by David Lehman
Praise for The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
—Robert Pinsky
“The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman’s ‘state-of-poetry’ forewords and the guest editors’ introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
—Academy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness . . . in all of these volumes . . . there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
—The Villager
“A year’s worth of the very best!”
—People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
—Booklist
“Certainly it attests to poetry’s continuing vitality.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
—The Washington Post
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CONTENTS
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Foreword by David Lehman
Introduction by Sherman Alexie
Sarah Arvio, “Bodhisattva”
Derrick Austin, “Cedars of Lebanon”
Desiree Bailey, “A Retrograde”
Melissa Barrett, “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One”
Mark Bibbins, “Swallowed”
Jessamyn Birrer, “A Scatology”
Chana Bloch, “The Joins”
Emma Bolden, “House Is an Enigma”
Dexter L. Booth, “Prayer at 3 a.m.”
Catherine Bowman, “Makeshift”
Rachael Briggs, “in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler”
Jericho Brown, “Homeland”
Rafael Campo, “DOCTORS LIE, MAY HIDE MISTAKES”
Julie Carr, “A fourteen-line poem on sex”
Chen Chen, “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me”
Susanna Childress, “Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair”
Yi-Fen Chou, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve”
Erica Dawson, “Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale”
Danielle DeTiberus, “In a Black Tank Top”
Natalie Diaz, “It Was the Animals”
Denise Duhamel, “Fornicating”
Thomas Sayers Ellis, “Vernacular Owl”
Emily Kendal Frey, “In Memory of My Parents Who Are Not Dead Yet”
James Galvin, “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses”
Madelyn Garner, “The Garden in August”
Amy Gerstler, “Rhinencephalon”
Louise Glück, “A Sharply Worded Silence”
R. S. Gwynn, “Looney Tunes”
Meredith Hasemann, “Thumbs”
Terrance Hayes, “Antebellum House Party”
Rebecca Hazelton, “My Husband”
Jane Hirshfield, “A Common Cold”
Bethany Schultz Hurst, “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1–12”
Saeed Jones, “Body & Kentucky Bourbon”
Joan Naviyuk Kane, “Exhibits from the Dark Museum”
Laura Kasischke, “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike”
Douglas Kearney, “In the End, They Were Born on TV”
Jennifer Keith, “Eating Walnuts”
David Kirby, “Is Spot in Heaven?”
Andrew Kozma, “Ode to the Common Housefly”
Hailey Leithauser, “The Pickpocket Song”
Dana Levin, “Waching the Sea Go”
Patricia Lockwood, “See a Furious Waterfall Without Water”
Dora Malech, “Party Games”
Donna Masini, “Anxieties”
Airea D. Matthews, “If My Late Grandmother Were Gertrude Stein”
Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here”
Laura McCullough, “There Were Only Dandelions”
Rajiv Mohabir, “Dove”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog”
D. Nurkse, “Plutonium”
Tanya Olson, “54 Prince”
Ron Padgett, “Survivor Guilt”
Alan Michael Parker, “Candying Mint”
Catherine Pierce, “Relevant Details”
Donald Platt, “The Main Event”
Claudia Rankine, from Citizen
Raphael Rubinstein, “Poem Begun on a Train”
Natalie Scenters-Zapico, “Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez”
Evie Shockley, “legend”
Charles Simic, “So Early in the Morning”
Sandra Simonds, “Similitude at Versailles”
Ed Skoog, “The Macarena”
A. E. Stallings, “Ajar”
Susan Terris, “Memo to the Former Child Prodigy”
Michael Tyrell, “Delicatessen”
Wendy Videlock, “How You Might Approach a Foal:”
Sidney Wade, “The Chickasaw Trees”
Cody Walker, “Trades I Would Make”
LaWanda Walters, “Goodness in Mississippi”
Afaa Michael Weaver, “City of Eternal Spring”
Candace G. Wiley, “Dear Black Barbie”
Terence Winch, “Subject to Change”
Jane Wong, “Thaw”
Monica Youn, “March of the Hanged Men”
Contributors’ Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
Acknowledgments
About Sherman Alexie and David Lehman
David Lehman was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. Two prose books appeared in 2015: The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014 (Pittsburgh), comprising all the forewords he has written for The Best American Poetry, and Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook/Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. He teaches in the graduate writing program of The New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
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by David Lehman
When you write an annual column for nearly three decades, you may, in effect, be writing a book in discontinuous increments. But you’re not necessarily conscious o
f it. You don’t consult the previous year’s report before writing the present one, so when you put them together and reread the lot, you’re likely to be in for a few surprises.
In 2015 the twenty-nine “forewords” that had appeared to date in The Best American Poetry were gathered in The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014 and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Rereading the pieces in consecutive order, I was struck not only by unconscious repetitions (Wordsworth on pleasure and the formation of poetic taste, “abundance” as the defining trait of American poetry, W. H. Auden’s observations, Oscar Wilde’s paradoxes) but also, for example, by my evident partiality for the “not only/but also” rhetorical formula.
My pet peeves never let me down. I seem always to have been aghast at ad hoc pronouncements that pass for critical judgments and can rarely let it go unremarked when somebody lowers the limbo bar even in the act of elegizing some aspect of the poetry he despises. The December 2014 issue of The Atlantic provided a perfect illustration: a piece by James Parker lamenting, in the year of the Welsh poet’s centenary, the loss of Dylan Thomas. The article’s title states the theme: “The Last Rock-Star Poet.”1 As the last of that Bardic breed, Thomas (Parker says) was worthy of our attention if not our unequivocal acclaim—except that as a poet he didn’t amount to all that much. In Parker’s words, “ ‘Fern Hill’ is gloop; ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is inferior Yeats.” That sentence, those judgments, are backed up by nothing. They are not even discussed, let alone substantiated, explained, argued. They are merely stated as if they were beyond dispute—articles of received wisdom elevated to self-evident propositions. I wondered whether the writer had taken the time to reread “Fern Hill” or was he merely, as was possible, revolted by the memory of a younger version of himself, who had a deep crush on Thomas, having been smitten, as he admits, by “the charm of the man, the charm of the boy, the shock-headed cherub-troll who’d come waddling down to London from Swansea with a cigarette between his lips and a brown beer bottle in his pocket.”
“Fern Hill” is a full-throated evocation of Edenic innocence, a Romantic recollection of an enchanted boyhood in the tradition variously exemplified by Thomas Traherne in the latter half of the seventeenth century and Wordsworth a century later. I like quoting the last three lines of the poem because they reach for the highest notes available in bringing this elegy for youth to a close:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Is it possible that these lines make The Atlantic writer gag (“gloop”) precisely because they are so rich and so affecting and because such qualities are as outmoded as neckties? The sheer passion of the writing; the artful repetition of key phrases introduced earlier (“young and easy,” “Time” as a divine agent); the complexity of the final utterance, a subordinate clause that surpasses the main clause in its lyricism; the arresting simile at the very end—there is wizardry here, and wonderment, a sense of the natural sublime.
As for “Do not go gentle into that good night,” to dismiss Thomas’s famous villanelle as “inferior Yeats” is a pedantry, and a false one. Use Yeats as your standard, and few poets shall ’scape whipping. But for the record Yeats did not write villanelles, and the effects Thomas achieves in “Do not go gentle” are not those that the Irish poet was after. In the face of his father’s imminent demise, Thomas used the constrictive form dialectically, to discipline his feelings and to apply a restraint on his fountain of imagery and linguistic genius. The poem’s second stanza attests to the power that he achieved through the use of the strict form:
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
This is not a brand of poetry that would please the British poets of ironic understatement who chose Hardy as a master and whose greatest practitioner is Larkin. But it is a sterling example of Thomas’s method, which (he wrote in a letter) was to let one image “breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.” The method is at the service of something that can never stay out of fashion for long: the heroic note, defiance in the face of mortality.
Instant dismissal of greatness goes together with a second thing that reliably gets a rise out of me, the glorification of dumbness in American culture. A generously funded study indicates that there is a correlation between the elimination of course requirements and widespread ignorance of American history, civics, our government and economic structures. Although you might expect to see such a revelation in a satirical weekly, it gets half a page of a daily newspaper noted for its sobriety. Some readers may wonder whether we really need focus groups, task forces, or in this case a commissioned study to reveal what anecdotal evidence provides in abundance—or perhaps this academic exercise in stating the obvious itself lends credence to the argument. In any case, if you wanted the veneer of pseudo-scientific authority that only statistics can confer, you are now entitled to say that most college students do not know the length of a congressman’s term, the meaning and purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the name of the Revolutionary War general in charge of American forces at Yorktown.2
As if to signal its opposition to grade inflation—another villain in parables about the decline of an informed citizenry—the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued grades to universities and colleges. Both Wesleyan University, whose president has written in passionate defense of the humanities, and Brown University, that bastion of exclusive progressivism, were among the ninety-eight institutions that flunked. Fewer than one in five graduates of F-rated schools will have been required to take a class in American history. Even fewer will have been asked to study a foreign language or Economics 101. As one who loved his Columbia education, with its strong core requirements, it pains me that our graduates know less, and are expected to know less, than their counterparts in previous generations. It is as though the entire teaching profession has adopted a version of magical thinking that allows everyone to spin off the responsibility. But this I know: A lack of conviction in what you are teaching spells disaster. As Magdalena Kay writes: “Our current sense of crisis is partly a crisis of faith in what we are teaching, not just in how we are teaching it.”3 Kay quotes Christopher Lasch, prophet of The Culture of Narcissism: “When elders make no demands on the young, they make it almost impossible for the young to grow up.”
Poetry may be the enchanted childhood, the “farm forever fled” in Dylan Thomas’s ode to a lost paradise. But poetry is also an essential part of adulthood, and adulthood a more serious state of mind and being than an adolescence idealized by an eighteenth-century savant. I will continue to speak up for such allegedly outmoded things as canonical books, the study of Western culture and modern thought, the concept of genius, the value of the memorization and recital of verse, the sustaining power of the imagination, and the privileged status of the aesthetic considered apart from all political considerations. To an extent I believe that the attachment to such cultural values puts one in opposition to the worship of handheld gadgetry. I will always favor the physical book, but it would be foolish to deny a changing actuality—and the benefits that come with it. While I don’t find it natural to read, say, George Meredith’s Modern Love online, I am glad this formerly hard-to-find sequence of poems is available there, and I believe, moreover, that it is useless to resist advances in technological efficiency. The medium may not be the message but it alters the ground conditions of its being.
The idea of using social media as a channel for poetry has its attractions. Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, initiated “Next Line, Please” on the magazine’s website and asked me to serve as quizmaster and prompt-maker. Sin
ce we began the weekly challenges in May 2014, we crowd-sourced a rhymed sonnet over the course of fifteen weeks; we then had competitions for best haiku, tanka, anagram, limerick, sestina, completion of a fragment by Emily Dickinson, opening and closing sentences of imaginary novels. Among my favorites was the one we devoted to couplets. Each entry had to have “fall” as an end-word, with the result that seven of the couplets, when combined, fulfilled the requirements of two forms—the ghazal and the sonnet, or what Mariam Zafar dubbed the “ghazal sonnet.” Here’s what we came up with:
The better the book, the longer the farewell,
the leaves in amber as their shadows fall.
With a red gold fire raining down, we fall
in love. The lonely branches sprawling tall,
We lug the red-leaf-laden tarp like pall-
bearers to curbs for trucks to haul away our fall.
Of all sad leaves that curl and fall,
the red are those I must recall.
My austral spring belies your boreal fall;
you burn brown leaves and dismiss my call.
On the yellow brick road to Damascus St. Paul took a fall,
as did Bogart in To Have and Have Not upon meeting Bacall.
Popeye chuckled and scratched his balls: on the wall
he scrawled, “Explore the mall in the reddening fall.”
The authors were Bruce Bond, Katie Naoum, Leonard Kress, Lawrence Epstein, Diana (no last name given), Terence Winch, and John Tranter (channeling John Ashbery).
“Next Line, Please” was just one of several online verse initiatives that got started in 2014. The New York Times launched “The New Verse News” in December 2014. Poets were approached and asked to contribute a poem based on their reading of the day’s newspaper. I was invited, and on Monday the 22nd, I wrote a poem based on the front-page article “Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia” by Ariel Kaminer. This well-researched piece about tensions on the campus of my alma mater made me ponder the conflicts revealed and the mysteries stated but unsolved.4 Lifting whole phrases from the article, I wrote this:
