by David Lehman
MICHAEL RYAN has published five books of poems, an autobiography, a memoir, a novel, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. Four of the books were New York Times Notable Books of the year. The autobiography was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and the memoir was excerpted in The New Yorker. His poetry has won the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is director of the MFA program in poetry at the University of California, Irvine.
Of “The Mercy Home,” Ryan writes: “As Joseph Williams wrote in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, ‘The writer knows least about his work because he knows most about it.’ This is particularly true when the writer is writing autobiographically.
“The writer’s material is essential, but what really matters to me is what he or she makes of it. The writing I love most is finally about the reader, not just the writer. This makes autobiographical writing even more challenging. It’s where the art comes in.
“I try to do something different in every poem. I try even harder when drawn to habitual subjects like how people bear the unbearable.
“ ‘The Mercy Home,’ all 132 lines of it, rhymes—or half-rhymes—on a terminal ‘-r’ sound. What rhyme does in verse (and doesn’t do) is still very poorly understood. In this poem I hope it creates an incantation that underlies and overrides the narrative and exposition, and helps the poem’s rendering of the unbearable and providing it a shape in language.
“Writing and reading are both ways people bear the unbearable.
“The self-address as ‘you’ can be an effective self-critical, self-punishing voice in writing. Everyone I know has that voice inside them.
“I hope that, for all its insistence on the brutal facts, ‘The Mercy Home’ resolves in an act of peace through the imagination that does not underestimate the magnitude of human grief.”
DAVID ST. JOHN was born in Fresno, California, in 1949. His collections of poetry include, most recently, The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (Ecco, 2017). He is the editor of two posthumous collections of poetry by Larry Levis: The Selected Levis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf, 2016). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is university professor and chair of English at the University of Southern California.
Of “Emanations,” St. John writes: “This poem is an homage to the Big Sur coast of California and to two of its presiding artistic spirits, Robinson Jeffers and Edward Weston, as well as to two other remarkable figures of that landscape, Charis Wilson and the painter Pat St. John Moran, my aunt. The threads of narrative moving through the poem are meant to string historical and personal vignettes into a precarious mobile, each piece reflecting a restless light upon the other.”
SHEROD SANTOS’s most recent book of poems is The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2010). A new collection of prose/poetry pieces, The Square Inch Hours, was published in 2017. In 2006, he was presented with the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Humanities for his book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry. He has also received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Chicago, where he works in an outreach program for the homeless.
Of “I Went for a Walk in Winter,” Santos writes: “ ‘Time is an accident.’ That statement, by Maimonides, seems like an apt summary of my poem. I ran across it years ago, and while it interested me then, it interests me far more now, for if age has taught me anything, it’s that time is less a succession of moments than an accumulation of perceptions that present themselves largely by happenstance; in the case of this poem, during a late-night walk through the streets of Chicago in the middle of a snowstorm. How and what we think about our perceptions is, of course, another matter, another ‘time,’ so to speak, though that wasn’t my primary concern. My concern was simply to record my random observations as fully and accurately as possible as they appeared and disappeared in the ever-amassing drifts of snow.”
TAIJE SILVERMAN was born in San Francisco, California, in 1974. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Houses Are Fields was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009 and her poem “Grief” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2016.
Of “Where to Put It,” Silverman writes: “I don’t know how to explain where this poem came from—whether to preempt an explanation with reassurance that I hope nothing and least of all my sobs will hurt the baby inside me who is now five and likes to say, ‘Mamma, pretend I’m in your belly,’ and then burrow into my sweater while he looks up at me and meows. Or whether to state the obvious and belligerent truth that we can feel and live both the thing and its opposite, and that there must in some interior and immaterial castle be room for such contradiction. I hated being pregnant. I felt my body had been hijacked by an indifferent alien tribe and that my self had, against all previous suspicion, proved to be inseparable from my body. At the insistence of doctors, friends, and strangers, I quit taking the antidepressant that has long kept me buoyant (and has since shown to have no negative impact on pregnancy) until my brain without it unraveled into versions of self-loathing that now seem about as real as the X-Men. All the spaces in this poem existed and were contemporaneous, but still they needed imagining. And each one, once imagined, engendered the next. Like the self that is terribly loyal to the body but only moves toward it asymptotically, all the spaces did—do—lead toward but not into each other through hallways where we live. I felt, as I wrote the poem, a longing to experience witness differently. I kept picturing its last line, even as I wrote the first one.”
CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. The Lunatic, his new volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose, were published in 2015 by Ecco Press. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992.
DANEZ SMITH (Their Mother, 1989) is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Danez is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees (Penmanship Books, 2013) and black movie (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the Button Poetry Prize. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez’s work has been featured widely including on BuzzFeed, Blavity, PBS NewsHour, and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They are a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, three-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion, and a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective.
MAGGIE SMITH was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977. She is the author of Weep Up (Tupelo Press, forthcoming); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize and the IPPY Gold Medal in Poetry; Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones,” originally published in Waxwing, went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. PRI (Public Radio International) called it “the official poem of 2016.” The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Smith works as a freelance writer and editor.
Smith writes: “I wrote ‘Good Bones’ about raising my children in a world that’s as full of injustice and violence as it is beauty and wonder. I’m still in awe of how far the poem has traveled, and how it’s resonated with people around the world.”
R. T. SMITH was born in Washington, DC, in 1947 and was raised and educated in Georgia and North Carolina. For many years he served as alumni
writer-in-residence at Auburn University. He is the author of six books of stories and fourteen collections of poetry, including Library of Virginia Poetry Book Award winners Messenger (Louisiana State University Press, 2001) and Outlaw Style (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), as well as Brightwood (LSU, 2003), The Hollow Log Lounge (University of Illinois Press, 2003), and The Red Wolf (Louisiana Literature Press, 2013). He received the Virginia Governor’s Award for Achievement in the Arts in 2008 and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize in 2013. Smith edits Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he is writer-in-residence. He lives on Timber Ridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia.
Of “Maricón,” Smith writes: “Because it has haunted me for half a century, I wanted to tell the story of that tragic title fight in 1962 between Emile Griffith and Benny ‘Kid’ Peret, followed by the death of the latter, which underscored the dark irony of calling pugilism ‘the sweet science.’ When it occurred, only a few fans but most boxing insiders knew that the handsome Casanova Griffith was bisexual. Only many years after the bout did I learn that Peret had taunted Griffith with the term maricón at the weigh-in and during the fight. I made notes and talked to people for years but was completely stifled in my attempts to begin the poem. I found some traction only after Griffith died and I understood that his story was, for me, spliced together with the story of my own intense interest in and ambivalence about boxing. I started watching boxing on TV for the first time in decades, and watched the YouTube video of the fight. Then the literary tinder began to kindle. It seemed a self-brutalizing process I may have needed to endure, but I’m not watching boxing matches now.”
Born in 1968, A. E. STALLINGS grew up in Decatur, Georgia; studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and Oxford, England; and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. Her most recent collection is Olives (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her new translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days is recently out from Penguin Classics.
Of “Shattered,” Stallings writes: “This isn’t the first poem I’ve written about breaking a glass or sweeping. So I suppose that attests first of all to an innate clumsiness. Also, when you have kids, the fact that you have suddenly strewn the kitchen with cutting edges and children are running around barefoot fills you with that glamour-jagged horror of hypervigilance that seems to be a kind of attention to the moment shared by parents and poets. I have long been fascinated by the moment of the mistake, the action or word that changes what comes after (and thus what comes before) and cannot be undone or unsaid. Disasters on the domestic scale have always put me in a more cosmic philosophical mood.
“My lines are usually metrical, but I enjoy experimenting with syllabics (and particularly haiku-shaped syllabic stanzas) while including rhymes, the way the count pushes extreme enjambments and line breaks that ignore word-boundaries, and how the arithmetic turns up end rhymes in spots unanticipated by the ear. Maybe there is something apotropaic too in the writing of such a poem, an effort to ward off injury from the wounding sharpness of the world. At least in a poem, I can make a clean sweep.”
PAMELA SUTTON was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1960. She holds an MS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. She taught creative writing and critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 2008, where she was nominated by her students for the Charles Ludwig Teacher-of-the-Year Award. She worked as associate editor for The American Poetry Review from 1989 to 1993 and was a consulting editor until the death of APR’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Berg. Sutton currently lives on Marco Island, Florida, where she is finishing a novel, writing a third book of poetry, and looking for a university teaching position. Her first book of poems, Pocket Gospel, was published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2012. Her second, Burning My Birth Certificate, won the Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, and is forthcoming from Ashland Press.
Of “Afraid to Pray,” Sutton writes: “This poem attacked me like a pack of wolves. The Novel version is better.”
CHASE TWICHELL was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950. She has published seven books of poetry, the most recent of which is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming in 2018. After teaching for many years, she left academia in 1999 to start Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of poetry. Ausable was acquired by Copper Canyon in 2009. From 2014 to 2016 she served as chair of the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards at Claremont Graduate University. She is currently on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She lives with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York.
Of “Sad Song,” Twichell writes: “A couple of years ago, my first boyfriend found me on Facebook, and we’ve been back in touch ever since. I was in love—we’d been friends since childhood—but we were far too young, and he soon left to go adventuring in Thailand, and I to college. I waited for him for an absurdly long time, but he never came back, which froze my emotion in the glacier of time. Fifty years later, here it is again, poking out, half-thawed, a baby mastodon!”
JAMES VALVIS was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1969. After some college and a stint of homelessness, he enlisted in the United States Army and served during Desert Storm, though he did not see combat. He began writing poetry for publication while in the army and has since published hundreds of poems and scores of short stories in such journals as Ploughshares, Rattle, Tampa Review, The Louisville Review, and The Sun. He won the Chiron Review Poetry Contest. His poetry books are How to Say Goodbye (Aortic Books, 2011) and What Exactly Is a Valvis? (NightBallet Press, 2013). He lives in Issaquah, Washington, with his wife and daughter.
Valvis writes: “Let me first thank Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for including ‘Something’ in this year’s anthology, and the editors at The Sun for originally publishing the poem. I maintain great editors are more rare and less appreciated than great writers, and so I thank them and all who have supported my work.
“The events depicted in ‘Something’ happened six months before I wrote the poem. As a young man, I used to suffer from severe panic disorder, symptoms of which included sweating, shortness of breath, a sense of unreality, and rapid heartbeat. Often, for seemingly no reason, while riding on a train, while reading in the library, while waiting in a grocery store line, the symptoms arrived and I thought I was dying. I’ve largely beaten back this awful condition, but there remain times when the stress is severe enough I psychologically shut down. I knew guys in the army who claimed during firefights they would inexplicably sit on the battlefield and start weeping. Or they’d start daydreaming and looking up at the stars as tracer rounds flew overhead. Each recorded a buzzing, a punch-drunk sensation where the blow is emotional rather than physical. Something like this happened to me in that doctor’s office, and I wanted to record the feeling as accurately as possible and to bring the reader into this moment.
“A flat narrative wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t illustrate the humming, droning sound one hears, which shuts off linguistic clarity and understanding—at a time when understanding is most needed. The repetition of ‘something’ is meant to be that ‘dumb hum.’ The word ‘some’ even rhymes with hum, and the word ‘thing’ rhymes with ping, like a heart monitor ping.
“If you pushed me I might credit Raymond Carver with some influence and perhaps give a nod to Poe’s ‘The Bells,’ but here I start to question too much hindsight analysis. For me, a poem happens mostly in the moment of composition and, in this regard, this poem was no different than any of my others. I will say that after I finished drafting ‘Something’ I knew I’d written a good poem. If there’s any better feeling than that, I surely don’t know what it is.
“One final note. Because people have asked, I should say the health concerns turned out to be, as my wife said,
borrowed trouble. I’m fine; I had and have no cancer. I’m very lucky. May God provide His mercy and compassion to those not as fortunate.”
EMILY VAN KLEY’s book, The Cold & The Rust Smell, won the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and is forthcoming from Persea Books. Raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she now lives in Olympia, Washington, where she also teaches and performs aerial acrobatics.
Van Kley writes: “ ‘Dear Skull’ was written in response to images of decorated skeletons kept as holy relics in the early Catholic world, as shared with me by the poet Jessica Walsh. My life had been recently shaken by the sudden loss of a dear friend, and I was intrigued by the relative permanence of these human remains, their continued significance—even participation—in the world of meaning, despite having been separated from selfhood, that quality so perplexingly erased (?) transformed (?) interrupted (?) by death.”
WENDY VIDELOCK lives in a small agricultural town on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. This is her second appearance in The Best American Poetry. Her books include Nevertheless (Able Muse Press, 2011), The Dark Gnu (Able Muse, 2013), Slingshots and Love Plums (Able Muse, 2015), and What’s That Supposed to Mean (EXOT Books, 2009).
Of “Deconstruction,” Videlock writes: “We have made our home on the edge of the Rockies, on the fringe of an arroyo in the high deserts of western Colorado. From here, nestled against the mesa, we are given an endless parade of wildlife and dramatically changing skies and weather. This is no country for unstudied birds, or ignorant ones. The poem in question arrived, as it were, in one fell swoop, and is told from the point of view, it seems, of a loquacious old crow.”
