to live, but I am so lonesome I could cry. Cue the pedal steel guitar. The poem about Williams was stillborn, but the desire remained. That swerve was the thing I wanted to replicate, the steel guitar’s rending glissando, and the resulting wreckage.”

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  ISHION HUTCHINSON was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collections are Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Fellow assistant professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

  Hutchinson writes: “I wrote, or rather rewrote, the first draft of what became ‘Morning Tableau’ one morning last summer in Krems, Austria. The poem’s previous incarnation had the image of the beloved swaying in the hammock and the little lyric, ‘my God, my heaven, my all,’ which came from reading a letter of Van Gogh’s in which he quotes a hymn (to Tio, I think) from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book he loved. The morning I woke to rain—rain on the Danube, which I could see from my window over the tops of apartments—and maybe this will sound melodramatic, but the rain didn’t seem like rain at home, no tropical haze, if I may, but it stuck with me and the atmosphere, the romance of the Austrian rain, ashen to my eyes (light tropical rain being clear silver), started to work its way into the draft. I am sure it was the rain that led me to rewrite the poem, but it was the town as a whole. One of the streets near the hotel is lined with linden, there is even a hotel there called Unter den Linden, which, I supposed, is to be reminiscent of the boulevard in Berlin, and of course it is nowhere as grand; this is a provincial town, its association is rural medieval, not of the operatic architecture of a wet metropolis, just the subtle resonance you find of a village in the rain anywhere. A scream is buried under every quiet, something disfigured by history, and I think the poem eventually rejects the quiet it opens with, rejects even an attitude that says love is paradisal, to end on an inflection of morning as mourning, depending on your accent. That disfiguring history in the poem is, of course, the Holocaust and World War II, which I think is filtered through some of the books I was reading then, particularly those of Thomas Bernhard. I didn’t want to be emphatic about that—essentially I see the poem as a love poem, an aubade—hence why the most direct line concerning that history is borrowed and bracketed with quotation marks.”

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  MAJOR JACKSON is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Roll Deep (W. W. Norton, 2015). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor at the University of Vermont and a member of the core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

  Jackson writes: “ ‘Aubade’ takes off from Richard Wilbur’s terrific poem ‘A Late Aubade,’ whose rhetorical structure s
ponsors my own poem. Prior to 2012, I thought the tradition of poetry about lovers separating in the morning a quaint layover from that bygone era of courtly love poetry whose passionate expressions of longing seemed excessively sentimental and out of step with our times. Until forced to conduct and manage a relationship over 1,300 miles for nearly half a decade in which the anxiety of separation from my wife and of having to say ‘good-bye’ was real in every instance, did I change my attitude and begin to take delight in such poetry whose themes of carpe diem and living a full life inclusive of spiritual and corporeal love felt essential and timeless, recognizing, too, that such dramatic performances of seduction are not only a necessity of the form, but a joy when adapted to refract the particular texture of loving in our fast-paced age of travel and digital connectedness. Like the sonnet, the aubade understands itself as participating in a conversation about love and as a performance rather than a confession whose audience is more than the beloved addressed in the poem, but the countless readers who will encounter it.”

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  Born in Detroit in 1948, LAWRENCE JOSEPH is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he received a major Hopwood Award for poetry; the University of Cambridge, where he received an MA in English Literature; and the University of Michigan Law School. His most recent books of poetry are Into It and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (which includes his first three books, Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes), published in 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His book of poems So Where Are We? is forthcoming from FSG in 2017. He is also the author of two books of prose, Lawyerland (FSG, 1997) and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, published in the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry Series in 2011. He has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Shouting at No One and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. As Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, he teaches courses on labor, employment, and tort and compensation law, legal theory, and law and interpretation. He has also taught creative writing at Princeton. Married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem, he lives in lower Manhattan.