Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

  Of “Late Aubade,” Richardson writes: “An aubade is a dawn song, often for the parting of lovers. So a late aubade would be faintly paradoxical, though of course I also mean late in life. My poem borrows from Hardy a little of his rhythm and his habit of writing self-elegies and Farewells to Life, not surprising in a poet who did much of his best work in his seventies and eighties. It reminds me a little of his ‘He Never Expected Much.’ Hard to say exactly who Hardy was addressing his good-byes to, but my Life is a woman who seems to be very old and very young at the same time.”

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  PATRICK ROSAL is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016). Other titles are Boneshepherds (2011), My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003), all from Persea Books. A former Fulbright research fellow, he is a full-time faculty member of the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden.

  Of “At the Tribunals,” Rosal writes: “When I started reading and writing seriously, I was astonished by the lack of violence in American poetry. It’s such a major part of our history and of almost every coming-of-age narrative for people on the margins, and yet much of our poetry seemed uninterested in looking squarely at this nation’s violence. I feel I’ve inherited a tradition (which isn’t solely literary) that asks me to examine the evidence of my own life and how I might have been complicit in America’s brutishness. To me, it is a necessary exercise as a citizen and an artist. I don’t think I needed headlines to teach me this. Early on in my writing life, I felt charged with this responsibility by elder storytellers, singers, gamblers, mga manghihilot, poets, and others. Imagine if young men were taught that sort of reflection—if they were given permission to be confounded by their own brutality rather than so simply assured of its power.”

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  DAVID ST. JOHN was born in Fresno, California, in 1949. His books of poetry include Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems (1994); The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012); and The Window (Arctos Press, 2014). A volume of his essays, reviews, and interviews is entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us (White Pine Press, 1995). He has written libretti for Donald Crockett’s opera based on his book The Face, and Frank Ticheli’s choral symphony The Shore. He is the coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009) and has edited a posthumous collection of poems by Larry Levis, The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016). He has received the Rome Fellowship and the award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award. He is professor and chair of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Venice Beach, California.

  Of “Vineyard,” St. John writes: “For most of 2012–2014, I wasn’t writing my own poems at all. I was busy editing Larry Levis’s book, The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, so it didn’t really matter to me. It was wonderful to immerse myself in Larry’s poems, as it had always been. Of course, I found myself thinking a lot of the times in the late 1960s when he and I were both living still in Fresno, and of the San Joaquin Valley with its acres of peach and fig, almond and apricot trees all blossoming every spring. And of the vineyards Larry grew up among. In those days, the land just north of our college was given over entirely to orchards, hard as it is to think of that now. I was thinking also of friends of mine, and friends of Larry’s; some were about to go to Vietnam and some would be going north to Canada. The taste of that time has always seemed to me the taste of valley dust. As time passed, it became the taste of ash.”

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  BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970, and is currently associate professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark. Her books are So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008), and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children in Verona, New Jersey.

  Of “But I’m the Only One,” Shaughnessy writes: “It occurred to me that I probably should have changed the names in this poem. They’re all real names, real people—it all really happened pretty much this way. It’s a kind of ambivalent love poem to that time in the mid-nineties in New York City where you got the Village Voice the minute it came out and went home immediately to get on your home phone and start calling about apartments, if you needed an apartment. And if your girlfriend of sixteen months or so dumped you and there you were dumping red wine on your broken heart in between shifts at Kinko’s, you needed an apartment. Getting a room in the ‘Dyke Loft’ with three unknown roommates was a thread of hope, never mind the rent was out of my range—I was desperate to be chosen. When I was, I felt so incredibly cool. In the three years I lived there nine roommates cycled through, not including the cats. We had parties, we had troubles, and there’s no doubt that in that Dyke Loft I became a poet. I wrote my first book there, in large part because I couldn’t afford to do anything but stay home and write.

  “I hope none of the women in this poem feel slighted or irritated by their appearance here. We were young together in an intense way, for a short while—it wasn’t easy to be out back then; in too many ways it wasn’t even safe—and we formed a strange, fierce, passionate circle. That loft was full of dreams. For all our differences, we could agree on certain lesbian anthems, be admitted gratis to the Clit Club on Friday nights, all huddle together to watch Ellen or ‘the lesbian wedding episode’ on Friends. Ours was a subculture, and we were working toward discovering who we were within it and, eventually, without it.”

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  ANYA SILVER was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in 1968. She has published two books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press, The Ninety-Third Name of God (2010) and I Watched You Disappear (2014); her third book, From Nothing, will be published by LSU in 2016. She was named Georgia Author of the Year for Poetry in 2015. She is a professor of English at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

  Silver writes: “Fairy tales were my introduction to literature, and I still remember sitting on my father’s lap as he read to me from our big blue book of the Grimms’ fairy tales. I hadn’t remembered the fairy tale ‘Maid Maleen’ until I reread it for a fairy tale course that I was teaching. I was drawn to the tale’s self-sufficient heroine, who manages to escape, with her maid, from the tower in which her father has imprisoned her. As is the case in many fairy tales, Maid Maleen is restored to her former status and happiness through marriage at the end of the story. Western fairy tales in general posit a benign universe that rewards kindness and humility. Painful events are merely erased by good fortune. However, as someone living with metastatic breast cancer, I am no longer able to accept such a view of the world. The deaths of my friends remain with me. I can’t forget, and don’t want to forget, their suffering, or the fact that approximately forty thousand women and men will die of breast cancer each year. I reject pink ribbon culture and the false narrative of breast cancer as a curable disease that has been perpetuated by prominent organizations. Women with metastatic breast cancer know that there is ‘never safety again.’ The smoke of our beloveds’ cremated bodies ‘remains forever’ in our lungs. I wanted the poem to capture, through mythological imagery, the emotional burden of loss.

  “Fairy tales abide with us because they can be interpreted and reinterpreted in ways that suit our personal and cultural needs. It’s not necessary for a reader to read ‘Maid Maleen’ as a poem about breast cancer. The poem addresses trauma of any kind. I wrote it primarily about my own disease, but imagery from the Holocaust and Stalin’s Great Terror also informed my choices. The line ‘There will be no wedding today’ is from my favorite fairy tale, Jane Eyre. #metavivor”

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  TAIJE SILVERMAN was born in San Francisco in 1974. Her first book, Houses Are Fields, was published in 2009 by Louisiana State University Press. She has received the 2
016 Anne Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review, the 2010–11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, the Emory University Poetry Fellowship, and several residencies at the MacDowell Colony as well as from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2010–11, she taught at the University of Bologna as a Fulbright Scholar. She now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Of “Grief,” Silverman writes: “Two months before the Mother’s Day on which I wrote this poem, I had given birth to my son, and the grief I felt for my mother’s absence was lined with his presence. I felt both that she was more here, in my motherhood, and that he was less here, for the fact that she couldn’t know him. A limbo—like the limbo he must have entered between being in my womb and being in the world. I’d been holding him in my arms outside the neighborhood community center when this rush of maple seeds came gusting around us, and I wondered what he must think of them, this sudden whirling of something he had no name or context for. Grief is like that, too. The impulse is to name it, to put a measure on what’s been lost, but the completeness of the loss is as unknowable as the helicopter seeds must have seemed to my baby who had no words. And missing my mother as I sat down to write this, I was glad for that mystery. Who knows what’s here and what isn’t, or how much stays in the in-between.”

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  TOM SLEIGH’s books include Station Zed, Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2015 and 2011), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk, winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His work appears in The Best of the Best American Poetry. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and awards from the American Academy in Berlin, Civitella Ranieri, the Lila Wallace Fund, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa.

  Of “Prayer for Recovery,” Sleigh writes: “When I was living in Berlin a few years ago, I often visited the Topography of Terror Museum dedicated to the history of the Gestapo and SS. It’s housed in a new building on the same site as the former headquarters of both the Gestapo and SS. To visit the museum is to understand the Nazi mania for documentation: thousands of photographs from the era are mounted throughout the exhibition space and explained with terse, accurate, and unflinching descriptions of what happened.

  “A photograph I came back to again and again, one of the most troubling and moving, was of August Landmesser, a trade unionist, present at a Nazi rally to celebrate the launch of a ship he’d helped build, the SSS Horst Wessel. In the photo, Landmesser is surrounded by thousands and thousands of heiling citizens, their right arms shooting out in epileptic abandon, their mouths shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ as Hitler shouts ‘Sieg Heil’ back. But alone among the vast throng, Landmesser refuses to give the Nazi salute; instead, he stands there with his arms resolutely folded, looking a little disgusted, a little dismayed by his fellow Germans.

  “His story is a love story of sorts: he joined the Party in 1931, hoping to get work, but fell in love with a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler. Not only was he expelled from the Party, he was unable to marry her because of the Nuremberg racial laws passed in 1935. They had a baby girl, anyway—and then the full logic of Naziism caught up to them. They refused to hide their relationship in public, and had another child. So he was imprisoned, released, imprisoned again in a concentration camp, released again, then forced into a penal infantry unit consisting of thousands of other prisoners, and died in Croatia six months before Germany surrendered. Shuttled among concentration camps, his wife eventually died in the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942.

  “Somehow their children survived the war, one in the care of Irma’s mother, the other with foster parents.

  “All this is to say that the poem came out of a stay in a Berlin hospital, and while I was in my room, in between worrying about my blood counts, I often thought of Landmesser standing there all alone, in radically different historical conditions, not exactly pure because of his former Party affiliation, but also a man of courage. I’d stare at my IV bag and watch the drip, or I’d walk in the hallways clinging to my IV pole, passing through the electric eye that opened the door from one wing to another, and I’d think of Landmesser scowling, solitary—and at the moment the photo was taken at least, almost suicidally brave. The electric eye also haunted me, as if the door automatically swinging back opened onto another dimension where people like Landmesser and me could meet.

  “The poem suggests that some state of us, which of course we can’t know, will live on after us, just as Landmesser has lived on in a photograph that he never saw or even knew was being taken.

  “And since he was a shipyard worker, he would have known how to use a rivet gun.”

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  A. E. STALLINGS, born in 1968, is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and later at Oxford University. She has published three poetry collections, most recently Olives (TriQuarterly Books, 2012). Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, is available from Penguin Classics (2007), and a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days is forthcoming.

  Of “Alice, Bewildered,” Stallings writes: “I have always identified with Alice—partly, no doubt, because Alicia (that’s what ‘A.’ stands for) is a diminutive of Alice; Alice is also my mother’s name. We had a two-record LP set of a complete and unabridged reading of Alice in Wonderland when I was a child (which has since been thrown out, unfortunately), by some British actor, with interludes of woodwind music, and I used to listen to it over and over, particularly when I was ill. It’s the narrative soundtrack for me of fever and being half asleep in the middle of the day in a dim room; a comforting soundtrack, the aural equivalent of alphabet soup and saltine crackers. I probably know swaths of it verbatim.

  “Through the Looking Glass is a different matter—that book I know from reading rather than listening, and it strikes me as a more grown-up and cerebral book. If Alice in Wonderland is dreamy, there’s something of the nightmare about Through the Looking Glass. I know it in a more partial way, say, the relevant passage on Humpty Dumpty and literary theory. Rereading it (or was I reading it to my son?), I was struck afresh with the disturbing passage about the Wood Where Things Have No Names. Even though Alice falls down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, there is a sense of absurd adventure to it. Through the Looking Glass feels more of a katabasis, a journey to the underworld; indeed the forest of forgetfulness puts one a bit in mind of Dante, or Virgil. It makes sense that Alice thinks her name might begin with ‘L’—‘Lacie’ was Charles Dodgson’s anagram for Alice, and in the name ‘Alice’ one could almost feel that the ‘A’ is a privative ‘a.’ In Greek, Alice (and Alicia) is ‘Aliki’ or ‘Alike.’ So when I reread that passage, a sort of queasy chill went through me, and I wanted to explore that moment, to be Alice when she loses who she is.”

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  FRANK STANFORD, born in Mississippi in 1948, was a prolific poet who has been called one of the great voices of death. He wrote ten volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories: The Singing Knives (1971), Ladies from Hell (1974), Field Talk (1974), Shade (1975), Arkansas Bench Stone (1975), Constant Stranger (1976), The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), Crib Death (1978), You (1979), The Light the Dead See (1991), and Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away (1990). 2015 saw the publication of two new volumes: What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, edited by Michael Wiegers) and Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives (Third Man Books, eds. Michael Wiegers and Chet Weise). Stanford worked as a land surveyor and spent most of his life in Arkansas. He died in 1978.

  Of “Cotton You Lose in the Field,” Michael Wiegers writes: “When I began the long task of compiling and editing What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the poet C. D. Wright shared with me several unpublished manuscripts and encouraged me to visit the Bein
ecke Library at Yale, which had recently acquired many of his papers. This poem comes from a manuscript, Plain Songs, which claims the poet Jean Follain as an influence and prominently features Stanford’s ‘versions’—mock translations—and original poems seasoned by his explorations of poetry in other languages. And yet, despite an international influence, this poem remains thoroughly autochthonous in its voice and demeanor.”

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  SUSAN STEWART was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1952. She is the author of six books of poems: Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981); The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987); The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Columbarium (Chicago, 2003); Red Rover (Chicago, 2008); and the forthcoming Cinder (Graywolf Press, 2017). Columbarium won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her translations include Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton University Press, 2009) and a cotranslation of Milo De Angelis: Theme of Farewell and After-Poems (Chicago, 2013), and her prose works include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) and The Poet’s Freedom (2011), both from Chicago. She has been a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and in the summer of 2016 was visiting professor at the Université Paris VII/Diderot.

  Of “What Piranesi Knew,” Stewart writes: “This brief poem is an appreciation of the mysterious carceri, or ‘prisons,’ etchings of the great eighteenth-century Venetian and Roman print-maker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These etchings have been important to English-speaking writers and artists since they first appeared in 1750. I have been studying them for many years, trying to grasp Piranesi’s remarkable sense of space and shadows. My fascination with his work and life began during a period when I often taught in Rome and has sent me to study print-making in recent years at the Pennsylvania Academy—the wonderful art school in my home town of Philadelphia. But in this poem, I have tried to express an emotional connection to his prints, above all.”