Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

  “But all that came after years and years of silence. On the day that I finally sat down to write this poem, I didn’t know what I was doing. Each line felt like a quick sketch. I just started writing, or listening. I had been thinking a lot about India, where I had lived on and off for a while. It’s hard to think about India without thinking about the East India Company and the West India Company—colonialism always present in everything I do, like the ancient world. But still this poem felt accidental. I was smarting. One day it pretty much came out just as it is, beginning to end. That rarely happens. I believe in the Great Church of Revision, so this poem falling out fully fashioned shocked me. And when it turned in on itself, at the end, it was its gift for me. In writing it, I learned who the new self was to become. I love that great Hindu/Buddhist slogan: ‘There are no others.’ I was feeling that deeply. There was no one to blame. Certainly no one to praise. So much death, and not all of it obvious. I was thinking about the ways in which we take our leave—from homes, from nations, from our bodies, from each other. And most of all I wanted to say to the Goddess: Life sucks, but I understand. Perhaps this poem was proof of my surrender.”

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  THOMAS LUX was born in 1946 in Massachusetts. His most recent book of poetry is To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). In 2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems of Bill Knott, which Lux edited and for which he wrote the introduction. He is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He lives in Atlanta.

  Of “Ode While Awaiting Execution,” Lux writes: “The poem was composed over a period of several months in 2014. The poem uses one of my favorite poetic tools: metaphor. I wish I could speak more about the process of writing a poem, but except for saying that it happens gradually over many drafts, I can’t.”

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  PAUL MARIANI was born in New York City on February 29, 1940. He holds a chair as Boston College’s University Professor of English, where he has taught since 2000. Prior to that he was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts, where he taught from 1968 until 2000. His first teaching assignments were at Colgate University, the semester we lost Jack Kennedy, and three colleges in the New York City area: Hunter, Lehman, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where Frank Serpico was one of his students. Mariani is the author of eighteen books, including seven volumes of poetry: Timing Devices (Pennyroyal Press and Godine; 1977, 1979), Crossing Cocytus (Grove Press, 1982), Prime Mover (Grove Press, 1985), Salvage Operations: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1990), The Great Wheel (Norton, 1996), Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), and Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems (Cascade Books, 2012). In addition he has published A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Cornell University Press, 1970), William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (American Library Association, 1974), A Usable Past: Essays on Modern & Contemporary Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), God and the Imagination: Poetry, Poets, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking/Penguin, 2002), and six biographies of poets: William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (McGraw Hill and Norton, 1981 and 1990); Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (William Morrow, 1990); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (Norton, 1994); The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (Norton, 1999), which was the basis for James Franco’s feature-length film The Broken Tower; Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Viking/Penguin, 2008); and The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

  Of “Psalm for the Lost,” Mariani writes: “I don’t remember exactly what was troubling me when I wrote this poem, and in truth I don’t really want to go back there again. But what the poem tells me is that I had finally come to the realization in the very marrow of my soul that everything I had worked for or thought I had worked for would soon come to an end, and that I had no control over what my gift to others—if anything—will be. Fr. Hopkins knew this, as did John Berryman. But then so, too, did others I have followed down the years: Hardy, Yeats, Williams, Stevens, Lowell, Hart Crane, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Levine. My wife and I read a psalm each morning over coffee as a kind of spiritual exercise, and so something of the ancient cry you find there finds itself here as well. But then there’s Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian, who realized at the end that everything he had built was just so much straw in comparison to what he glimpsed at the altar one morning. Then, too, there’s Caravaggio’s sobering portrait of Peter at the moment of his denial of his master, caught in the unforgiving light of that brazier, and the troubling question of what after all really matters if you can deny everything you’ve built your life on. Which brings me to the Zen-like final image of my three sons building the most elaborate sand castles for our five grandchildren each summer on First Encounter Beach—turrets, art deco, Gaudi-like structures, which the incoming tide washes away within hours. If anything I have built is going to remain, it will have to be in hands other than my own, building up, as the wind wills, once again out of the dust.”

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  DEBRA MARQUART is a professor of English in the MFA Program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University. She is the senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment and an affiliated faculty member with the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of three poetry collections—Small Buried Things (New Rivers Press, 2015), Everything’s a Verb (New Rivers, 1995), and From Sweetness (Pearl Editions, 2001)—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories (New Rivers, 2001). The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint Press, 2007), her memoir, received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She won the 2013 Wachtmeister Award from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Normal Poetry Prize from The Normal School, and the 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award from Farmingdale State College.

  Marquart writes: “ ‘Lament’ is the last section of the long title poem of my latest collection, Small Buried Things. The poem documents the destructive effects of the oil exploration that has overrun my home state of North Dakota since the discovery of two shale formations underlying the state that have an estimated 7 to 11 billion barrels of oil—made recoverable now through the technology of fracking. The sections of the poem register my own concerns, plus the worries that I heard from people within the region as I traveled the state in 2013 and 2015 teaching writing workshops for the North Dakota Humanities Council in small towns and communities impacted by the oil boom.

  “According to The New York Times, in the period between 2006 and 2014, ‘more than 18.4 million gallons of oils and chemicals spilled, leaked or misted into the air, soil and waters of North Dakota. . . . In addition, the oil industry reported spilling 5.2 million gallons of nontoxic substances, mostly fresh water, which can alter the environment and carry contaminants.’ These spills occurred largely in rural parts of the state without access to municipal water supplies where populations are dependent on well water drawn from groundwater sources made vulnerable by surface spills.

  “The first four sections of the poem, ‘Small Buried Things,’ address the degradation to the environment, the impacts on soil, water safety, and human health, as well as the sharp rise in violent crime, industrial accidents, and highway fatalities. The poem also addresses the concerning presence of actively commissioned ICBMs that remain buried in the region where fracking is occurring, in addition to concerns about the rise in seismic activity through the midwestern states because of reinjection wells, another byproduct technology connected to the practice of fracking. ‘Lament’ is the last section of the poem, a kind of keening in the face of what has proven to be the unstoppable destructive force of the oil extraction industry.”

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  CATE MARVIN was born in Washington, DC, in 1969. She att
ended Marlboro College in Vermont for her BA. She received two MFAs in creative writing, one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction, as well as a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. She has published three books of poems: World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001), Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande, 2007), and Oracle (W. W. Norton, 2015). She has received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her daughter, and is a professor of English and creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

  Marvin writes: “Thanks to the generosity of my then-Dean at the College of Staten Island, Francisco Soto (himself a scholar of Octavio Paz), I was granted a three-week academic tour of China during the summer of 2007, an experience upon which the poem ‘High School in Schuzou’ was based. I’d long been loath to consider my high school experience as poetic material. However, while visiting a particular school in Schuzou, I went to a restroom (a ‘girls’ room’) and experienced a flashback: in short, I felt confined, and was intensely reminded that we all originate from a point of certain disadvantage as children placed in institutional environments. My most recent book, Oracle, contains several ‘high school’ poems that explore this experience.”

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  MORGAN PARKER was born in 1987 in Redlands, California, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Switchback Books, 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize. Her second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in February 2017. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she works as an editor for Amazon Publishing’s imprint Little A, and moonlights as poetry editor of The Offing. She also teaches creative writing at Columbia University and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With poet and performer Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.

  Of “Everything Will Be Taken Away,” Parker writes: “I wrote this poem after reflecting on and being seduced by a text-based piece by conceptual artist Adrian Piper, from which the poem takes its title. In summer 2015, with death so ubiquitous on the news and in the air, the phrase resonated like a chant, a reminder, a comfort as well as an elegy. This is a poem about mourning the past and the future simultaneously. It’s about understanding your own body as a terminal thing.”

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  HAI-DANG PHAN was born in Vietnam in 1980. He came to the United States as a refugee with his family in 1982 and grew up in Wisconsin. He is the author of the chapbook Small Wars (Convulsive Editions, 2016). A graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program in creative writing, he lives in Des Moines and teaches at Grinnell College.

  Of “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981),” Hai-Dang Phan writes: “It’s a failed essay. On first looking into my father’s Norton, I wanted to write a personal essay exploring some of the same questions of migration, mourning, and inheritance in prose. However, the unreconstructed poet in me sabotaged the wannabe essayist from the start because what I did right away was make a list—which resists narrative and induces poetry—of all the words my father had marked for attention. That list, those charm-like words, cast their spell. And so the poem, and so the opening list. It’s a found poem, artifice meets accident, sourced from the literary works and reader’s notes of my father’s textbook. I wanted to convey the uniquely tactile, sensuous, and material experience of reading and responding to a printed book, alongside the intimate thrill of handwriting. It’s a poem-quilt made of well-worn texts (by, and in order of appearance: Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, and Wallace Stevens). It’s the ghost of a sestina. ‘It has the appearance of a sesqui-sestina,’ a perceptive, trusted reader (the poem bears the fingerprints of a number of them) observed after reading a later, slightly longer draft. During early drafts I actually had the bad idea, quickly discarded, of using words from the list I compiled as my six end-words for a hypothetical sestina. The six-line stanza form I ultimately kept, for shape and restraint, recursiveness and sprawl. It’s a capsule biography, a portrait of my father (who served during the war as an officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, mostly on a small patrol boat unit in the Mekong Delta); as an immigrant trying to learn the language and literature of his adopted country; as a father trying to come to terms with the loss of his first child, whom he only ever saw alive once, and while he was in reeducation camp. I feel compelled to note that it’s my mother’s grief, briefly acknowledged and secreted inside a borrowed metaphor, which haunts the margins of the poem when I return to it now. After all, she was the one who had to deal with the death of her daughter while her husband was imprisoned, her private sorrow its own prison house. It’s also a self-portrait because my life is bound up with this family trauma, and the historical trauma surrounding it. Insofar as I grapple with these legacies, as a writer I’m interested in the formal problems and possibilities they pose. Given the intense emotional response my father’s marginalia provoked in me and what became the concerns of the poem, I needed a distancing strategy to combat the threat of cheap sentiment, false immediacy, and unknowing appropriation. Hence, the professorial persona and voice of the detached academic. In October 2012, when I came across my father’s Norton while visiting my parents in Wisconsin, I had just started teaching at Grinnell College and entered a period of uncertainty about the course of my writing life. It’s a reconciliation between two selves, the poet and the professor, that I, too, often see as conflictual, not to mention the age-old wars between fathers and sons, the present and the past. It’s my marginalia on his marginalia, a double-annotation and translation, of what words, memories, people, and events mean as they change contexts, of the unknowable. It’s a record and reenactment of reading, between the lines, behind the words, for the lives we’ve missed, others’ and our own.”

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  ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS is the author of two books of poetry, The Ground (2012) and Heaven (2015), both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as the collection of literary essays When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010) and a translation, from the Catalan, of Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey, 2012). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Pen/Joyce Osterweil Prize for Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. His poetry has been translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and SUNY-Stony Brook University. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, he lives in New York City and Barcelona.

  Phillips writes: “If I were to tell you that ‘The First Last Light in the Sky’ began as a short story, I would understand if you didn’t believe me. It certainly doesn’t read like, say, a poem by Browning or Frost, many of which you could be conned into thinking began as prose narratives. And that’s intended no slight to their verses: after all, it’s well known that Yeats would scratch out a paragraph or two about the mise-en-scène of a poem before the perfume of his prosody took over. Is Lydia Davis writing poetry? Is Haruki Murakami writing prose? Poetry is my resting state. And as I was editing this story (there was so much more of it you’ll never see), the reductions began to distribute themselves into parcels of ten syllables with somewhat of an iambic temperament, the vision became prophetic instead of prosaic. I’m not one for grand statements about poetry but I take it as gospel that you should never run away from a poem when a poem declares its presence in your life. And so the short story that was became the poem that this now is. Its ending was not in the original, but as the poem made its presence clear it had words for me, like an annunciation—song and pain, it said. A bit of I AM THAT I AM. This is sung and seen in lala and ‘aiai’: mirror images of each other but for ‘aiai,’ the ancient wail of lament from myth, looking like a lala that’s been cut cle
an through by something severe.”

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  STANLEY PLUMLY was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939. He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. From W. W. Norton, recent volumes of poems include Old Heart (2007; Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2008) and Orphan Hours (2012). Recent books of prose include Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008) and The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014; the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, 2015). He lives in Frederick, Maryland.

  Of “Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Five Flights Up,’ ” Plumly writes: “ ‘Five Flights Up’ is the last poem in Elizabeth Bishop’s final single volume, Geography III. To me, it has always represented a kind of swan song of both exhaustion and reconciliation. It is an exquisitely beautiful exit poem. One reaches an age when even bending over to tie one’s shoes becomes one more signature of mortality.”

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  JAMES RICHARDSON was born in Bradenton, Florida, in 1950. His recent books include During (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), which was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press, 2004), and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001). He received the 2011 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has taught at Princeton University since 1980.