The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  Rubinstein writes: “As a commuting teacher, and a longtime fan of the poetry of voyage epitomized by Valery Larbaud and Blaise Cendrars, I often start poems in transit. ‘Poem Begun on a Train’ was written in the fall of 2013 in response to an invitation from Andrew Ridker to contribute to Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean). Gradually, what began as a poem about its own making led me, via increasingly dark scenarios of readership, from tautology to history. The Scottish modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who was appropriating texts many decades before the advent of ‘conceptual writing,’ supplied not only an instance of a poet under state surveillance but also a model for the recasting of found prose as verse, something I do throughout the poem. Another person on my mind, though unnamed, was Franco Moretti, an innovative literary scholar known for his concept of ‘distant reading.’ The 2013–2014 Whitney Museum exhibition mentioned at the end of the poem focused on mostly forgotten 1970s New York performance art, including Squat Theatre, a group of Hungarian exiles whose theater was a storefront space on West 23rd Street. Soon after arriving in New York I saw their wild multimedia piece Andy Warhol’s Last Love, which included a recital of Kafka’s ‘An Imperial Message.’ Distressingly, Kafka has turned out to be as relevant to the twenty-first century as he was to the twentieth.”

  NATALIE SCENTERS-ZAPICO, born in 1988, is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. She is the author of The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). She teaches creative writing and English at Juan Diego Catholic High School and splits her time between El Paso–Cd. Juárez, Oviedo, and Salt Lake City. Learn more at nataliescenterszapico.com.

  Of “Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez,” Scenters-Zapico writes: “As an adolescent, I loved reading history books and became very familiar with Chicago/Turabian style. As a game, I would read these histories by beginning with the endnotes and find each corresponding reference in the main passage. I was fascinated by the way the focus of the book changed simply by giving the limelight to the endnotes. This poem is an exploration of how the order of a book, especially one that claims to be historical or academic, holds two stories. One, which contains the main subject of the text; the other, the hidden back material that often presents secondary stories thought not worthy of mention in the main text by the author. In ‘Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez’ I wanted to give Cd. Juárez the place of front material without neglecting the fact that it is often placed as back material in U.S. history. In this way, I hope to give the reader an opportunity to put into practice the way that I read history books as an adolescent, thereby recognizing the day-to-day ways in which Cd. Juárez is important to U.S. consciousness.”

  EVIE SHOCKLEY was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1965 and reborn in Durham, North Carolina, in 1996. Her poetry publications include the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006); and two chapbooks. She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). She is a creative writing editor for Feminist Studies and an associate professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She has made her home in Jersey City, New Jersey, now for more consecutive years than in any place she has lived in since Nashville, a fact that she finds shocking.

  Of “legend,” Shockley writes: “I have always loved form, forms, in poetry: given forms, like the sonnet and the ghazal; visual form, as in concrete poetry or other approaches that purposefully use the space of the page; and procedural forms, such as the constraints the Oulipians have developed. This poem falls largely within that last category. The constraint it employs is called univocalism, which means that only one of the vowels is used throughout the poem. In this case, it’s the vowel ‘e,’ to the exclusion of all the others. Univocalism is challenging, but fun to write, and it can create powerful sonic effects.

  “As I recall, I wrote this poem at the very beginning of a six-week period I spent in Asheville, North Carolina, during the summer of 2012. I’d hoped this would be a window in which I would write a lot, but that turned out to have been extremely optimistic. I was there to teach two courses for the Bread Loaf School of English, and any time that wasn’t devoted to work I spent enjoying Asheville and seeing my friends in the area. But in my first days in town, I sat down with my notebook and used the formal constraint to jump-start a poem out of thin air. The story of Fern and Bess, two ‘clever femmes’ who were working against constraints of their own, seemed to write itself, as I searched for words that fit the bill. I decided to teach the form in my creative writing course a few weeks later. My students came up with some strong, energetic, vibrant poems, thanks in part to a constraint that won’t allow you to slide by on your go-to words and phrases or rely on mindless patterns of syntax.”

  CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate. The Lunatic, his new volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose, were published in the spring of 2015. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992.

  Of “So Early in the Morning,” Simic writes: “My friends have been dying over the last few years, so that’s behind this poem of mine.”

  SANDRA SIMONDS was born in Washington, DC, in 1977 and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida. She is professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia, and is the author of four collections of poetry: Ventura Highway in the Sunshine (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009).

  Of “Similitude at Versailles,” Simonds writes: “This poem, from my fourth book, Ventura Highway in the Sunshine, is part of a series of poems that deals with how we teach humanities courses at the university. Before I started my job as a professor, I had always taught literature, not humanities, and I was interested in exploring and interrogating the humanities textbook and canon formation as a poetry project—what do we leave out of the humanities, what is included in the humanities? What voices are forever lost? What voices stick around and echo into the future? I came to the conclusion, as so many have before me, that it’s the minor voices that get left out (like mine?), and I tried to think about my own life as a poet. What are the material circumstances of my life and how do these material circumstances affect my work as a poet? What does it mean to try to write a poem in a house when children need to be fed, when cartoons are distracting you from trying to write, when you are living paycheck to paycheck? I wanted to include the material circumstances of my life to be, not the background of my poem, but rather the foreground to make a point about the humanities. What does it mean to be a working mother in the twenty-first century? Will my voice also be lost? Saved?”

  ED SKOOG was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He has lived in New Orleans, Southern California, and Montana, and currently lives in Seattle. He has published two books of poems, Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Rough Day (Copper Canyon, 2013), which won the Washington State Book Award in poetry. In addition to sometimes teaching at Seattle’s Hugo House, he is codirector of Writing Week at the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program, is cohost (with the novelist J. Robert Lennon) of the podcast Lunch Box, with Ed and John, and is poetry editor of Okey-Panky.

  Of “The Macarena,” Skoog writes: “I think I took a long time paying my dues, a process that started only after school began to wear off. This poem recalls a few months of that time. Twenty-three years old that summer, I’d rented an apartment in the Sunflower Hotel in Abilene and tried to write a novel about the people who worked at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, which resembles a college campus. A fountain burbles in the chapel where he’s interred. Long hours there. In my family, Eisenhower is remembered as kindly and local. I didn’t have enough dissona
nce, perhaps, to sustain such a narrative. It was a severe, lonely time. Coffee talked to me from the stovetop percolator. I almost got arrested for climbing a grain silo to watch the sunrise. I was naïve about writing and love. Still am, I hope. When small-town loneliness got to me, I’d drive to Kansas City and visit a friend who was living by the art museum. She was gearing up to move to New York and maybe I’d come, too. Instead I abandoned the novel, and novel writing, and moved to Seattle for another love. Eighteen years later I wrote this poem.”

  A. E. STALLINGS was born in 1968. She studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and since 1999 has lived in Athens, Greece. She has published three collections of poems, Archaic Smile (University of Evansville Press, 1999), Hapax (Northwestern University Press, 2006), and Olives (Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, was published by Penguin Classics in 2007 and her verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days is forthcoming from the same publisher. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, United States Artists, and MacArthur foundations, as well as a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Of “Ajar,” Stallings writes: “I’ve spent the last couple of years at work on a verse translation of Hesiod’s eighth-century BC almanac, Works and Days, for Penguin Classics. Hesiod’s is the first version we have of the story of Pandora and the Jar. (It’s better known as Pandora’s Box; but in Hesiod’s time, the storage vessels were jars.) So it was natural to conflate that with home life. (The offending washing machine has since been replaced, thank the gods.) In Greek, the word usually translated as ‘hope’ (‘elpis’) is more ambiguous, and could even mean ‘anxiety’ about the future. I think that was in the back of my mind, too. The last line, it strikes me in retrospect, is a pretty Hesiodic sentiment. The formal structure, with the two strands of rhymes running through the tercets, showed up from the get-go, but it didn’t occur to me to do the (perhaps obvious) thing of cracking open the lines until relatively late in revision. The space, or pause, gave it a bit more breathing room on the page. The punning title probably came at about the same moment.”

  SUSAN TERRIS was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1937 and lives in San Francisco. Her most recent book is Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013). She is the author of six books of poetry, fifteen chapbooks, and three artist’s books. She had a prior career in the field of children’s books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux was the primary publisher for her twenty-one children’s and young adult books. She is the editor of Spillway Magazine. Her book Memos will be published by Omnidawn in 2015. See www.susanterris.com.

  Of “Memo to the Former Child Prodigy,” Terris writes: “As a child, I desperately wanted to be a prodigy, though at that time I would have used the word ‘star.’ I was a dancer, a competitive swimmer, a wanna-be actress, a curious student, and I had already had a story published in a national teenage magazine. My parents rejected the prodigy notion, telling me calmly, ‘Too public. We don’t do things that way.’ And if I asked them if I was smart, they’d reply, ‘Of course you are. You’re our daughter.’ Years later, when I had children of my own, I understood their logic better. Still, I remained fascinated by the idea of the truly amazing prodigy (which I never, even with parental encouragement, would have been)—an Alexander Pope, a Shirley Temple, a Mozart. Isaac Stern, the famous violinist who was not a prodigy, held the notion that musical prodigies had to retrain in their twenties, ridding themselves of their childish behavioral tics to be a success in the adult world. That notion has become mine, too—only I extend it to all prodigies, not just musical ones. Running through this poem are a few snatches of the lyrics from The Mikado of ‘The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring’—a kind of paean to innocence and joy. My notion of retraining for any prodigy is to stop focusing on past triumphs and start over at ‘one’—at innocence and joy, to learn to be a whole person, a non-solipsistic adult.”

  MICHAEL TYRELL was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1974. He is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted (The National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches at New York University.

  Of “Delicatessen,” Tyrell writes: “I’ve always been fascinated by how documentaries can make the quotidian seem mythic, and after taking in so many stories on social and other media about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, I found myself writing in a quasi-documentary style, taking stock of my own minor daily routines and the imagined lives of people I saw or encountered in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As the poem took shape, other figures emerged, one being Hyacinth Thrash—a survivor of the tragedy in Jonestown in 1978. Her story, which I heard recounted in a documentary, has haunted me for years. I hope I’ve done her justice.”

  WENDY VIDELOCK was born in Ohio and raised in Tucson, Arizona, where she graduated from the University of Arizona. She now lives in western Colorado, where she writes, paints, and teaches. Her books, Nevertheless (2011), The Dark Gnu (2013), and Slingshots and Love Plums (2015), have been published by Able Muse Press.

  SIDNEY WADE’s sixth collection of poems, Straits & Narrows, was published by Persea Books in 2013. Her translations from the Turkish, Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday, won the Meral Divitci Prize and will be published in October 2015. She has served as president of Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and secretary/treasurer of the American Literary Translators’ Association. She teaches workshops in poetry and translation at the University of Florida’s MFA@FLA program. She is the poetry editor of Subtropics.

  CODY WALKER was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1967. He is the author of Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser Press, 2008) and coeditor of Alive at the Center: An Anthology of Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013). He lives in Ann Arbor and teaches English at the University of Michigan. His second poetry collection, The Self-Styled No-Child, will be published by Waywiser in 2016.

  Of “Trades I Would Make,” Walker writes: “Several summers ago, I started going to an Ann Arbor café called Mighty Good. My first daughter had been born the previous fall; I’d written almost nothing in the intervening months. So my partner and I hired a babysitter, which allowed us to escape to Mighty Good on Sunday afternoons and feel like writers again. I joked that the title for my next book would be These Poems Are Costing Me Ten Dollars an Hour. (These days, with two kids, the poems cost thirteen dollars an hour.) ‘Trades I Would Make’ emerged from those carefree afternoons.”

  LAWANDA WALTERS was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949. Her poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. She received an MA in literature from California State University at Humboldt and an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives in Cincinnati.

  Of “Goodness in Mississippi,” Walters writes: “My poem is a double elegy, in which I mourn and try to reconcile the early deaths of two people in very different circumstances. On the surface the poem speaks mostly about my first best friend, who amazed me with her early maturity and natural kindness and was my first role model. But the poem is also—and primarily—my acknowledgment of the near-miraculous mystery when someone chooses to be good in a place and time that makes that choice impossible. In a state that was proudest of its two Miss Mississippis, only the beautiful and the white were acknowledged. It was a hollow, superficial existence, and the spectrum of its cruelty extended from a lonely white kid with pimples and a long nose to someone who identified himself as black, like Vernon Dahmer, who lived in Hattiesburg, just as we did, and was a successful businessman, the owner of acres of farmland and a logging business. I believe that both my friend and Mr. Dahmer died because they were the ‘good’ in Mississippi, a place that did not hand out awards for substance, just appearance. Let me be clear that my friend did not die out of he
r own vanity. She genuinely cared about other people but was secretly mean to herself. So I make the leap from my friend, who was too kind, to someone neither of us knew, a man who owned a store in a separate part of town and was concerned enough about his friends, who had not managed to get past the racist registrar at the Hattiesburg Courthouse, to keep a ledger in his store for people to sign up to vote, to pay the poll taxes for those who could not afford that travesty, and to speak on a radio show (the morning before his murder) announcing the venue of his store as a safe place for people to come and sign up to vote.

  “I was able to write this poem—in which I try to speak of Dahmer’s sacrifice for the good of others—when I tried Terrance Hayes’s ‘golden shovel’ form, which he invented in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool.’ I feel so grateful for that form and for the opportunity to express my white girl’s humility and awe toward a heroism for which all of us can never be grateful enough.

  “A longer backstory about the poem’s genesis, ‘Mississippi Daze,’ appears on the Georgia Review website: garev.uga.edu/wordpress/index.php/2014/04/mississippi-daze/.”

  Born in 1951, AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER was the firstborn of five children of black working-class parents who came north to Baltimore, Maryland, from the family homeland in Brunswick County, Virginia, and Northampton County, North Carolina. Encouraged by his parents, he skipped the eighth grade and entered the University of Maryland’s main campus at College Park in 1968 when he was sixteen years old. After completing two years in good standing there, he returned to Baltimore and worked in factories from 1970 to 1985, during which time he wrote poetry, short fiction, and newspaper articles. During those years he also founded 7th Son Press and published the journal Blind Alleys. He left factory life in 1985 with an NEA fellowship in poetry and a contract for his first book, Water Song (Callaloo). He completed his BA (1986) at the State University of New York and did his graduate work (1985–1987) at Brown. He has published thirteen more collections of poetry, most recently A Hard Summation (Central Square Press, 2014) and City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). His twelfth collection, The Government of Nature, received the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has a first-degree black sash in Taijiquan and is a Dao disciple in the Tien Shan Pai Association. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He adapted his birth name, Michael Schan Weaver, in 1998 when he used “Afaa” for his sixth poetry collection, Talisman (Tia Chucha). His websites are afaaweaver.net and plumflowertrilogy.org.