by David Lehman
As a Platonic idealist, Lerner has some insightful things to say: “Socrates is the wisest of all people because he knows he knows nothing; Plato is a poet who stays closest to poetry because he refuses all actual poems.” Lerner argues that defenses of poetry going back to Sir Philip Sidney tend to assert “an ideal of imaginative literature” rather than to exalt an individual poem. The discrepancy between the ideal and the actual poem widens. The poet as idealist finds all poetry defective. The killer, as Lerner sees it, is the demand for universality, for “the intensely subjective, personal poem” that can somehow “authentically encompass everyone.” Such a poem “is an impossibility in a world characterized by difference and violence.”
The question, however, is whether such idealism is common to all poets, and is it the primary standard that poets adopt while working on poems? Are poets, then, doomed to the melancholy of certain failure? The failure of poets “to be universal, to speak to and for everyone in the manner of Whitman” is neither a realistic goal nor necessarily a wise one. On the contrary, as Lerner notes, it is the logic behind foolish articles alleging the decline of poetry. There is the suspicion that The Hatred of Poetry is an academic exercise in the sense that it exists solely to quicken discussion. If the author were in earnest, would he continue to write poems? It might also be said that there is a difference between Lerner’s title and Marianne Moore’s statement. The “too” in “I, too, dislike it” slyly suggests a likeness, a secret alliance between writer and reader. We mistrust poetry, we know it is full of false sentiments and insincere rhetoric, and so we have to be won over. Less aggressive than “hate,” “dislike” may be the more accurate term. It may come closer to the “perfect contempt” that poets instinctively display when addressing specimens of the art not their own. Using words from the same poem by Marianne Moore, we might argue further that poetry is in service not to an emotion or state of mind but to the quest for a certain kind of power, the power to create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
Not a writer of poetry himself, George Orwell was impatient with poetry for quite different reasons. Of what use could it be against a machine gun? “Ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God,’ ” Orwell wrote in 1942. “Poetry is disliked because it is associated with unintelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday,” he wrote a year later.1
Do “people fucking hate poetry,” as The Big Short announces? Do they put up with poets as the slightly comic figures on the college faculty who do their part for the good of the community by teaching poetry in old-age homes and penitentiaries? My own view of things is that a poet can expect not hate but “unremitting indifference / broken up by patches of hostility.”2 “Barely tolerated, living on the margin / In our technological society”: the opening of John Ashbery’s poem “Soonest Mended” (1970) characterizes the poet’s condition.3
And yet it sometimes seems as if everyone has a niece or nephew who writes poetry. Ben Lerner has an amusing passage about what happens when a poet is unwise enough to reveal his or her vocation to a total stranger on an airplane. Lerner writes that the embarrassment is double: “There is embarrassment for the poet—couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?—but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poetry and self.” The problem is worse if you are identified as not only a poet but also an editor, though in my experience the “non-poet” shows no embarrassment when requesting a reading or threatening to pull out a manuscript.
W. H. Auden’s solution to the problem of identifying himself to temporary companions was to say that he was a medieval historian. “It withers curiosity,” he explained.4
In The Best American Poetry 2017, we have three Youngs (C. Dale, Dean, and Kevin) and an Olds. We have sonnets, several of them in rhyme; a numbered list poem; a poem in rhymed haiku stanzas; a poem in the manner of a text message; an epithalamium, and a verse epistle “To Marlon Brando in Hell.” We have a master in his eighties and a Stuyvesant High School alumna who was born in 1997, when this anthology series was in its tenth year. Most unusually we have a poem, R. T. Smith’s “Maricón,” that treats the March 1962 fight between boxers Emile Griffith and Benny (“the Kid”) Paret—the same bout that triggered Donald Platt’s poem “The Main Event,” which appeared in The Best American Poetry 2015.
Natasha Trethewey, the guest editor of this volume, appeared for the first time in The Best American Poetry in 2000. That year her first book, Domestic Work, assembled evidence of an ability to find the dualities of her personal history mirrored ironically but pointedly in the language that we speak. As the daughter of a white man and an African American woman in Mississippi at a time when interracial marriages were against the law, she could identify herself with the “mixed girl” in the 1959 movie Imitation of Life. She grew up, she writes, “light-bright, near-white, / high-yellow, red-boned / in a black place”—and was gifted at telling “white lies.” In 2007, Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard, her third book. To the poet’s repertoire, the book added the challenges of poetic form. The title poem—the journal of a black soldier from a Louisiana regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War—consists of ten unrhymed sonnets. The last line of each is mirrored and distorted in the first line of the next. The effect is complex: smooth continuity, elegant circularity, but also a third thing that disturbs the peace and order of the other two. The poem begins, “Truth be told, I do not want to forget.” It ends with “a scaffolding of bone / we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.” The poem exists precisely in the space between those two poles.
In 2012 Natasha was named Poet Laureate of the United States. She has held faculty appointments at Duke, Chapel Hill, Yale, Emory, and now Northwestern. Her list of favorite poems from 2016 grew slowly. “Mostly I want to be blown away when I read a poem,” she told me. The poems she chose had to meet that strict criterion. Not the reputation of the poet but the poem on the page was what mattered. Numerous magazines were consulted. On the honor roll, The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares are tied at the top of the list: more poems were chosen from them, five each, than from any other single source. The subjects addressed in the poems include Aleppo, God, the life you didn’t lead, “Girl from the North Country” as sung by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, grackles, the seventeenth century, a wristwatch, the “age of anxiety,” deconstruction, and “the post-galactic abyss of sex with strangers” (Major Jackson), to limit myself to ten. The table of contents includes the work of poets who are entirely new to me as well as poets we have showcased before.
Sometimes a poem goes viral, usually to the surprise of the author. One poem that went viral in 2016 you’ll find here: Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones.” It is probably safe to say that no poem last year had quite the effect of a piece of doggerel that a political satirist recited on a TV show in Germany about the controversial president of Turkey. The poem touched on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anatomy, his alleged interest in barnyard animals, and the athletically demanding sexual activities he supposedly enjoys doing with them. The effort was in the category of the crude and puerile. Nevertheless the Turkish president was not amused; the poem caused a minor diplomatic flap between Germany and Turkey, and quite a lot of snarky comment. The incident made me think of a piece of light verse that doubled as a political poem of some brilliance and bite. The writer was the late Robert Conquest, historian of Soviet Russia, author of The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. The poem stretches the form of the limerick, disdaining crudities. In five lines Conquest sums up several decades of revolutionary Russian history: ‘There was a great Marxist called Lenin / Who did two or three million men in. / That’s a lot to have done in / But where he did one in / That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”5
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1. George Orwell, My Country Right or Left (volume two of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, pp. 195, 334.
2. “October 1,” The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002).
3. Originally in The Double Dream of Spring (1970).
4. “The Poet & The City” in The Dyer’s Hand (1962).
5. I have read a version of this memorable limerick in which “Bolshie” replaces “great Marxist” in line one and “grand Marxist” in line five.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014) and a term as Poet Laureate of the state of Mississippi (2012–2016). She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966 and was educated at the University of Georgia, Hollins University, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002), Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Her book of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was published in 2010 (University of Georgia Press). In 2015 she served as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine, selecting and introducing poems for the weekly column. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has also received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For fifteen years she taught at Emory University, where she was Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2017 she joined the faculty at Northwestern University as Board of Trustees Professor of English.
INTRODUCTION
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by Natasha Trethewey
As early as I can remember my father recited poetry to me, not simply for the pure pleasure of it but also, I think now, to prepare me for the inevitable losses to come, for the ways of the world I would inhabit, and to provide a means for making sense of it. Like Robert Frost, he believed in the necessity of a thorough and early grasp of the figurative nature of language. “What I am pointing out,” Frost wrote,
is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.
Both my parents knew that I would need an “education by poetry” to be safe in the world I’d entered. In 1966, when I was born, their interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi and as many as twenty other states in the nation, rendering me illegitimate in the eyes of the law, persona non grata. On the way to the segregated ward at the hospital my mother could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets: private citizens, lawmakers, and Klansmen—often one and the same—hoisting them in Gulfport and small towns all across Mississippi. The twenty-sixth of April that year marked the hundredth anniversary of Mississippi’s celebration of Confederate Memorial Day—a holiday glorifying the Lost Cause, the old South, and white supremacy—and much of the fervor was also a display in opposition to recent advancements in the Civil Rights Movement: the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
My mother had come of age in Mississippi during the turbulent 1960s, turning twenty-one in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the Watts Riots, and years of racially motivated murders in the state. Unlike my father, who’d grown up a white boy in rural Nova Scotia—free-ranging, hunting and fishing in the woods—my mother had come into being a black girl in the Deep South, a world circumscribed by Jim Crow laws. If my father believed in the idea of living dangerously—the adventurer’s way—the necessity of taking risks, my mother had witnessed the necessity of dissembling, the art of making of one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile deference. In the summer of 1955, when she was eleven years old, she’d seen what could happen to a black child in Mississippi who had not behaved as expected, stepping outside the confines of racial proscription: Emmett Till’s battered remains, his unrecognizable face in my grandmother’s copy of Jet magazine. And in the years to follow she’d watched Mississippi ignite with racial violence as the Civil Rights Movement reached its zenith.
Having grown up steeped in the metaphors that comprised the mind of the South—the white South—she could not miss the paradox of my birth on Confederate Memorial Day: a child of “miscegenation,” a word that entered the American lexicon during the Civil War in a pamphlet. It had been conceived as a hoax by a couple of journalists to drum up opposition to Lincoln’s reelection through the threat of amalgamation and mongrelization. Sequestered on the “colored” floor, my mother knew the country was changing, but slowly.
Over the years, as my parents and I went out together, encountering people disdainful of and often hostile to their union, to our family, they grasped even more the necessity of my education in metaphor, though they began to diverge in what exactly I might need to know.
I don’t recall when I first noticed that divergence, but a moment stands out to me from a trip we took to Mexico a couple of years before their marriage ended. We’d been traveling along a seemingly endless stretch of blacktop as the sun began to set, hanging low and heavy in the sky. “How’d you like to have that ball to play with?” my father asked, pointing to it. “Don’t be silly,” said my mother. “You know she’d burn her hands.” Even then I knew something had passed between them, some difference in how they perceived the metaphors by which I would need to be guided: for my father, all was possibility; for my mother, danger from which I’d need to be protected.
Only one souvenir of that trip remains: a photograph. In it I am alone, there are mountains in the distance behind me, and I am sitting on a mule. It had been my father’s idea to place me there, a linguistic joke within a visual metaphor: the sight gag of a mixed-race child riding her namesake, animal origin of the word “mulatto.” In the photograph I see my father’s need to show me the power of metaphor, how imagery and figurative language can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things; that we might harness, as with the yoke of form, both delight and the conveyance of meaning; that language is a kind of play with something vital at stake. My mother knew, as another figurative level of the photograph suggests, that I would have to journey toward an understanding of myself, my place in the world, with the invisible burdens of history, borne on the back of metaphor, the language that sought to name and thus constrain me. I would be both bound to and propelled by it. She knew that if I could not parse the metaphorical thinking of the time and place into which I’d entered, I could be defeated by it. “You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”
Growing up in the Deep South, I witnessed everywhere around me the metaphors meant to maintain a collective narrative about its people and history—defining social place and hierarchy through a matrix of selective memory, willed forgetting, and racial determinism. With the defeat of the Confederacy, wrote Robert Penn Warren, “the Solid South was born”—a “City of the Soul” rendered guiltless by the forces of history. “By the Great Alibi,” he continues, “the South explains, condones, and transmutes everything . . . any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition. . . . By the Great Alibi the Southerner makes his Big Medicine. He turns defeat into victory, defects into virtues. . . . And the most painful and costly consequences of the Great Alibi are found, of course, in connection with race.”
The role of metaphor is not only to describe our experience of reality; metaphor also shapes how we perceive reality. Because the Deep South of my childhood was a society based on the myths of innate
racial difference, a hierarchy based on notions of white supremacy, the language used to articulate that thinking was rooted in the unique experience of white southerners. Thus, in the century following the war, the South—in the white mind of the South—became deeply entrenched in the idea of a noble and romantic past. It was moonlight and magnolias, chivalry and paternalism. The blacks living within her borders, when they were good, were “children” to be guided, looked after, protected from their own folly, “mules of the earth,” “darkies” with the “light of service” in their hearts. When they stepped out of line they were “bad niggers” from whom white women—“carriers of the pure bloodline”—needed to be protected; they were “animals” to be husbanded into a prison system modeled on the plantation system—or worse, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” On the monumental landscape, in textbooks, they were un-storied but for the stories told about them. In my twelfth-grade history book they were “singing and happy in the quarters,” “better off under a master’s care.” According to my teacher, they were “passive recipients of white benevolence” who’d “never fought for their own freedom”—even as nearly 200,000 fought in the Civil War. And when they seemed exceptional in the mind of the South, they were magical: You’re smart for a black girl, pretty for a black girl, articulate—not like the rest of them . . .
I recall the myriad ways poetry helped me to contend with the reality of the world I faced then, and the thinking of the people in it: how Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” gave historical context to the dissembling I saw from older black men in our neighborhood—many of them my uncles, deacons in the church—when they were confronted and harassed by police; how Langston Hughes’s “I, too, sing America” imagined a future that was just, in which everyone—regardless of race—would be offered a seat at the table; how W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” showed me that I was not alone in feeling the seeming indifference of the whole world to my grief when I lost my mother and that loss, instead of isolating us, can make us part of a community in the world of a poem, a shared experience; and how Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” from which my father often recited, prepared me not only for our geographic separation after the divorce, but also for the joy of recollection, the happy memories of familial bonds and ties to place—even in the face of sorrow:
