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
“For the small community of American poets, The Best American Poetry is the Michelin Guide, the Reader’s Digest, and the Prix Goncourt.”
—L’Observateur
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CONTENTS
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Foreword by David Lehman
Introduction by Natasha Trethewey
Dan Albergotti, “Weapons Discharge Report”
John Ashbery, “Commotion of the Birds”
Mary Jo Bang, “Admission”
David Barber, “On a Shaker Admonition”
Dan Beachy-Quick, “Apophatic”
Bruce Bond, “Homage to a Painter of Small Things”
John Brehm, “Intrigue in the Trees”
Jericho Brown, “Bullet Points”
Nickole Brown, “The Dead”
Cyrus Cassells, “Elegy with a Gold Cradle”
Isaac Cates, “Fidelity and the Dead Singer”
Allison Cobb, “I Forgive You”
Leonard Cohen, “Steer Your Way”
Michael Collier, “A Wild Tom Turkey”
Billy Collins, “The Present”
Carl Dennis, “Two Lives”
Claudia Emerson, “Spontaneous Remission”
David Feinstein, “Kaddish”
Carolyn Forché, “The Boatman”
Vievee Francis, “Given to These Proclivities, By God”
Amy Gerstler, “Dead Butterfly”
Reginald Gibbons, “Canasta”
Margaret Gibson, “Passage”
Aracelis Girmay, “from The Black Maria”
Jeffrey Harrison, “Higher Education”
Terrance Hayes, “Ars Poetica with Bacon”
W. J. Herbert, “Mounting the Dove Box”
Tony Hoagland, “Cause of Death: Fox News”
John Hodgen, “Hamlet Texts Guildenstern about Playing upon the Pipe”
David Brendan Hopes, “Certain Things”
Major Jackson, “The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail”
John James, “History (n.)”
Rodney Jones, “Homecoming”
Fady Joudah, “Progress Notes”
Meg Kearney, “Grackle”
John Koethe, “The Age of Anxiety”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “from The Last Bohemian of Avenue A”
Danusha Laméris, “The Watch”
Dorianne Laux, “Lapse”
Philip Levine, “Rain in Winter”
Amit Majmudar, “Kill List”
Jamaal May, “Things That Break”
Judson Mitcham, “White”
John Murillo, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,”
Joyce Carol Oates, “To Marlon Brando in Hell”
Sharon Olds, “Ode to the Glans”
Matthew Olzmann, “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz”
Gregory Orr, “Three Dark Proverb Sonnets”
Carl Phillips, “Rockabye”
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Halo”
Robert Pinsky, “Names”
Stanley Plumly, “Poliomyelitis”
Paisley Rekdal, “Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi”
Michael Ryan, “The Mercy Home”
David St. John, “Emanations”
Sherod Santos, “I Went for a Walk in Winter”
Taije Silverman, “Where to Put It”
Charles Simic, “Seeing Things”
Danez Smith, “last summer of innocence”
Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
R. T. Smith, “Maricón”
A. E. Stallings, “Shattered”
Pamela Sutton, “Afraid to Pray”
Chase Twichell, “Sad Song”
James Valvis, “Something”
Emily Van Kley, “Dear Skull”
Wendy Videlock, “Deconstruction”
Lucy Wainger, “Scheherazade.”
Crystal Williams, “Double Helix”
Christian Wiman, “Prelude”
Monica Youn, “Greenacre”
C. Dale Young, “Precatio simplex”
Dean Young, “Infinitives”
Kevin Young, “Money Road”
Matthew Zapruder, “Poem for Vows”
Contributors’ Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
David Lehman was born in New York City, the son of Holocaust survivors. 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. Poems in the Manner Of (2017), his most recent book, comprises poems written in imitation, appreciation, parody, or translation of poets from Catullus to Sylvia Plath. He is the author of nine earlier 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 and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Two prose books recently appeared: The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014 (University of Pittsburgh Press), containing the forewords he had written to date 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 (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Lehman 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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b
y David Lehman
If in January 2016 someone had told you that in the year ahead the Cubs will win the World Series, Bob Dylan will win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Donald Trump will be elected president of the United States, you’d have thought that person batty. Yet all these things have come to pass, and at least one of them has a direct bearing on poetry.
No sooner was it announced that Dylan had become the first American Nobel Laureate in literature since Toni Morrison than the quarrels began. Enthusiasts cited the way Dylan has entered and modified the culture. How his phrases linger in the air: “the times they are a-changin’,” “there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden,” “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows,” “he not busy being born / Is busy dying.”
But the cries of dismay were predictable if only because the poetry community is divided and because there is an unhealthy amount of bile and resentment out there. Any American poet—even our grand old master Richard Wilbur, now ninety-six—would get his share of Bronx cheers if he were to win the Nobel. It was said of Dylan that he didn’t need the prize, that he is yet another old white guy, that he is arrogant, that he composes songs not poems or is “at best,” as one disgruntled observer put it, “a pretentious high-school-notebook poet”—in other words, not a poet at all.
Purists would say that what Dylan writes are lyrics, which depend on their musical setting for coherence and are inextricably bound up with their performance. I would counter that the best of Dylan’s songs work on the page, not only because of their originality but equally because they constitute the autobiography of a fascinating, shape-shifting personality that is rebellious, ornery, intense, and has proved remarkably attuned to the zeitgeist.
With the most prescient timing in recent publishing history, Bob Dylan’s The Lyrics 1961–2012 appeared within one month of the prize announcement in October. The book contains the words of all of Dylan’s songs, organized album by album from his eponymous 1962 debut to his most recent efforts. The transcendent period was the stretch between 1964 and 1967—the period of “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Desolation Row,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “All Along the Watchtower.” While the lyrics and their reception make the primary case for Dylan’s achievement, I believe that Chronicles (2004), the first volume of his projected three-volume memoirs, offers a valuable window into the writer’s brain. “Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house,” he wrote of trying to compose songs. “Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing. If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down.”
A self-creation in the tradition of Jay Gatsby rather than that of Julius Henry Marx (i.e., Groucho), Bob discarded his birth name (Zimmerman) in favor of the moniker of the wild, word-drunk Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. A natural surrealist with bardic leanings, Dylan radiated a kind of Bohemian glamour. The lyrics reflect the stance of a put-on artist, a joker, enigmatic, elusive, and full of insolence or righteous belligerence. “Maggie’s Farm” (1965) elevates “I quit” into poetry: He “hands you a nickel / He hands you a dime / He asks you with a grin / If you’re havin’ a good time / Then he fines you every time you slam the door / I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.” Or consider the ire hurled at the false friend in “Positively 4th Street”: “I wish that for just one time / You could stand inside my shoes / You’d know what a drag it is / To see you.”
Usually when I discuss Bob Dylan as a poet I point to his visionary songs. “Desolation Row” (1965), which I selected for inclusion in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, is terrific in its phantasmagoria. The title song of Highway 61 Revisited (1965) begins with God and Abraham mixing it up in Genesis 22: “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ ” The allusions here and elsewhere in Dylan’s lyrics—in which at any moment Genghis Khan or F. Scott Fitzgerald might put in an appearance—look random but are pointed and shrewd. Still, the case for Dylan rests as much on his powers of rhetoric as on his oracular powers. Some of his strongest lines are infused with the spirit of protest: “How many years can a mountain exist / Before it’s washed to the sea?” Others verge on heartbreak (“It don’t even matter to me where you’re wakin’ up tomorrow / But mama, you’re just on my mind”) or celebrate a lazy day in an easy chair (“Buy me a flute / And a gun that shoots / Tailgates and substitutes / Strap yourself / To the tree with roots / You ain’t goin’ nowhere”). He can bring a dream to a close with the inevitability of a rhyme: “The pump don’t work / ’Cause the vandals took the handles.” The rhymes in “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Want You” show there’s a lot of life left in that venerable device.
In 1880 Matthew Arnold brought to the study of poetry the concept of “touchstones” for exemplary lines that imprint themselves on the mind. It is a criterion the author of “Visions of Johanna” (1966) meets. “The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face.” With or without music, that line sings. Only a true poet could have written it.
A larger issue emerged in the Dylan debates: what qualifies as “literature”? Dylan’s own response was to retreat into modesty. He didn’t go to Sweden to collect the prize but sent a banquet speech. It was hard to process the news, he wrote, but then he
began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”
These are all fair points, I reckon, though it should be noted that in making them Dylan manages to compare himself to “William Shakespeare, the great literary figure.”
The choice of Dylan for the Nobel has set a precedent for widening the category of “literature” to embrace the work of other troubadours (and in future, perhaps, filmmakers and showrunners). The New Yorker has showcased the poetry of Leonard Cohen, who died at eighty-two just weeks after an impressive profile by David Remnick appeared in the magazine. I am happy that Natasha Trethewey chose a Leonard Cohen poem for this year’s Best American Poetry. “California Poem,” a poem by Johnny Cash that The New Yorker published in September, didn’t make the cut, but it did reinforce the notion that the boundary between poems and lyrics is not an impossible one to cross. And when Lin-Manuel Miranda accepted the Tony Award for his colossally successful musical play Hamilton with a “16-line sonnet,” it came as a reminder that verse continues to lend prestige to a formal occasion, be it a wedding or an award ceremony. And yet—
Ours is a great era for hate—what George Orwell called “a human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s get all together and have a good hate.” These sentences are from his novel Coming Up for Air (1939), in the course of which our protagonist, a middle-aged man with an expanding waistline, gets frustrated trying to explain to a philosopher friend, an aesthete, why it’s important to fight Hitler.
Now and then there’s an odd news story demonstrating that the subject of poetry can lead to a display of high passion, even a fistfight or a duel. In January 2014 The Independent reported that in the town of Ir
bit in the Ural Mountains in Russia, a vodka-soaked advocate of poetry killed a prose partisan in a brawl over the rival merits of the literary genres each championed. (A few months earlier, in an argument over the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, one man shot another in a grocery store in southern Russia.) Reduce the amount of alcohol and raise the amount of bitterness and you arrive at the state of critical discourse at its worst. In The Big Short, an entertaining and instructive movie about the financial shenanigans that led to the near-collapse of Wall Street in 2008, these lines appear on the screen: “Overheard in a Washington, D.C. Bar: Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.” That is a far cry from Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but beauty is out of favor, and paranoia and hatred have risen in its stead. Joel Stein, Time magazine’s humorist, wrote a cover story on “the culture of hate” and how it is taking over the Internet. The Internet multiplies the avenues, conceals the perpetrators, loosens the restraints. There are a lot of mischief makers and propagandists out there, and the 24/7 need for news stories on cable TV keeps the hysteria level high. Keats wrote that “My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk.” Wallace Stevens exalted the imagination as superior to unredeemable actuality. That is a lot to expect of the poetic imagination. But the possibility helps to shelter you from the corrosiveness of public discourse.
Of all the arts, poetry may attract the most venomous haters and the most persistent predictors of its decay and inevitable demise. Ben Lerner argues, in The Hatred of Poetry (2016), that hatred itself is part and parcel of the creative impulse. “Poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me—and maybe for you—inextricable,” he says. On the surface, this may seem perverse, an internalizing of the dismissive things people say (or don’t say but think) about poetry. But it is possible, as Lerner suggests, that the famous opening line of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”—“I, too, dislike it”—is every poet’s starting point or governing condition. Poets are control freaks with a strong streak of perfectionism and by their own standards can never be satisfied with their work. The best poem is the one that has not yet been written.
