Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

  “The psyche is surely a mad genius in its ability to generate the story it needs. Commentators like Bill O’Reilly, authoritarian and bullying, are the id-monsters of the inner patriarchy, the unconscious costumed as superego, spreading fear like a transmittable disease, one that is readily transmuted into a contagion of rage.

  “For much of his life, I wish to say for the record, my father was a hardworking doctor in a poor part of southern Louisiana; his skilled hands and medical expertise did a great deal of good, and, as far as I know, he never turned a patient away for lack of payment. Our family freezer was often full of shrimp and wild game dropped off by grateful patients.

  “But sometimes things go wrong; the story, as they say, ‘goes south.’ In his retirement, my father drastically mismanaged his savings by gambling on the stock market, and he died broke, his credit cards cut to pieces by his wife; his computer access to the stock market blocked. He was a man dismayed and baffled by his misfortunes.

  “ ‘Cause of Death: Fox News’ is, I suppose, a polemical poem, and probably guilty of the oversimplifications that accompany certainty. When we tell a story, consciously or unconsciously, we usually tell it to our own advantage. I hope that in this poem, the speaker’s certainties are redeemed, at least in part, by tones of human sympathy, and also perhaps by inflections of dark humor. Trustworthy or not, such a poem is a sort of time capsule, the snapshot of a moment in our social (and personal) history, which will do for the time being, until the story needs to be reopened, unpacked, and freshly scrutinized, from a different angle in the ever-changing light.”

  JOHN HODGEN lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Grace (winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), In My Father’s House (winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University Bluestem Press, 1993), and Bread Without Sorrow (winner of the 2002 Balcones Poetry Prize, Lynx House Press/Eastern Washington University Press, 2001). He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for poetry, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in poetry. He has also received the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Foley Prize from America Magazine, and the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for the best poems published in Beloit Poetry Journal.

  Of “Hamlet Texts Guildenstern about Playing upon the Pipe,” Hodgen writes: “Hard sometimes seeing students shuffling soundlessly across the quad, out of the cradle endlessly texting, passing each other like lost friendships in the night. Easy, however, seeing them holding their phones like bouquets of glow worms or handfuls of fireflies up to their faces, how they are transformed, blazed with delight, someone’s lighted little words having languaged them, religioned them, with (what else?) love, something shining, wholly theirs, at the tips of their fingers, shimmering, gleaming, true.

  “Easy as well within the nutshell of the classroom amidst those hefty tomes, those other texts, analyzing, contextualizing, for those selfsame students to raise their temporarily empty hands to say that Romeo and Juliet would’ve lived if they had had cell phones back in the day. And Hamlet would’ve run off with Ophelia, met her in Room 2B, or not, Snapchatting, Instagramming, Tumblring, MadThumbs, Finger Swiping, Tinder Is the Night, Tweeting like nightingales or larks. And they’d be right, Hamlet, that fuzzy gray cloud over his head, his typing awareness indicator, his TIA, wiggling, telling Gldnstrn/Rsncrntz, we nd 2 tlk, jst tll the truth, SAD, SAD, SAD.”

  DAVID BRENDAN HOPES was born in 1950 in Akron, Ohio. He practices poetry, fiction writing, playwriting, and painting in Asheville, North Carolina, where he has been professor of English at UNCA for thirty-four years. He has had books published by Dodd Mead (back in the day), Scribner’s, Milkweed Editions, and Pecan Grove Press.

  Hopes writes: “ ‘Certain Things’ arose from one of those moments when you realize you are doing EXACTLY the thing that used to irritate you about your father. Not only is it a moment of realization, but a moment of compassion, when you forgive your parent much, guessing for the first time why he did what he did in the way he did it.”

  MAJOR JACKSON was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1968. His latest book is Roll Deep (W. W. Norton, 2015). He is the editor of Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He has been included in multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry. The recipient of a Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received awards and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives with his wife, the poet Didi Jackson, and their children in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

  Of “The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail,” Jackson writes: “Having lived primarily for the past two decades in regions of the United States best described as either rural, pastoral, or mountainous, I treasure my trips to large cities (mostly New York City) for what they remind me of my youth, the aliveness and excitement of humanity choreographed together in some concert not of our design, and for the palpable sense of simultaneity, that everything is happening all at once. Thanks to Walter Benjamin, much has been written about the flâneur as an emblematic figure of modernity. Because of the crush and immediacy of life around us, the challenge of living in cities is learning to discern what is truly remarkable about existence, is learning to stay awake, and thus, to remain human. This poem is composed of some observations and bits of conversations I have transcribed and recorded in journals over the past five years, chiefly as a means of slowing down and savoring the pleasures of life in a metropolis.”

  JOHN JAMES was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1987 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of Chthonic (CutBank, 2015), winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Contest. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, where he held multiple fellowships and received an Academy of American Poets Prize. He is completing an MA in English at Georgetown University, where he serves as graduate associate to the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and directs the summer school’s creative writing institute. Also a scholar, he researches William Blake and ecological Romanticism. He lives in Washington, DC, with his partner and daughter.

  James writes: “I wrote ‘History (n.)’ in about an hour. My daughter was maybe one and a half and my mother was downstairs keeping an eye on her. I was working under a serious time constraint, and because of that, I had to write quickly, putting my inhibitions aside and giving myself over to associative leaps I wouldn’t normally make. I composed the poem on my computer, as a single prose block consisting of sixteen lines in Perpetua font, a numeric limitation I placed on myself in order to fill a space with language, without much regard for what the language itself actually said. (I decided to worry about that later.) Strictures are good for me; I often need something to write against in order to write at all. It’s in part a fidelity to the numeric nature of metrical form, even though I—and practically all of my contemporaries—write primarily in free verse. I see myself within that poetic lineage. I grabbed a few books I knew to be relevant to the ideas on which I was meditating—tomes by Hegel, Haruki Murakami, Anne Carson, and others—and started excerpting text that for various reasons seemed interesting to me, using it to fill out the prose block when I got stumped. That’s what the italicization is about. It’s all excerpted text. Once I was finished—and this might have been the next day—I cut what felt like excess language from the poem and began to put it into lines. I was experimenting at the time with spacing and alignment, as well as with the short, fragmented secti
ons that comprise the poem. Actually, I wrote a series of similar poems, which comprise the final section of my book manuscript, The Milk Hours. Once I was finished with that process, the poem was done. I cut one line—the last one—when The Kenyon Review took the poem, but that was all. The line just seemed a little too heavy handed. My partner, who is usually my best critic, actually made fun of it. And then it ended up here. Somehow I think it was the time constraint that allowed me to write the poem. Being forced to make those associative leaps opened me up to a mode of perception that I don’t always inhabit. All of the pieces, from the Plato epigram to the Calbuco volcano, somehow melded together, and I had a decent poem on my hands. Surprisingly, even alarmingly, it didn’t take much effort at all.”

  RODNEY JONES was born in Hartselle, Alabama, in 1950. His new volume, Village Prodigies (Mariner Books, 2017), doubles as a poetry book and an experimental novel. His other books include Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985–2005 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), and Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New Orleans and teaches in the MFA low-residency program at Warren Wilson College.

  Of “Homecoming,” Jones writes: “I was thinking in 2006, when I first wrote several drafts of this piece, that I would shape them into a poem later, so I noted what mattered and put them down mostly in fragments. Mostly nouns. When I came back to it seven years later, I wrote ‘Here are some verbs.’ Then I took the point of view, which had been autobiographical, and gave it to an imaginary character who had lived there as a boy, made a few alterations, and it became the last section, CX of Village Prodigies.”

  FADY JOUDAH was born in Austin, Texas, to Palestinian parents. He has three poetry collections and four volumes of poetry in translation from the Arabic, and has received a Yale Series award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among other honors for his work. He is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston.

  Of “Progress Notes,” Joudah writes: “This poem is one of a handful that took me years to complete. I think in terms of the body, the corporeal journey in life as we, partners of the body (and partly owned by it), historicize its corpus. This poem is one formulation of that haunting.”

  MEG KEARNEY’s newest collection of poems for adults, Home by Now (Four Way Books, 2009), won the 2010 PEN New England Laurence L. & Thomas Winship Award. The title poem of Home by Now appears in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places anthology (Viking, 2011). Meg’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions in 2001 and is still in print. She has written three interconnected novels-in-verse for teens, all from Persea Books: The Secret of Me (2005), The Girl in the Mirror (2012), and When You Never Said Goodbye (2017). Her short story “Chalk” appears in Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories (Persea, 2011). Meg’s picture book, Trouper (Scholastic, 2013), illustrated by E. B. Lewis, was awarded the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the State of Missouri’s Show Me Readers Award. Meg is the founding director of the Solstice low-residency MFA in creative writing program of Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. For more than eleven years, she was the associate director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards. A native New Yorker, she now lives in New Hampshire. For more information: www.megkearney.com.

  Of “Grackle,” Kearney writes: “I am working on a manuscript of poems inspired by 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells. Using the description and story of each bird as a prompt, I’ve written well over one hundred poems so far, and have thrown out more than half. One of these days, I hope to have enough ‘keepers’ to form a book.”

  JOHN KOETHE was born in San Diego in 1945. He received an AB from Princeton and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He has published ten books of poetry (as well as books on Wittgenstein and philosophical skepticism) and has received the Lenore Marshall, Kingsley Tufts, and Frank O’Hara awards. His most recent book is The Swimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). FSG will publish a volume of new and selected poems, Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, in 2018. He is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and lives in Milwaukee.

  Of “The Age of Anxiety,” Koethe writes: “I don’t remember what made me think of the title of Auden’s longest poem, but when I did I thought of construing it to refer not to a public social or historical epoch but rather to a time in one’s own personal life. The poem is simply an elaboration of that thought and so writing it was pretty straightforward. I usually take a long time—often weeks—to finish a poem, but since this one was so straightforward I finished it in a few days.”

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), The Chameleon Couch, The Emperor of Water Clocks, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. He has received the William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. They include Slipknot, Wakonda’s Dream, Nine Bridges Back, Saturnalia, Testimony, The Mercy Suite, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (with Chad Garcia). In 2016 he was announced as New York’s eleventh state poet. He teaches at New York University. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

  DANUSHA LAMÉRIS was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971, but has spent most of her life in the Bohemian enclaves of California: Mill Valley, Berkeley, and, for the past twenty-seven years, Santa Cruz. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches private writing workshops.

  Laméris writes: “Every poem, in its making, opens a world, and I have learned many things since writing ‘The Watch.’ For example, in some cultures, you never give someone a watch. Why remind them they are going to die? The same way, at least in my personal cosmology, you never give a person you love a knife, because of the severance it implies. Perhaps every gift has a psychic cost.

  “In the process of writing the poem, I realized the similarities between the work of the poet and the watchmaker. Both occupy arenas of smallness, detail, and well-defined constraints. Marriage is like this, too. My husband still wears this watch most days, and so now I am reminded of his mortality both by the actual watch, and its semblable on the page.

  “Recently, after a reading, the guy sitting next to me asked if I knew that there’s a name for an extra feature on the face of the watch—say it shows the phases of the moon, or tells the date. Apparently, it’s called a ‘complication.’ ”

  DORIANNE LAUX was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. Her most recent books of poems are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon, recipient of the Oregon Book Award, both from W. W. Norton. Laux is also the author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke. In 2014 the singer/songwriter Joan Osborne adapted her poem “The Shipfitter’s Wife” and set it to music on her newest release, Love and Hate. Laux teaches poetry at the MFA program at North Carolina State University and is a founding faculty member at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.

  Laux writes: “ ‘Lapse’ is a ‘Golden Shovel,’ a form Terrance Hayes invented in which one takes a line from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and uses each word in the line, in order, as the new poem’s end words. The poem originally appeared in Plume and was later reprinted in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, published in 2017 with the University of Arkansas Press.”

  PHILIP LEVINE (1928–2015) was born into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants and worked in Detroit auto factories from the age of fourteen. Described by Edward Hirsch as “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” Levine was the celebrated a
uthor of more than twenty poetry collections and a legendary teacher who influenced countless young poets from California State University, Fresno, on the West Coast to NYU and Columbia on the East. He was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, he wrote about his experiences as a factory worker and about such of his mentors as Berryman and Yvor Winters. About Berryman he commented, “He was a guy who didn’t want you writing like him. He considered himself, and rightly so, as a rather eccentric poet, and he urged me away from that kind of eccentricity.” Levine told his Paris Review interviewer that he used to memorize poems “when I worked in factories and recited them to myself. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.” Levine’s final two books, The Last Shift, a collection of poems, and My Lost Poets, a prose book, were published posthumously in 2016.

  AMIT MAJMUDAR (b. 1979) is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, twin sons, and daughter. His poetry has appeared in previous editions of this anthology (2007, 2012) as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012. His first poetry collection, 0°, 0°, was published by Northwestern in 2009. His second poetry collection, Heaven and Earth, won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. His third collection, Dothead, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2016. Ohio’s first poet laureate, he blogs for The Kenyon Review and has written two novels, Partitions in 2009 and The Abundance in 2011, both published by Holt/Metropolitan in the United States and Oneworld in the United Kingdom. His forthcoming book is a verse translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita entitled Godsong (Knopf, 2018).