by David Lehman
Of “Kill List,” Majmudar writes: “The earliest Sumerian cuneiform tablets were thought to be scripture or poetry when they were first discovered. Deciphered, they proved to be a merchant’s ledger.
“If I take off my glasses and look at a poem, the blurred vision releases those lines into pure potential. Any list can blur into a potential poem.
“The epic poem of the twentieth century may well be those lists of names that totalitarian regimes consigned to the Gulag or to the death camps—poems whose every line was a life. You can recite the names of those dead by candlelight and make a litany.
“In our era of large-scale data collection, hacked consumer databases, and government watchlists, Anonymous (American, circa AD 2000) is producing many Gilgameshes’ worth of list poems. These comprise our own national epic. Every line of it is a life.
“A kill list, by contrast, is often shorter and more concentrated. It is a lyric poem. Every line of it is a death.”
JAMAAL MAY was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He now lives in Hamtramck, a 2.2-square-mile city inside of Detroit’s borders. His two books of poetry, Hum (Alice James Books, 2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016), received awards from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, respectively. He codirects OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah and teaches at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
May writes: “ ‘Things That Break’ is an example of the space between things I tend to reach for. Like Sei Sho¯nagon’s The Pillow Book, the listing lends a participatory aspect to the poem, as the mind instinctively tries to tie everything back to breaking (hopefully). In doing so, the reader becomes a coconspirator in the experience. Rather than stay with the list poem mode, the syntax shifts to trouble the comparisons and add more shades of meaning. By the end, I use what’s been built already to create a moment where the child holds a steady form, paradoxically indicating a break.”
JUDSON MITCHAM was born in June of 1948 in Monroe, Georgia. His books of poetry include Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (University of Missouri Press, 1991), This April Day (Anhinga Press, 2003), and A Little Salvation (University of Georgia Press, 2007). His novels are The Sweet Everlasting (Georgia, 1996) and Sabbath Creek (Georgia, 2004), both winners of the Townsend Prize for fiction. He holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Georgia and taught psychology for thirty years at Fort Valley State University. He has also taught creative writing at Mercer University, Emory University, and Georgia College & State University. In 2013 Mitcham was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. He is the current poet laureate of Georgia.
Of “White,” Mitcham writes: “The massacre described in the poem’s first section is the Moore’s Ford lynching, which occurred on July 25, 1946, just outside Monroe, Georgia, my hometown. The names of the murdered are Roger Malcolm, Dorothy Malcolm, George W. Dorsey, and Mae Murray Dorsey. The story made headlines in The New York Times and resulted in what was the largest FBI investigation in history at that time. Laura Wexler’s book, Fire in a Canebrake, is a detailed examination of the case. As the poem says, I grew up in that town but never heard a word about what had happened until I was middle-aged. I have yet to find anyone of my generation who knew about it while young, a fact that leaves me in ‘dumb sputtering astonishment at the ignorance of our lives.’ ”
JOHN MURILLO was born 1971 in Upland, California. He is an assistant professor of creative writing and African American literary arts at Hampshire College. His first collection of poems, Up Jump the Boogie, was published by Cypher Books in 2010.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is currently Visiting Writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University. She is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the essay collection Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. “To Marlon Brando in Hell” will be included in her next book of poems, The Gathering Storm.
Oates writes: “ ‘To Marlon Brando in Hell’ grew out of a fascination with the cinematic images of my long-ago childhood and girlhood. Marlon Brando, but also Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, each iconic figures of twentieth-century America whom we can perceive, at a distance of decades, as unique, fated, doomed. How the ardor of youth is transformed by degrees to something like torpor—the suffocation of the spirit. How, in Brando’s case in particular, an unfathomable talent (for acting) was transformed into self-loathing and self-destruction. The admiring observer—(the poet)—is stunned to realize how contemptuous the bearer of great talent might be for his own talent—how careless of his talent, as of his life.
“Yes, the stanza about the fifteen-year-old girl is autobiographical. Of course! This is the springboard for the poem.”
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco, California, in 1942. Her most recent collection of poems, Odes, was published by Knopf in 2016; other books include The Dead and the Living, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University, and was a founder, in 1986, of the Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshops. She was New York state poet from 1998 to 2000.
Of “Ode to the Glans,” Olds writes: “Once Neruda’s Odes to Common Things had fallen into my hands, in December 2008 (I remember it falling literally, from a high shelf, in the back of a dark, dusty old bookstore, far off my beaten path), I read it with passionate admiration, dazzled by the concepts, the plainness of speech, and the unfettered, animizing imagination—everything so alive. I did not think of trying my hand at it. Its originality seemed absolute. (The Spanish facing the English [in Ferris Cook’s translation] was part of the richness of the experience.) And a few weeks later, it came to me that there were everyday objects, common things, which I had never thanked or sung.
“Well, that’s not true. It wasn’t an idea. The beginning of a description of an ordinary object just came into my mind—or rather my mind thought of some things a familiar object was like—my mind started playing with simile. A tampon was like ‘Inside-out clothing; / queen’s robe; / white-jacketed worker who clears the table / prepared for the feast which goes uneaten.’ The poem began to carry some of the pride of a girl becoming a woman, with a woman’s reproductive powers, and some of the gratitude for the helpfulness of the tampon like a friend comforting and protecting one.
“As I was writing the first draft, I did not notice, much, that the poem was coming out not in my usual 4/4 time of the church-hymn line, but each image had its own space. I liked that. Later I thought that was part of the praise, and part of the plainness, the commonness. And when I see the poem now, I see it did not address its subject, the object of its attention, until fifteen of the twenty-five lines had been written—I think the poem suddenly turned itself from a description into a direct address.
“That was ‘Ode to the Tampon,’ the first in what turned out to be a series. Once I began to see the outline of a series, I thought I might eventually put what I thought were the best of the odes in a book as one section of a book—not a whole book, lest I reveal my obsessionalness.
“ ‘Ode to the Glans’ was one of the last poems I wrote which ended up in Odes. Looking at it today, I noticed for the first time the familiar friendly tone of its opening, the speaker surprised she had forgotten this character (the glans), this dramatis persona. By then I was deep in the premise of serenading not one beloved’s body, or its attributes, but some kind of aggregate or representative of some common things, and common parts of people. Somehow it felt to me liberating, affectionate, comfortable, and body-politic in a humorous and respectful enough way.
“I failed, in many other poems (not included in the book), with the tone—not my strong point, to know how close one can go to the body, to the matter, and still honor the spirit.”
MATTHEW OLZMANN was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1976. He is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanines (2013) and Contradictions in the Design (2016),
both from Alice James Books. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a lecturer at Dartmouth College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Of “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz,” Olzmann writes: “This poem is from a book-length series of epistolary poems. It was originally published on January 5th, and on that day, the president gave a speech on gun violence. A month or so earlier, on the day I sent the poem out for publication, the place where I was working at that time went on lockdown because a man with a rifle was spotted on campus. Is there ever a time when this isn’t an issue? A time when we’re not either reflecting upon a previous tragedy or bracing for a new one? Is this supposed to be normal? Despite the polemics of the subject matter, I think of this less as an ‘anti-gun’ poem, and more of an ‘anti-ridiculous-debates-where-nothing-gets-done-about-guns’ poem. In early drafts, I thought of it exclusively as an elegy. Later, I started thinking of it as being more about a certain refusal to act in the face of an obvious catastrophe.”
GREGORY ORR was born in Albany, New York, in 1947. Since 1975, he has taught at the University of Virginia, where he founded its MFA program in writing in 1982. He has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent of which is River Inside the River (W. W. Norton, 2013). He is also the author of A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, which W. W. Norton will publish in 2017. These poems are from a recently completed collection, What Cup? His current project is a stage adaptation of his memoir, The Blessing. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Of “Three Dark Proverb Sonnets,” Orr writes: “The aphoristic has always appealed to me. And it’s occurred to me (and others) that a proverb could be thought of as a one-line folk lyric, or at least as an ultimately compressed lyric of anonymous origin. The form of the proverb also gave me permission to heighten the sound-play, to indulge in rhyme and off-rhyme and even puns. Making them up became a kind of game that went on in my head/on the page for about two or three months, the fall of 2013. By the time my fascination with the proverb form subsided I had a good number of them. Having celebrated the dense autonomy of the aphoristic, I came up against a wish to have them gain some scope as well. Obviously, given the nugget-nature of the form, I wasn’t going to be able to construct much in the way of narrative unity, but I wanted more than just individual proverbs—I felt they could gather force if I clustered them either by tone or theme or both. I think that’s when I decided some of them (these three for example) could be ‘sonnets.’ My definition of sonnet is quite loose I suppose; possibly even tongue-in-cheek.
“As for the content. I felt somewhat that I had been emphatically affirmative in some recent work and got to thinking about that. One of my favorite texts is Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—and part of the pleasure in it is the way the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ are a bracing antidote to the one-sided, ‘angelic’ view of the world. I thought also of William James’s put-down of Whitman—that he was almost ‘pathologically healthy-minded’ and essentially lacked a ‘vision of evil’ to reality-check his insistent celebrations. I’ve never lacked a dark or sardonic side and so I decided to let it loose in this form: ‘dark proverbs.’ ”
CARL PHILLIPS was born in Everett, Washington, in 1959. His new book of poems, Wild Is the Wind, will come out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018. Previous books include Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), Silverchest (FSG, 2013), and a book of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014). Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Of “Rockabye,” Phillips writes: “Sometimes one of the hardest things to admit to in a relationship is vulnerability—in my own experience this has seemed especially so between men. Also brokenness, be it physical or psychological. But what if we not only admit to, but embrace the fact of brokenness? And if we end up arriving together at a place we set out for, does it matter that our road was a broken one, that our minds and bodies that we used, to get there, were likewise broken? For me, there’s hope in thinking of vulnerability as its own kind of strength, in embracing the so-called flaws we all travel with, and in not thinking of the distance between two people as an uncrossable divide. I suppose the poem came out of all that.”
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS was born in New York City in 1974. He received a bachelor of arts in English from Swarthmore College and a doctorate in English from Brown University. His first book of poems, The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the GLCA New Writers Award. His next book, Heaven (FSG, 2015), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and divides his time between New York City and Barcelona.
Of “Halo,” Phillips writes: “The peculiar power of poetry, its particular panache, rises out of its inherent ability to blur the boundaries between the sacred and the divine, absence and presence, indeed between a thing and nothing at all. ‘Halo’ is a poem that thrives in the space of that divide. As someone who does much writing in my head, I’m fascinated by how a poem is a material object and a diaphanous idea simultaneously; that its beauty is one that flickers between these states. A bit of Baudelaire’s ‘Perte d’auréole’ swims somewhere in the seams of it but ‘Halo’ is its own strange thing: a light on the mind’s horizon.”
ROBERT PINSKY was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. His recent book of poems is At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His awards include the Italian Premio Capri, the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago, the Korean Manhae award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry for his translation The Inferno of Dante (FSG, 1994). The videos from his Favorite Poem Project can be viewed at www.favoritepoem.org. He was guest editor of The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition (2013).
Of “Names,” Pinsky writes: “The nominal token of my name confronts me with the past, for good or ill and plenty of both. The delusory, often pathological, occasionally beautiful associations of culture, the chimerical, crucial, often enough murderous baloney of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’ They are there in how you designate me and how I designate you.
“We come into the world, for a moment or two, innocent of all that, but soon enough it begins determining us. For example: if you call that certain moment ‘christening’ you associate yourself with an American majority, thereby making yourself at that moment more secure than Mohamed, Vijay, or Menachem.
“Anyone’s name: an essential, minimal particle of culture. A meaning. Some readers will not recognize the aggressive history and meaning of the question ‘What kind of name is that?’ Some readers will not recognize ‘Byron De La Beckwith’ or ‘Ikey Moe.’ That possible darkness, too—the unknowing itself—is part of my meaning.”
STANLEY PLUMLY is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland. His most recent book is The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is finishing a book on Constable and Turner and the sublime landscape. “Poliomyelitis” appeared in Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016).
Of “Poliomyelitis,” Plumly writes: “Polio was a part of the childhoods of anyone born right around or after the Second World War. I had many classmates who suffered various stages of the disease. My poem ‘The Iron Lung’—from the late nineteen seventies—is my first attempt to identify with the consequences of polio, which, in those days, normally amounted to paralysis or death. Infantile paralysis was (is) its common name.”
PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000, and Vintage Books, 2002); a hybrid-genre memoir entitled Intimate (Tupelo Press, 2012); and several books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007),
and Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), which won the UNT Rilke Prize. Her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, is out from Copper Canyon Press, and her latest book of nonfiction, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of the Vietnam War, won the AWP Nonfiction Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. She is the editor and founder of the web history archive project, Mapping Salt Lake City (www.mappingslc.org).
Of “Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi,” Rekdal writes: “For a period of six months I lived in Hanoi, next door to the Vietnam Military History Museum, which is where I came across this sculpture. I wrote this poem in dozens of wildly different versions over the course of three years but nothing, for me, could ever formally approach the monumentality of this monument. The sculpture is an artwork of both propaganda and history, as all war monuments are, and yet something about these reassembled planes felt, the more I observed them, restless, enlarging. These planes are not representational figures made of stone and marble, as they might be in a more sanitized monument that line a capital’s landscaped mall. They are planes. They are the real planes real men died in, from which real men killed other people. For me, the artwork is a sliver of war’s terrible sublime, and perhaps it is the enormity of sensations that this piece arouses in me that first made me suspect the sculptor had been duped by his creation or, better yet, had helped it slip the control of the politicians who commissioned it, who wanted to tell only one story about the war, rather than the story the artist seemed to recognize. This was a sculpture that, accidentally or not, elegizes the deaths of Vietnam’s enemies as much as it celebrates Hanoi’s victors. During my time in Hanoi, I visited this sculpture frequently, taking notes, thinking that someday I would write a poem that could encapsulate what I felt while looking at it, or that perhaps I would come to this courtyard one day and sit by it and look at it and simply feel less. For a time, I even visited the museum daily, believing that repeated exposure would numb these sensations that arose in the planes’ presence, assure me that I had at last pinpointed the final sentiment behind the monument; that, by articulating it for myself, I might encapsulate some idea central to understanding the war. But I never did. I never wrote a satisfactory poem about that sculpture. I just stopped.”
