by David Lehman
Praise for The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
—Robert Pinsky
“The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman’s ‘state-of-poetry’ forewords and the guest editors’ introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
—Academy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness . . . in all of these volumes . . . there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
—The Villager
“A year’s worth of the very best!”
—People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
—Booklist
“Certainly it attests to poetry’s continuing vitality.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
—The Washington Post
“For the small community of American poets, the Best American Poetry is the Michelin Guide, the Reader’s Digest, and the Prix Goncourt.”
—L’Observateur
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CONTENTS
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Foreword by David Lehman
Introduction by Dana Gioia
Allison Adair, “Miscarriage”
Kaveh Akbar, “Against Dying”
Julia Alvarez, “American Dreams”
A. R. Ammons, “Finishing Up”
David Barber, “Sherpa Song”
Andrew Bertaina, “A Translator’s Note”
Frank Bidart, “Mourning What We Thought We Were”
Bruce Bond, “Anthem”
George Bradley, “Those Were the Days”
Joyce Clement, “Birds Punctuate the Days”
Brendan Constantine, “The Opposites Game”
Maryann Corbett, “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers”
Robert Cording, “Toast to My Dead Parents”
Cynthia Cruz, “Artaud”
Dick Davis, “A Personal Sonnet”
Warren Decker, “Today’s Special”
Susan de Sola, “The Wives of the Poets”
Dante Di Stefano, “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen”
Nausheen Eusuf, “Pied Beauty”
Jonathan Galassi, “Orient Epithalamion”
Jessica Goodfellow, “Test”
Sonia Greenfield, “Ghost Ship”
Joy Harjo, “An American Sunrise”
Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
Ernest Hilbert, “Mars Ultor”
R. Nemo Hill, “The View from The Bar”
Tony Hoagland, “Into the Mystery”
Anna Maria Hong, “Yonder, a Rental”
Paul Hoover, “I Am the Size of What I See”
Marie Howe, “Walking Home”
Mandy Kahn, “Ives”
Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War”
Stephen Kampa, “The Quiet Boy”
Donika Kelly, “Love Poem: Chimera”
Suji Kwock Kim, “Sono”
Karl Kirchwey, “Palazzo Maldura”
Nate Klug, “Aconite”
Robin Coste Lewis, “Using Black to Paint Light”
David Mason, “First Christmas in the Village”
Robert Morgan, “Window”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Invitation”
Hieu Minh Nguyen, “B.F.F.”
Alfred Nicol, “Addendum”
Nkosi Nkululeko, “Skin Deep”
Sheana Ochoa, “Hands”
Sharon Olds, “Silver Spoon Ode”
Jacqueline Osherow, “Tilia cordata”
Mike Owens, “Sad Math”
Elise Paschen, “The Week Before She Died”
Jessica Piazza, “Bells’ Knells”
Aaron Poochigian, “Happy Birthday, Herod”
Ruben Quesada, “Angels in the Sun”
Alexandra Lytton Regalado, “La Mano”
Paisley Rekdal, “Philomela”
Michael Robbins, “Walkman”
J. Allyn Rosser, “Personae Who Got Loose”
Mary Ruefle, “Genesis”
Kay Ryan, “Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless”
Mary Jo Salter, “We’ll Always Have Parents”
Jason Schneiderman, “Voxel”
Nicole Sealey, “A Violence”
Michael Shewmaker, “Advent”
Carmen Giménez Smith, “Dispatch from Midlife”
Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story”
Gary Snyder, “Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany”
A. E. Stallings, “Pencil”
Anne Stevenson, “How Poems Arrive”
Adrienne Su, “Substitutions”
Natasha Trethewey, “Shooting Wild”
Agnieszka Tworek, “Grief Runs Untamed”
G. C. Waldrep, “Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,”
Wang Ping, “老家—Lao Jia”
James Matthew Wilson, “On a Palm”
Ryan Wilson, “Face It”
Christian Wiman, “Assembly”
Contributors’ Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
David Lehman was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return from England. Poems in the Manner Of (2017), his most recent book, comprises poems written in imitation, appreciation, translation, or parody of poets from Catullus to Charles Bukowski. His eight earlier collections include New and Selected Poems (2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), all from Scribner. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other anthologies. Two prose books recently appeared: The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014 (Pittsburgh), containing all the forewords he had written to date for The Best American Poetry, and Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Lehman lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
FOREWORD
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by David Lehman
In 2017 one former guest editor of The Bes
t American Poetry succeeded another when Kevin Young (BAP 2011) was hired to take the place of Paul Muldoon (BAP 2005) as poetry editor of The New Yorker. Paul, who continues to teach at Princeton, is the coauthor, with Jean Hanff Korelitz, of a critically acclaimed re-creation of the holiday feast in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” And for the first time in a decade, he is eligible to grace The New Yorker with a poetic tour de force on the order of “Aubade,” which ran in the January 29, 2018, issue.
As for Kevin, he left his post at Emory University to head the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, where his first public appearances celebrated the Schomburg’s acquisition of James Baldwin’s archives (“a well-timed coup,” said The New York Times) and the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who used to practice on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge (because no one complained about the noise) and for whom the bridge may someday be named.
For an admiring profile of Kevin Young that ran in Esquire, Robert Baird asked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who hired Young, why The New Yorker “still publishes poems,” as if that were a quixotic or archaic thing to do. “Poetry is arguably, in some compressed and magical fashion, the highest form of expression, the greatest devotion we have to our most intricate invention, language itself,” Remnick wrote in an email. “How can we publish a magazine that proposes to be literary, as well as journalistic, that does not publish poetry?”1
The title Esquire’s editors affixed to Baird’s piece—“Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?”—echoes that of the essay Dana Gioia wrote for The Atlantic in 1991: “Can Poetry Matter?” In reaction to this echo, one can 1) revert to adage (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), or 2) exclaim over the persistence of the worry, which seems to have outlived the related anxiety that either the novel or the author is dead, or 3) linger over some paradoxes. Perhaps never before have so many people written poetry despite the universally acknowledged truth that few folks buy poetry books. “It is almost eerie, the number of people who want to be poets,” Louise Glück remarked when working on The Best American Poetry 1993, and the number has gone up in the twenty-five years since. An academic industry has grown around the teaching of poetry and other forms of creative writing, yet voices keep proclaiming that poetry is ready for the morgue, has forfeited its public responsibility, has lost its audience, has slid into irrelevance. A survey released by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015 provides statistics to back up the gloom-and-doomsayers out there. If your idea of an active public is anyone who has read “at least one poem” in a calendar year, that public declined precipitously in the ten-year period ending in 2012 and is limited to 6.7 percent of the population. Do the math and you still get a hefty number of people—until you remind yourself of how broad the category is and how low the figure would be if people were asked to name a living poet or to recite a couple of lines of verse.
Robert Baird, author of the Esquire piece, has written one of the most cogent critiques of, or laments for, poetry today. (There are plenty of bad ones.) “Spend It All” appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on January 13, 2012. The post begins with an arresting observation: “Pass much time in the company of poets—young or old, online or off—and soon enough you’ll find yourself privy to the cycles of consternation and dismay inspired by the general insignificance of poetry.” This is undeniable even if one reflexively counters with the observation that America can now boast of having more poets per capita than ever in its history. Poetry has “slipped beyond decadence” into an eccentricity. “Poetry lost the common reader a long time ago, if it ever had her, and from where I sit, it seems well on its way to losing the uncommon reader as well,” Baird writes. “Time was you had to know at least a little Larkin or Lowell or Creeley to count yourself a cultured intellectual, just as older times demanded you had to keep current with opera and ballet. No more. These days we feel like we’re shouldering our share of the civilizational burden if we keep up our subscription to The New York Times and pledge yearly to NPR.” It sounds despairing, but Baird keeps his cool. “If you’re a poet you decide that there are too many poems that need writing, far too many that need reading. Plus, you figure, if people don’t like poetry, then bully for them, just like Frank O’Hara said all those years ago. Poetry, like virtue, is its own reward.” Then, too, he concludes, with the fortitude of Tennyson’s Ulysses, there is such a thing as “literary magnificence.”2
Everyone has always wanted to be a poet. The desire to write poetry, to live the life of a poet, has a long and honorable tradition. Here, from “The Fall of Hyperion,” is Keats’s statement of the theme:
Who alive can say,
“Thou art no Poet; may’st not tell thy dreams?”
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse
Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.
Keats anticipated Freud, who established the rationale for the argument that there is a poet in each of us. If the unconscious is the true genius, if it is the source of the dreams, the errors, and the jokes that prefigure poems, then all who dream, who err, who jest can get into the action in this game that has few and mostly lenient referees, and what’s the harm? If there is even a slim chance that the amateur poet, the student poet, the Sunday poet may participate in the cultural heritage that nourishes the imagination and resists the mighty forces of materialism, isn’t that all the justification we need to encourage the multitudes to write poetry and prose?
There is a flip side. Lack of talent or inspiration hasn’t stopped a lot of Shagpats from getting in on the action.3 A good heart and the power of positive thinking can take the poetaster a long way. Social media accelerate the tendency. The queen of Instagram poets is Rupi Kaur, a Canadian woman born in India. She has two books and 1.5 million followers on Instagram. She also has cash customers. Two and a half million copies of Milk and Honey, her first book, have been sold. Her poems, signed with her name in lowercase, are sincere, well-meaning, and sensitive in the approved way of greeting card verse. According to New York magazine, Queen Rupi reigns in “the realm of college freshwomen who have recently been or may soon go through breakups.” Carl Wilson of The New York Times defines her target audience as consisting of readers “who may think of poetry as the literary equivalent of opera or ballet, a privileged-white-male establishment hostile to their interests.” Covering the “inevitable backlash against Instagram’s favourite poet” for The Guardian, Priya Khaira-Hanks writes that Kaur and some of her rivals “hit upon a winning formula: rupturing short confessional pieces with erratic line breaks to share hard-won truths.” Example: “if you are not enough for yourself / you will never be enough / for someone else.” In The Wall Street Journal, the headline of Nina Sovich’s piece on the Rupi Kaur phenomenon—which lacked a single line of Kaur’s poetry—summed it up. “My Love Is Like a Hashtag: ‘Instagram Poets’ Sell Well.”4 The last best defense of such verse is that it may serve as a “gateway” to the real stuff. I can give lip service to this proposition even as I note that it sometimes seems as if the only time articles about poetry appear prominently in the culture pages of our newspapers is when the subject is a counterfeit, the implication being that we’d be prepared to embrace poetry if only it weren’t poetry.
Just as it occurs to me that the self-delete function of Snapchat may make it an exemplary medium, Mark Bibbins lets me know that William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” has become “a meme on Twitter, with people posting parodies/variations—some of which are receiving thousands of likes/retweets.” In Williams’s sly poem the speaker confesses to eating the plums in the icebox that “you” were planning to have for breakfast. “Forgive me” he says, but what follows sounds more like a gloat than an apology. The plums, he expl
ains, were delicious, “so sweet and so cold.” Kenneth Koch, a master parodist, took Williams’s formula to a logical extreme in four “variations.” The last of the four epitomizes the comic sublime, packing an exclamatory surprise in each line: “Last night we went dancing and I broke your leg. / Forgive me. I was clumsy, / And I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!”
I have used the fake apology as a prompt in my classes at the New School and in the weekly “Next Line, Please” challenges on the website of The American Scholar, so it didn’t altogether surprise me to learn that the fake apology was causing a Twitter ruckus. Many of the entries, seemingly composed off the cuff, turned the case of the eaten plums into new lyrics for familiar poems or jingles in the public domain. A writer self-characterized as “Medusa without frontiers” and “Ophelia in waders” opted for an Emily Dickinson locution: “Because I would not stop for plums, / I ate all yours, you see. / And now the icebox holds just pits; / I’m sorry.—Willie C.” Sir Ian modeled his entry on the opening of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”: “I saw the best plums of my generation destroyed by Williams, starving hysterical naked, / dragging himself through the icebox shelves at dawn looking for a sweet cold fix.”5
You may say: If this is poetry, what happened to language charged with meaning? Where are the best words in the best order? Is this what Wallace Stevens had in mind when he wrote that poetry is “a means of redemption,” “a search for the inexplicable,” “the renovation of experience,” and, just to keep you on your toes, “a pheasant disappearing in the bush”? Does this do what Emily Dickinson prescribed—take the top of your head off? The prosecution rests.
In chambers, the judge reminds counsel that the gallant thing is to change the subject and end the paragraph on a positive note. And the jury is addressed as one poet talking to another, trying to define the indefinable. Though judgment is subjective, and rankings are best left to posterity, the inevitably unsuccessful attempt to define poetry can help us to grasp its essence and recognize the genuine article when it comes along. “Poetry is language that sounds better and means more,” in Charles Wright’s formulation. “Poetry is philosophy’s sister, the one that wears makeup,” says Jennifer Grotz. Paradoxes please us: “a poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise” (Billy Collins). Poetry is a game—and it is also a lover’s quarrel with the world of words. Then it occurs to me: substitute “America” or “paradise” for “poetry” in that formulation, and the game gets even more interesting. America is a melting pot, or it’s the land of the free agent. Paradise is always being lost or maybe it’s a version of the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Poetry is a café, or it’s the place where parallel lines cross, or up close it’s the gibbous mirrored eye of an insect.
