Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

  JERICHO BROWN has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  Of “Bullet Points,” Brown writes: “Fear of unwarranted and unexplainable murder by police is as individual and personal as it is political. Please Google: Sandra Bland of Texas, Jesus Huerta of North Carolina, and Victor White III of Louisiana.”

  As a poet with an MFA in fiction, NICKOLE BROWN has a strong leaning toward hybrid work, an interest reflected in her two books. Fanny Says, published by BOA Editions in 2015, is a biography-in-poems about her bawdy, tough-as-new-rope grandmother, and Sister, her debut collection published by Red Hen Press in 2007, is a novel-in-poems. Though much of her childhood was spent in Deerfield Beach, Florida, Nickole was born in Louisville and considers herself a Kentucky native. She studied at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, was an editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson, and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. For ten years, Nickole worked at the independent literary press Sarabande Books, and she was a publicity consultant for Arktoi Books and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, and for four years was an assistant professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has also been on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State, the Sewanee Young Writers Conference, the Writing Workshops in Greece, and the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press and lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina.

  Of “The Dead,” Brown writes: “As early as second grade, I wanted to know my family’s ancestry. I came home with the word ‘ancestor’ rolling around in my mouth after hearing friends bragging about all the green and exotic lands from which their families came. I was excited, I had to know, so I came home to my grandmother and begged, Fanny, please, can’t you tell me where we’re from? Right quick, she squinted her right eye like she was sighting a rifle and said, Child, don’t you worry your pretty little head ’bout that. We weren’t nothing but a bunch of chicken thieves. What I thought she meant by this was trash, as in white. Because always, she’d joke: Girl, you was born trash, and you’ll die trash. We’d laugh, and so she’d say it again: Yep, you trash alright. That’s how you were born, that’s how you’ll die. But now that I’m grown and have heard the old stories, I realize behind her jokes was a long line of people she’d just as soon we forget altogether, and along with them, their deep history of poverty, ignorance, and ache. No one ever spoke of the dead in her house, and she certainly didn’t keep old photos. We dealt with tragedy in my family by putting it behind us—Blow up, blow out, blow over, Fanny would say, by which she meant, Get over it, forget the past. So when my beloved cousin died tragically and too young, I saw the depths of her willed amnesia—as always, she was fussing at me for wearing black clothing, and when I told her why I was dressed the way I was—that I was on my way to his funeral—she genuinely seemed to have forgotten. This perhaps is why I have the opposite problem—like a lot of writers, I don’t want to forget one single scrap. My wife calls me ‘a real nostalgia machine’ . . . ridiculously, I try to keep time still by stitching even small moments to the page, and more than once, I dare the dead to come, to sit up beside me and speak again, whispering their names.”

  CYRUS CASSELLS was born in 1957 in Delaware. He is a professor of English at Texas State University; this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of his teaching career, which began in Boston. He has published four books with Copper Canyon Press: Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), Beautiful Signor (1997), More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004), and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). His first book, The Mud Actor, was a 1982 National Poetry Series winner, published by Henry Holt and then reprinted in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporary Series. His sixth volume, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, is forthcoming in the spring of 2018 from Southern Illinois University Press. Cassells has won a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants.

  Of “Elegy with a Gold Cradle,” Cassells writes: “For my part, crafting an elegy often entails a delayed revelation, an attempt to convey what was unexpressed or even unsayable while the lost one was alive. It took nearly a decade for me to write this poem describing what it felt like to scatter my mother’s ashes on Maui, a place she’d never been but dreamt of going all of her life: One phenomenon I recall, in the days following my mother’s death from leukemia, was the powerful sense of our earliest bond: finding the antique cradle seemed a profound emblem of a sudden, inspiriting return to my origins as her son.”

  ISAAC CATES was born to Texan parents in Würzburg, Germany, in 1971. He teaches in the English department at the University of Vermont. Some of his comics appeared online last year in Okey-Panky. He writes scholarly criticism about both comics and poetry. He also edits and publishes an all-ages comics anthology called Cartozia Tales.

  Of “Fidelity and the Dead Singer,” Cates writes: “I was never very close friends with the poet Michael Donaghy—we were friendly acquaintances—but I heard him read his amazing poems enough times that when I reopen his books now, if I strain, I can almost hear some of them in his voice. He died unexpectedly of a sudden brain hemorrhage, aged only fifty, leaving a silent void where a poet should still have been. It hit me surprisingly hard, as have the losses of other poets I was closer to, like Rachel Wetzsteon, Craig Arnold, and Brett Foster. I wish I could hear them, like ghostly voices, instead of only reading their words. But the words are something.

  “And about that catalog of records: they’re a little bit of fiction. My mother’s collection of 45s didn’t actually include any Roy Head and the Traits, though it could have. And I never owned any Howlin’ Wolf on vinyl. I did have a copy of the Beatles’ compilation LP Hey Jude (which has now vanished into Past Masters), though in my callow vinyl youth I overplayed Reel Music even more. It’s funny to think what a narrow demographic played their parents’ Beatles LPs and heard that needle hiss. Now the silence around the songs doesn’t have that personal quality.”

  ALLISON COBB is the author of Born Two (Chax Press, 2004), Green-Wood (Factory School, 2010), Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series, 2015), and After We All Died (Ahsahta Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was born in 1971 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were made. She performs her poems as part of a collaboration called Suspended Moment with visual artist Yukiyo Kawano, a third-generation atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series.

  Cobb writes: “ ‘I Forgive You’ is the opening poem of my book After We All Died. I wrote the book because I kept hearing friends and colleagues talk about the Anthropocene—how the current extinction and climate crises foreshadow coming catastrophes, and the potential end of the human species. I thought, what if the end has already happened, as many climate scientists suggest? What would it be like to write from the point of view of living after the end? The book, and this poem, were the result.”

  LEONARD COHEN, the Jewish-Canadian singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, and painter, died in 2016. Born in the Westmount area of Montreal in 1934,
brought up as an orthodox Jew, Cohen was educated at McGill University, where he studied with Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. A member of the “Montreal School of Poets,” he published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, at the age of twenty-two. In the mid-1960s, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a recording career and was discovered by renowned producer and scout John Hammond. Over a nearly fifty-year solo career, Cohen recorded fourteen albums, writing some of the most revered songs in popular music, including “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Bird on the Wire,” and “I’m Your Man.” Judy Collins’s cover of “Suzanne” was a huge hit. Cohen continued to observe the Sabbath even when on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War.

  Cohen’s music was marked by his distinctive baritone voice and a melancholy tempered by wit, candor, and invention. In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Bob Dylan said that Cohen’s “gift of genius is his connection to the music of the spheres,” while Australian songwriter Nick Cave wrote that Cohen was “the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate.” Cohen’s thirteen books of poems include Flowers for Hitler, Book of Mercy, and Book of Longing. He wrote two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and was inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With humor and lyricism, his work explored the uncertainties of faith, religion, sexuality, and politics, and has had a profound influence on generations of musicians and writers. “People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant,” he observed. “But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.”

  David Remnick concludes his 2016 profile of Cohen by quoting the writer. “I know there’s a spiritual aspect to everybody’s life, whether they want to cop to it or not,” Cohen said. “It’s there, you can feel it in people—there’s some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot penetrate but which influences their mood and activity. So that’s operating. That activity at certain points of your day or night insists on a certain kind of response. Sometimes it’s just like: ‘You are losing too much weight, Leonard. You’re dying, but you don’t have to coöperate enthusiastically with the process.’ Force yourself to have a sandwich.

  “What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice. “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’ That’s a tremendous blessing, really.”

  MICHAEL COLLIER was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953. His two most recent collections of poetry are An Individual History (W. W. Norton, 2012) and My Bishop and Other Poems. He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

  Of “A Wild Tom Turkey,” Collier writes: “Part of the year I live in the country on a three-mile-long paved town road that connects two much longer state roads. Other than the manure spreaders, silage and hay trucks, livestock trailers, tractors, harvesters, pickups of all sizes and makes, a neighbor loading his flatbed with his backhoe and Bobcat, and the back-and-forth traffic of what passes for morning and evening rush hour, it’s a mostly quiet place, agriculturally bucolic. When it’s quiet, and sometimes when it’s not, I can hear creatures that live in the woods and fields around me. Most of the time when I hear them they seem to be in distress of one kind or another. Mating is a very common distress, so is being hunted and killed or trapped. A hummingbird once got caught behind plastic sheeting I had stapled over a partially broken garage window. The high pitch of its panicking voice, combined with an even more rapid than usual oscillation of its wings as well as the creepy distortion of its form behind the plastic, frightened me into an initial paralysis, until I freed the bird by ripping away the sheeting. A fox one evening last summer after the sun had gone down stood in the grass between our vegetable garden and the house and at consistent intervals cried and screamed with the heat of a wheel bearing burning up. I saw it from an upstairs window and wondered not only why it was making that sound but also what it was watching because its head was turned in a backward-looking, fixed glance. There are, of course, coyotes, near and far, that sound like cowards trying to scare each other. In an example of interspecies cooperation, an opossum sleeps on a crate in the garage next to where our adopted cat sleeps on a padded box. The sound the opossum makes is the drag of its hairless tail, like a heavy cable, over the floor as it slinks away when I appear. What else? On one occasion a cow, escaped from a neighbor’s dairy farm, stood in the driveway, swinging its head back and forth in acknowledgment of its predicament, or maybe like the swishing of its tail, just trying to swoosh away the flies on its ears. Now and then, it lifted its head and let out a mournful bellow that echoed across the valley. Birds, lots of birds screeching, singing, hammering, but not so many in distress, except when a robin chick fell out of its nest, tucked in a house eave, and was immediately surrounded by a mob of squawking adults. I had no idea there were so many robins living so close that would respond to such an emergency. And then there are the wild turkeys but that’s what ‘A Wild Tom Turkey’ is about, so I’ll leave it there.”

  BILLY COLLINS was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016), Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011), Ballistics (Random House, 2008), The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006), Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001), Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Questions About Angels (William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003) and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House, 2005). He is a former distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York) and a distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College. A frequent contributor and former guest editor of The Best American Poetry series (2006), he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He also edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds illustrated by David Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Of “The Present,” Collins writes: “As is the case with time itself, we choose to picture the present in many ways. How do you pin down something that is both apparent (we are always in it) and elusive (where did it go?). We may think of it as a relentless series of nanoseconds, which are zipping by far too rapidly to be grasped. But that’s not the way we actually experience the existence of the present. Experiments in human attention show that we feel the present as a moment lasting about 2.5 seconds, which is—come to think of it—about as long as it takes to read a line in a poem. And that’s not a bad way to think of a poem: as a series of ‘presents,’ one after another tumbling down the page. My poem, which is simpl
y a meditation on its title, pokes a little fun at the common advice to ‘live in the present’ as if it were a room where you could pull up a chair and have a look around. What the poem suggests is that there’s no here here.”

  CARL DENNIS was born in St. Louis in 1939. He lives in Buffalo, where for many years he taught in the English department of the State University of New York. Among his most recent books, all published by Penguin, are New and Selected Poems 1974–2004 (2004), Callings (2010), and Another Reason (2014). “Two Lives” is scheduled to appear in a new book, Night School, that Penguin will be publishing in spring 2018.

  Dennis writes: “In ‘Two Lives’ I wanted to give flesh to the notion that the life we live is only one of many we might have lived had any single fact of our history been altered. It seemed to me that the best way to make this notion worth considering seriously was to imagine the ghostly alternative abutting on the actual, so that the two seem like part of a single story, one in which the unlived life has a chance to enlarge the lived one. The poem is based on the faith that the more fully we can imagine other lives for ourselves the more fully we can inhabit the life we have.”

  CLAUDIA EMERSON (1957–2014) was born and raised in Chatham, Virginia. She received a BA in English from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She received fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her third collection of poems, Late Wife, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and in 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia. Emerson was poetry editor for The Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for Shenandoah. She taught at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, the University of Mary Washington, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, The Opposite House, and Impossible Bottle.