by David Lehman
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!
It was in this spirit that I read and selected poems for The Best American Poetry 2017. It should be noted that, in many ways, any anthology could serve as an autobiography of the mind of the anthologist, and certainly this was true for me. Looking back on it now, I see clearly my preoccupations. I have been in a state of bereavement almost all of my adult life—ever since the spring I turned nineteen when my mother was killed. Over the years there have been periods of intense grief, immediately following more losses, and then other periods in which the feeling of grief was less intense but nonetheless present as an integral part of who I am. Not long ago, I felt the sharpness of it again: I lost my father, the poet Eric Trethewey, near the end of 2014. The whole year following, as I was reading poems for a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine and watching terrible events unfold in the news, I wanted to call him so that we might speak as we always had, that I might find comfort in his wise words, his voice on the other end of the line. I wanted to engage in the ongoing conversations we’d had my entire life about poetry and justice, and about loss—of which novelist Pat Conroy wrote, “There is no teacher more discriminating and transforming.”
And then came 2016, into which the headlines of the previous two years began to bleed and overlap: images of mass shootings, scenes of refugees fleeing the devastation and violence of their homelands, videos of police using deadly force on unarmed citizens, acts of terror internationally and at home. There seemed to be no respite. Too, there were more losses of poets I’d loved and admired. It was my fiftieth year—a child of interracial marriage—and I was poised to celebrate the anniversary of advances in civil rights gained by Loving v. Virginia while, at the same moment, the presidential election season gave rise to increasingly visible and mainstream forms of white nationalism and separatism, uncivil discourse, and outright lies repeated and spun to look like facts. It was a hard year in which the enduring rhythms of poetry provided a singular kind of respite. In particular, I found solace in the ways in which contemporary poets were turning their piercing gazes on the many facets of our historical moment and showing us with urgency the necessity of a proper poetical education in metaphor in order to contend with the tumultuous times we now face—both individually and collectively. We need the truth of poetry, and its beauty, now more than ever.
The range of subject matter and form in these seventy-five poems is vast, moving from Albergotti to Zapruder. Albergotti’s poem that opens the book employs and elevates the seemingly found language, institutional in nature, of the documents police officers must complete after using deadly force; Zapruder’s poem lifts the vernacular to the uses of the sacred and ceremonious, offering a blessing for lifelong happiness at a wedding. Judson Mitcham’s “White” examines racial privilege and deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference and hierarchy: the bedrocks of ongoing and often oblivious forms of white supremacy. Kevin Young’s “Money Road” is a timely intersection with a troubling history—the murder of Emmett Till—during the same year that Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused the fourteen-year-old Till of impropriety, finally speaks the truth. She confesses that she lied about the encounter that led to his murder at the hands of her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J. W. Milam. With its litany of losses, Nickole Brown’s “The Dead” becomes a collective lamentation for all our dead, while Sharon Olds’s “Ode to the Glans,” with its singular focus, becomes a collective celebration. Like all of these poems, the late Claudia Emerson’s “Spontaneous Remission” embodies the salutary achievements of poetry: the creation of a poem as an act of faith, generative in the face of death and destruction, hopeful in the face of despair, and the experience of reading a poem—at once pleasing and troubling and enlightening, a respite.
Throughout this difficult year I did not have my father to talk with, but I had the poems we’d shared, ones I’d turned to in the past, and a whole new set of poems—the ones in this anthology—to bring context and clarity and a renewed sense of joy through the pleasures and transformative powers of language. I am reminded, too, by all of the poems gathered here, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words: “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” Though this year I was often consumed by grief and overwhelmed by the sadness of our national and international tragedies, all of these poems spoke to me as records of the best and happiest moments in American poetry. Were my father here we might spend an evening reading them out loud and, perhaps, recite to each other these lines from Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Dedication,” which speak to the necessary call to witness found in these pages, a charge to contend with our historical moment—the need for truth—through the elegant envelope of form that a poem is:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
DAN ALBERGOTTI
* * *
Weapons Discharge Report
Incident involved the shooting of an animal.
—option under “Nature of Incident” in Police Policy Studies Council’s form “Weapons Discharge Report”
. . . it looks like a demon . . .
—Officer Darren Wilson, describing unarmed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in grand jury testimony
Complete this report as fully as possible to the best
of your recollection. Do not consult video evidence.
What time, what day, what week, what month, what century?
What district, what section, what subsection, what nation?
What type of incident: disturbance call,
domestic dispute, service of warrant,
homeland security activity, school disturbance,
church disturbance, disturbed individual,
disturbed family, disturbed culture,
suspicious person, suspicious color,
suspicious loyalty, suspicious love?
Select nature of incident: exchange
of gunfire between officer and offender,
perceived threats with a brandished edged object
or blunt object or unfired firearm, armed attack
was perceived by officer (but weapon never found),
another perceived threat not involving a weapon
(examples: safety of the public, involved parties
or officers threatened, officer felt threatened,
felt underappreciated, felt tired, bleary eyed,
angry, on edge, ready to pop, looked at sideways).
Pre-incident indicators of readiness:
officer arrived at the scene without
any degree of knowledge of danger,
officer totally surprised by threat,
officer knew assailant from prior police contacts,
officer was somewhat prepared for threat
due to prior knowledge of person and/or place,
officer knew exactly where he was, exactly
what he was doing, to whom, exactly why,
officer surprised by weapon’s power.
Light conditions: dark, dusk, dawn, blinding white,
good artificial, poor artificial, indoor, outdoor,
pure oblivion black. Was there light?
Was it dark? Was it sufficiently dark
to mask an inner darkness? Was it dusk?
Did incident involve accidental discharge
due to handling weapon, cleaning weapon,
loading or unloading weapon, admiring weapon,
admiring oneself in mirror while holding w
eapon,
feeling powerful, feeling excited, shaking
with anger or fear, struggling with suspect,
struggling with respect, struggling with self,
forcing entry, falling down, falling apart?
Estimate elapsed time between officer’s arrival
on scene and discharge of weapon: hours,
minutes, seconds, milliseconds.
(If nanoseconds, check “other.”)
Total number of shots fired by officer
(if unsure, write “hundreds”).
Total number of hits on suspect
(if unsure, write “dozens”).
What weapon was used by officer:
pistol, revolver, shotgun, sniper rifle,
Taser, 37mm, Pepperball, automatic
assault rifle, tactical military device?
Estimate distance of initial shot fired by officer:
Contact, 0–3 yards, 3–7 yards, 7–15 yards,
15–25 yards, over 25 yards, over 25 miles,
from Baton Rouge to Baltimore,
from New York to Los Angeles.
Was suspect moving or stationary? Was suspect
on foot, on floor, on gravel, on sidewalk, on dirt,
on grass, on drugs, on life support, on cross?
Was officer moving or stationary? Was officer standing,
prone, running, sitting, in vehicle, kneeling, supine,
squatting/crouching, ascending/descending stairs,
only ascending, towering above like a colossus?
Were multiple officers involved?
Was officer killed or wounded by assailant action?
Was officer killed or wounded by friendly fire?
Was officer hurt by friends, reserved,
alienated, taciturn, withdrawn, despondent,
prone to prolonged periods of weeping?
Did officer make independent threat identification
before firing? Did officer attempt to disengage
before employing deadly or less-lethal force?
Did officer attempt to shake off demons?
Did officer reload his/her weapon before end
of confrontation? Did body armor influence
officer’s survival? Did body armor influence
officer’s decision to fire? Did officer experience
weapon stoppage or malfunction during incident?
If so, what kind? Was officer able to clear stoppage,
clear weapon, clear head, clear conscience?
Profile of offender (check here for defaults):
age, race, gender, nationality, political affiliation.
Was offender influenced by alcohol or controlled substance?
Did offender have prior history of mental illness?
Did offender display suicidal inclinations when confronted?
Did offender have prior arrest record, history
of violent felonies while armed, history of violent felonies
while unarmed, history of assault against law enforcement,
history of persistent struggle under weight of history?
Did incident involve the shooting of an animal?
Did responding officer mistake suspect
for an animal? Did officer call suspect an animal
or similar (e.g., monkey, boy, demon, dog, child)?
Would officer say suspect looked like a demon?
Would officer say a child? Was suspect a child?
Was suspect killed by police action?
Were bystanders killed by police action?
Were elected officials’ careers ended by police action?
Was course of national history altered by police action?
Estimate the weight of history upon
officer’s decision to discharge weapon.
from storySouth
JOHN ASHBERY
* * *
Commotion of the Birds
We’re moving right along through the seventeenth century.
The latter part is fine, much more modern
than the earlier part. Now we have Restoration Comedy.
Webster and Shakespeare and Corneille were fine
for their time but not modern enough,
though an improvement over the sixteenth century
of Henry VIII, Lassus and Petrus Christus, who, paradoxically,
seem more modern than their immediate successors,
Tyndale, Moroni, and Luca Marenzio among them.
Often it’s a question of seeming rather than being modern.
Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes,
and occasionally just as good. Whether it can ever be better
is a question best left to philosophers
and others of their ilk, who know things
in a way others cannot, even though the things
are often almost the same as the things we know.
We know, for instance, how Carissimi influenced Charpentier,
measured propositions with a loop at the end of them
that brings things back to the beginning, only a little
higher up. The loop is Italian,
imported to the court of France and first despised,
then accepted without any acknowledgment of where
it came from, as the French are wont to do.
It may be that some recognize it
in its new guise—that can be put off
till another century, when historians
will claim it all happened normally, as a result of history.
(The baroque has a way of tumbling out at us
when we thought it had been safely stowed away.
The classical ignores it, or doesn’t mind too much.
It has other things on its mind, of lesser import,
it turns out.) Still, we are right to grow with it,
looking forward impatiently to modernism, when
everything will work out for the better, somehow.
Until then it’s better to indulge our tastes
in whatever feels right for them: this shoe,
that strap, will come to seem useful one day
when modernism’s thoughtful presence is installed
all around, like the remnants of a construction project.
It’s good to be modern if you can stand it.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare.
from Harper’s
MARY JO BANG
* * *
Admission
My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I never would be. Velvet belt buckle. Mascara lash. Miniature crimson lipstick alive in the pocket of a purse. Her bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue. I never would wear that black windowpane see-through blouse, mother-of-pearl buttons tracing the path down her spine. Every woman was her rival. You could say seriousness made me impossible, exactly the same way beauty made her. I understand men. Some like to have one woman in their arms, while a second one stands on a half-shell, both continuously shifting between being and being seen. Even as a child, I understood there were erotic fishhooks that one couldn’t see. I learned to use a camera to see what I could be.
from The Paris Review
DAVID BARBER
* * *
On a Shaker Admonition
All should be so trustworthy, that locks and keys shall be needless.
Needless, useless, pointless, moot: stripped of every honest purpose,
nothing so haplessly worthless now, so meaningless.
Needless, needless: the deadbolt, the strongbox, the padlock
lolling from the tall spiked gate, the little me
tal teeth
all jingle-jangling mindlessly on their rusting ring, the all too obtuse
fitfulness of pin and tumbler, every chain known to man.
All melted down for scrap: the whole clanking, tinkling, delirious mess
spaded into the pitiless furnace for our trusty smiths
to put to good use, all that glorious blazing gloop walloped anew into
buckles, skillets, windchimes, wind-up toys, more spades.
Needless, worthless, baseless, daft: the locket, the lockbox, the lockers
slambanging in the winless locker room, the secret
hasp in the desk or the case to trip for the stash, the fireproof safe,
the bulletproof vest, the chastity belt, the countless
stacks of patents for atomic bombproof vaults kept under lock and key,
all gone the way of relics, ruins, fossils, flesh.
Useless, useless as useless gets: the dupe under the doormat, the blanks
on their hooks, the plink of trinkets (church key, poker chip,
bronzed trilobite) from this or that set, the cutting kit’s merciless shriek
in the back of the shop, the brassy tang on the tongue
when wrangling hands free in a breathless rush to slip in or out, the endless
