The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellow and a 2012 Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2014, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University and a U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.

  Of “It Was the Animals,” Diaz writes: “Sometimes a god sends a storm or flood and it is a type of love. We gather up all the beasts, including ourselves, including our brothers, because we were built like other animals, with an instinct to survive. Maybe it is more than an instinct, maybe it is surviving that we do as a rule, and living is what is a luckiness when we manage to do it well enough to call it a celebration, to call it life. My love for my brother is both the flood and the ark. It is what makes me want to teach him the error of his ways but also what makes me want to hold him as we ride out whatever storm is battering us. He has his animals and I have mine. They hollow us. They make us dark inside. They split us open on the rocks. At the end of it all everything has changed—the land, the sky, the rivers, the sea—but what doesn’t change is that we are brother and sister. What never changes is love.”

  DENISE DUHAMEL was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961. Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), her most recent book of poems, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of a 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (winner of the Crab Orchard Award; Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

  Of “Fornicating,” Duhamel writes: “In July 2012 I had the good fortune to be in Lisbon with the Disquiet Program. I went to hear a lecture by Richard Zenith about the history of Portuguese verse. He ended with a few poems by contemporary poet Adília Lopes, and I was immediately hooked. I sensed in her work urgency and hilarity and have since sought out her poems that are translated into English. The lines I quote are from Lopes’s ‘Weather Report.’ You can read some of her work at www.poetryinternationalweb.net.”

  THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS was born on October 5, 1963, and attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. He earned his MFA at Brown University under the sharp, tough, and eye-opening tutelage of poet Michael S. Harper. He cofounded the Dark Room Collective in 1988. He is a photographer, poet, and professor, and his poems have appeared in Callaloo, Poetry, The Paris Review, Pluck!, The Nation, Tin House, and Transition. His photographs have appeared on numerous book covers. He has recently been a visiting writer at the University of San Francisco, Wesleyan University, Howard University, and the University of Montana. He is the author of The Maverick Room (2005) and Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (2010). In 2014, he cofounded (with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis) Heroes Are Gang Leaders, an Amiri Baraka tribute band of poets and musicians.

  Ellis writes: “ ‘Vernacular Owl’ was written, mostly, in bed in San Francisco and edited while crossing America numerous times on the California Zephyr (Amtrak). I was paid $2,230 for the publication of it in Poetry magazine, $250 for the recording of the poem for the Poetry Foundation’s podcast; and $500 more, by the Poetry Foundation, when the poem received the Salmon O. Levinson Prize. The appearance of ‘Vernacular Owl’ in this anthology will add $100, bringing the total to $3,080, all of which was used to fund the three recording sessions, engineering and mixing fees for the project Heroes Are Gang Leaders/The Amiri Baraka Sessions. ‘Vernacular Owl’ is not an elegy. The poem attempts to express the transformation of nonmaterial flight.”

  EMILY KENDAL FREY was born in McLean, Virginia, in 1976. She is the author of several chapbooks and chapbook collaborations, including Frances, Airport, Baguette, and The New Planet. The Grief Performance, her first full-length collection, won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2012. Sorrow Arrow, her second collection, was published by Octopus Books in 2014.

  JAMES GALVIN was born in Chicago in 1951 and raised in Northern Colorado. His first four books are collected in Resurrection Update, published by Copper Canyon Press. Also published by Copper Canyon are X and As Is. He is the author of two prose works, The Meadow and Fencing the Sky, published by Henry Holt. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  Of “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses,” Galvin writes: “W. B. Yeats wrote, ‘How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?’ Good question. I saw a wedding dress on display at Goodwill and it got me thinking. As a poet, I could identify with that dress, and also with all the dresses that, after so much care and deliberation, are worn once, then trapped in darkness, alone. My poem is a tracery of my thinking and feeling about the situation of wedding dresses.”

  MADELYN GARNER was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1937. A graduate of the University of Denver (BA) and Mills College (MEd), she is a retired public school administrator and instructor of English. She has received the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities for encouraging incorporation of the arts into school programs. Named a Leo Love Merit Scholar at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, she was awarded an Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Annual Writing Retreat scholarship. In 2010, she won the Jackson Hole Writers Conference Poetry Prize. With coeditor Andrea L. Watson, she published the anthology Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2013).

  Garner writes: “ ‘The Garden in August’ began with the powerful image of an older neighbor in her garden and then developed into a semibiographical account of my sister’s fatal battle with Alzheimer’s. As the poem progressed, I grew interested in what my neighbor might have done the day after I saw her, and in the process I found myself viewing her as a representative figure for those who choose to live life with dogged persistence and admirable willpower no matter how challenging. I often write about them: the elderly world adventurer planning yet another trip (next year, maybe Cuba?); the survivor of a near-death experience now healthy enough to walk her beloved Airedale several miles daily; my sister.

  “Soon it will be spring in the Rocky Mountains, and once more I will breakfast on the back patio in my own well-worn robe so I might enjoy the exuberance of parrot tulips planted in late October. Under hand there will be a growing nursery list of annuals to be purchased for this year’s garden, Ageratum houstonianum through Zinnia elegans, and a folder with multiple drafts of the poem I am working on at the moment. Later in the day, I will probably search for my favorite floppy-brimmed hat and check the garden hoses for weathering, perhaps even clean up the yard. I will do this, as the poem reminds me, because I am alive.”

  AMY GERSTLER was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. She teaches at the University of California at Irvine. Her books of poems include Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009), Ghost Girl (Penguin, 2004), and Medicine (Penguin, 2000). A new book of poems entitled Scattered at Sea came out from Penguin in June 2015. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.

  Of “Rhinencephalon,” Gerstler writes: “This poem came about due to a confluence of reading about refugees (some of whom get separated from their loved ones and families in the process of fleeing conflict zones and trying to emigrate to safety), thinking about various other types of displacement and homelessness that people suffer, and an urge to write a kind of love
poem. Somewhere in the mix is also the influence of reading and thinking about the role of smell in love and attraction. The rhinencephalon is a part of an animal’s brain—not terribly well developed in humans, apparently—that contains structures having to do with the sense of smell. I was thinking with envy of the fact that certain other animals with more sophisticated olfactory capabilities can recognize each other by smell.”

  LOUISE GLÜCK was born in New York City in 1943. Her most recent books of poetry, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, are Faithful and Virtuous Night, which received a 2014 National Book Award, and Poems 1962–2012. A former United States Poet Laureate, she has won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She teaches at Yale University and Boston University, and was the 2014–2015 Mohr Writer in Residence at Stanford University. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1993.

  R. S. (SAM) GWYNN was born in Leaksville (now Eden), North Carolina, in 1948. After attending Davidson College, he entered the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, where he earned his MFA. Since 1976, he has taught at Lamar University, where he is poet-in-residence and University Professor of English. His first two collections were chapbooks, Bearing & Distance (1977) and The Narcissiad (1980). These were followed by The Drive-In (1986) and No Word of Farewell: New and Selected Poems 1970–2000. His new collection is Dogwatch (2014) from Measure Press. His criticism appears regularly in The Hudson Review, and he is editor of the Pocket Anthology Series from Pearson-Longman. He lives in Beaumont, Texas, with his wife, Donna. They have three sons and seven grandchildren.

  Gwynn writes: “The origin of ‘Looney Tunes’ is a little unusual. Several years ago, a friend, an English poet, sent me a page that reprinted the winner and finalists of a TLS poetry competition, mentioning that both the winner and the first runner-up were friends of hers. I liked both poems, but ‘The Examiners’ by John Whitworth (it’s easy enough to find the poem online) struck me as superior to the winner. I asked her to put me in touch with John, and after a few emails we both, I think, realized a match made in poets’ heaven (Limbo?). We were both of an age and, though separated by the pond, enjoyed doing the same sorts of things with verse. Quickly after this, I wrote ‘Looney Tunes’ (originally titled ‘Dirge’) as an homage to John, to whom it is dedicated. Knowing John’s poems freed me up to write verse in dipodic meters (beloved by Kipling and Gilbert) and to use rhyme as audaciously as I dared. I hope that those who enjoy this bit of metrical madness will look up and read Whitworth’s poems; he is little known in the United States for the usual reasons. I was proud to host him at Lamar University for his first U.S. visit (even if it was only to southeast Texas), to take him to an Astros game (he is a cricket fanatic), and to let him give my students and many others unforgettable classroom performances and a public reading. A very good reading of ‘Looney Tunes’ (with appropriate visuals) can be found on YouTube at the archive of the great ‘Tom O’Bedlam,’ who has given a remarkable public voice to so many poems by me and others. For his readings, see htps://www.youtube.com/user/SpokenVerse.”

  MEREDITH HASEMANN lives in East Hampton, New York. When she’s not teaching eighth-grade English, you might find her searching for beach glass, carving and burning driftwood, or playing guitar and bass for the North Branch All Stars. Although right now she lives full-time in the Hamptons, her heart is in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she will return one day. She is seeking a publisher for her first book of poetry. Her young adult novels are represented by the Nancy Gallt Literary Agency.

  Of “Thumbs,” Hasemann writes: “This poem began to write itself on a shared hike in Vermont. Although the conversation centered upon hydroponic tomatoes, my background brain was buzzing with the chaos of my unnecessarily dramatic and drawn-out divorce and a host of other facts, concerns, and scraps of brain matter. A stacked stone wall near the apple orchard on North Branch Road led me to marvel at how each of these stones added precariously together to create a new whole, and how they just happened to fit. I tried to write ‘Thumbs’ like that stone wall, stacking my concerns one on top of the next to see if I could climb onto the construction and actually see anything beyond. For me, ‘Thumbs’ represents freedom. It’s about allowing a poem to exist on many planes and to be free to go where it wants.

  “I often wonder about how past and present fit together and how memory and thought work. We have so many layers crammed inside our brain, how is it at all possible to express anything at all? This poem was my attempt to allow the competing voices and experiences in my head to inform each other, instead of stifling them. It’s about accepting a number of story lines and how they converge.”

  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 has won a 2010 National Book Award and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.

  Hayes writes: “ ‘Antebellum House Party’ owes its life to a project by Ray McManus, a fellow South Carolina–born poet, who invited me to write a poem for an anthology he was editing, Found Anew: New Writing Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections. I don’t typically write poems by request, but after I came across an especially intriguing photograph (digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/bcp/id/27/rec/8), the poem came into focus. I hope it speaks for itself. Meanwhile, just recently a friend who’d read the poem forwarded a quote from Lyndon Johnson to his African American chauffer, Robert Parker: ‘Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.’ The context for this quote awaits you in cyberspace.”

  REBECCA HAZELTON was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1978. She is the author of Fair Copy (Ohio State University Press, 2011) and Vow (Cleveland State University Press, 2013).

  Hazelton writes: “I wrote ‘My Husband’ because there is so much attention given to the early stages of love, and so little given to long-term relationships (unless, of course, they are going badly). I wanted to write a poem that celebrated the delight and sensuality of the quotidian.”

  JANE HIRSHFIELD (born New York City, 1953) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the newly published The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), and two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and the newly published Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). She has also edited and cotranslated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets. Her work appears in seven previous editions of The Best American Poetry and the 25th anniversary Best of the Best American Poetry. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  Of “A Common Cold,” Hirshfield writes: “It will not surprise any reader to learn that I started this poem during the long (far more than eight days) course of the cold it describes. I was staying at the Civitella Ranieri in Umbria—where almost all the other residents caught the same cold. No remedy seemed to help. One day, still sick, I joined a group going to see a number of nearby Piero della Francesca paintings, including the famous Madonna del Parto, who stands, heavy with child, between drawn-back curtains. Alone with the painting for a few unexpected minutes, I found sudden, silent tears streaming down my face.

  “Over the next days, I began to think about colds, about their independent lives from their own point of view, about how they must possess a kind of immortality, mutating perhaps but meanwhile unceasingly traveling from one person to another, one circumstance to another, one country to another, one decade, century, millennium, to another. This poem is in part the Baedeker Guide a cold virus might write (though every place mentioned is somewhere I have been, on poetry-related travels that often do seem to lead to colds—or perhaps to the one, ever-changing cold I keep meeting again wherever I go). A cold
is in some ways not unlike a work of art: it inhabits each of us acutely but differently, and is passed from person to person because we are incapable of resisting its passage through us. There is also the impeccably democratic solidarity of colds to be admired: colds do not care if they are in the nose of a dictator or of a four-year-old, in the confines of a prison cell or the presence of a painting so transcendent it conquers all possibilities of separation—whether belief, time, culture, even the exhausted misery of many nights’ coughing. For those moments, there was remedy after all. But perhaps the virus was also—in the phrase we sometimes use to describe the condition of being riveted—stopped cold in its tracks by Piero della Francesca’s painting.”

  BETHANY SCHULTZ HURST was born in Parker, Colorado, in 1978. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Idaho State University. Her first book of poems, Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga, 2014), won the Robert Dana–Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

  Of “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1–12,” Hurst writes: “In this poem, I was interested in exploring public vs. private stances in mourning. What’s the difference between paying respects and producing a self-centered display? What separates necessary attention to a disaster from morbid curiosity or rubbernecking? The poem’s speaker struggles to find those boundaries, as well as the appropriate emotional response for personal ‘disasters.’

  “The first section, about wanting to be at Comic Con, came from a fragment of a dream, and for the speaker, superheroes seemed the answer: these would be the invulnerable figures to counter the speaker’s confusion. But it turns out that superheroes, who juggle saving the world with maintaining an unassuming secret identity, are also all about the struggle between private and public persona. Reboots and multiple authorship have created confusion for superhero identities. It’s intriguing that maybe these characters endure because of their fundamental inconsistencies.”