Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

  Of “Anthem,” Bond writes: “This sonnet, as part of a book-length sequence entitled Black Anthem, appears in the final section, where the book reflects upon its choices. Why a book of sonnets? Why that form—that intimate space so associated with autonomy and closure—that has, for many, reached the status of the political? Doubtless, it is for this reason, in part, that I wanted to use it, to subvert an ironically rigid reading of form, to illuminate more precisely our relationship to beauty and perception—to music, in particular, whose play of echo and disorder bear associations without becoming identical to them. So odd an age that shed so much light on how language works and does not work seemed so quick to regard the semiotics of certain forms as fixed—not only unrealistic in terms of the way signs work, but also revelatory of a psychology of critical and political engagement. Music, in particular the anthem, seemed a good place to explore this shared psychology, since the anthem resists our projections even as it gives them flesh, and the stakes of musical persuasion can be so high. What I stumbled on, in writing the poem, is how music’s resistance can likewise be ‘read.’ It resonates, not only as the rhetoric that inspires commitment, but also as the extinction of that rhetoric. Music’s pulse is made of singular beats, like bodies, lost in time to the equally ephemeral whole. The resistance of form to meaning thus occasions a surprising return to meaning, to a reimagined affirmation and resistance to beauty as a space apart, a veteran’s park, a haunted absence at the heart of each, anxious to believe.”

  GEORGE BRADLEY was born in Roslyn, New York, in 1953 and was educated at Yale University and the University of Virginia. He is the editor of The Yale Younger Poets Anthology and the author of five books of verse: one from Yale University Press, three from Knopf, and most recently a volume from Waywiser Press (A Few of Her Secrets, 2011). A short story of his was included in the 2010 PEN/O. Henry award anthology. He has worked as a construction foreman, a sommelier, a copywriter, and an editor. Currently, he imports olive oil from a property outside of Florence. He can often be found in Chester, Connecticut.

  Of “Those Were the Days,” Bradley writes: “The poem chosen for this year’s BAP depends on a reader’s passing familiarity with some of the proverbs and idioms one hears every day, and it progresses—methodically, implacably—by giving each saying a twist. Prior to composition, the idea for the piece floated around in the back of my mind for some time, in part because our culture’s old saws so often struck me as at once trenchant and stupid. That is, they contain the wisdom of generations, but it is the conventional wisdom, and while they are food for thought, they are often uttered in lieu of thinking. The more I pondered these sayings, the more they took on ominous overtones. Or perhaps, as I hope the poem suggests, it is the passage of time that alters one’s view of such expressions. Contemplating a language is like gazing at stars. You view the past through the lens of the present, and what you see necessarily depends on where you stand.”

  JOYCE CLEMENT was born in Upstate New York in 1961. In 1986, after a brief stint as a high school English teacher, she moved to central Connecticut where she still lives and works as a sales and marketing systems manager. Her book Beyond My View (Endionpress, 2011) received a Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. She was also a 2014 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award winner. Since 2011, she has served as a director of The Haiku Circle, an annual gathering of haiku poets held each June in Northfield, Massachusetts. From 2016 through 2018 she was coeditor of The Haiku Society of America’s Frogpond journal.

  Clement writes: “The haiku sequence ‘Birds Punctuate the Days’ arose over the course of a year, primarily during writing sessions consisting largely of not-writing. Pen and keyboard were neglected as my thoughts drifted somewhere behind, ahead, and away from me. Then there would occur a sudden flutter of light or startle of sound—a bird moment—that instantly returned me to the present. In this way birds punctuated my days.

  “In haiku, the writer is asked to avoid direct metaphor or personification. Instead two images, a fragment and a phrase, are typically placed next to one another, allowing the resulting associations to push, pull, or vibrate between them. Good haiku often offer levels of association, a touch point and then variants that ripple away from the central moment.

  “My intent when writing ‘Birds’ was to present a visual or aural resemblance between bird moment and punctuation mark that would create an immediate and satisfying connection. Beyond that, I wanted to encapsulate the function of the mark through the moment. Beyond that, I wanted to consider the feeling of the mark, to think about how the marks absorb or enhance the essence of what proceeds and follows them. And then, how does the choice of bird species, their known habits and characteristics, shape the feeling and meaning of mark and poem? Then what other natural pauses, shifts in direction, stillnesses, patterns do we encounter in the flow of thought or day that serve as unwritten punctuation? And so on.

  “The haiku are small. They leave plenty of white space for a reader to take a breath, contemplate, or let the mind drift . . . and then they punctuate the page again.”

  BRENDAN CONSTANTINE was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1967. A poet and teacher, Constantine has published four books of poetry: Letters to Guns (Red Hen Press, 2009), Birthday Girl with Possum (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), Calamity Joe (Red Hen Press, 2012) and Dementia, My Darling (Red Hen Press, 2016). He has received grants and commissions from the Getty Museum, James Irvine Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches creative writing at the Windward School.

  Of “The Opposites Game,” Constantine writes: “This poem brewed for quite a while. The scenes described actually occurred and were repeated in different classrooms over a few years. I knew I wanted to write about them, but I couldn’t make a start, or rather, I tried too hard. It’s an old problem: How does one overcome that first (and often shortsighted) understanding of where a poem ‘might’ end?

  “It ultimately came together for a rally held in honor of Gun Violence Awareness Day in Tucson, Arizona. Activist Patricia Maisch, to whom the piece is dedicated, invited me to read at the event. Her name may be familiar in connection to the infamous attack in 2011 at which Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with nineteen others. Six people died, including nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green. As horrifying a tragedy as it remains, it could’ve been much worse, for it was Maisch who noticed the shooter trying to reload after he was subdued. She boldly pried bullets from his hand that day and has been protecting her community ever since.

  “I knew I would never be able to compose a poem worthy of her spirit. But when a genuine hero asks you to deliver, you tend to focus. I just wanted to make something useful, if only for an afternoon in a public park. I’m very pleased the poem has continued to serve. Patricia seems to like it, too.”

  MARYANN CORBETT was born in Washington, DC, in 1950, grew up in Northern Virginia, moved to Minnesota in 1972 for graduate school, and has lived in Saint Paul since 1986. She earned a doctorate in English in 1981, specializing in medieval literature and linguistics. For almost thirty-five years she worked as an in-house teacher, editor, and indexer for the Minnesota Legislature, retiring in 2016. She is the author of four books of poetry: Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter (Able Muse, 2013), Mid Evil, the winner of the 2014 Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2015), and Street View (Able Muse, 2017).

  Of “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers,” Corbett writes: “When the Catholic Church in the United States adopted a new English translation of the Mass a few years ago—a translation that was touted as being more correct and closer to the Latin—many Catholics found the new wording stiff, stilted, and uncomfortable. Many were angry, and I was one of them. Most people gave up being angry, having little choice. But I stayed mad, and one day a couple of years back, this poem bubbled up out of my subconscious, very nearly writing itself.”

  ROBERT CORDING
was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1949. He has published eight collections of poems, including What Binds Us to This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991), Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1996), Against Consolation (CavanKerry Press, 2002), A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2013), and, most recently, Only So Far (CavanKerry, 2015). He taught for thirty-eight years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and two poetry grants from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts.

  Of “Toast to My Dead Parents,” Cording writes: “This poem began where it ends up: with the idea of a toast. Because a toast is basically honorific and loving, it can also probe and caricature the fault lines of our humanness. A few years after both my parents had died, I was looking for a form that could capture my response to their devoted sixty-three-year marriage, a marriage that also consisted of, from the moment of their rising to the moment they fell asleep, a kind of constant bickering. Despite their basic contentment, something was always not quite right and whatever that something was, it was the other’s fault. In the end, the poem turned out to be my own search for whatever it was that lay at the center of their marriage, that made it work and not work, that made their connection both so deep and so unsettling.”

  Born in Germany in 1968, CYNTHIA CRUZ grew up in Northern California. She is the author of How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, will appear from Four Way Books in 2018. She is editing an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics, which is forthcoming in 2019. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Notes Toward a New Language, a collection of essays on silence and marginalization, is forthcoming in 2018 from BookThug. A doctoral student in German at Rutgers University, she lives in Brooklyn and in Berlin and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

  Of “Artaud,” Cruz writes: “Artaud has been haunting me for most of my life. A ghostly apparition, but always only on the periphery.

  “I could never, can never, begin to attempt to articulate how his presence is felt in my life. More importantly, I cannot, have never, been able to articulate Artaud’s life. His presence in the world, the many experiences he lived through, the myriad ways he changed the world—there is no way for me to reduce his life. ‘Words say little to the mind,’ he wrote. Words fail.

  “Yet, I wanted to write a poem for Artaud. But how? I knew I could not ventriloquize—how could I ever begin to comprehend what it felt like to live inside his mind and his body? And, at the same time, there was no way I could reduce his life, his presence, to the compression of the form of a poem.

  “When students ask me what the difference is between a poem and prose I always tell them the poem’s job is to carry that which cannot be said to the reader. If I have something to articulate, I’ll write an essay.

  “And yet—I couldn’t write a poem for Artaud. It felt as if doing so would somehow inflict damage or violence upon him.

  “I have been thinking about the archive for the past several years—the act of archiving—lifting memory or images or objects or ‘found’ text or facts from life and dropping them into the poem—and how by doing so, we might make something more whole. Rather than attempt to describe my life—actually paste real-life evidence into the work. This is how I made the Artaud poem.

  “ ‘Artaud’ is a found poem. Its beginning is the list of illustrations included in the text Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud. In the same way gathering images from one’s life and then pasting them into a poem may relay more about one’s life than an attempt to describe one’s life through metaphor, the list of illustrations says more about Artaud’s life than any attempt at articulation might.

  “I revised this original ‘found poem’ until it seemed finally able to carry the enigmatic and profound weight of the artist’s life—all of its beauty and terror, brilliance and sorrow—and that is what you have before you—a kind of archive of his life from childhood to death in which his creativity and passion, his suffering and sadness, remain complex and feral, uncombed, as it were, an X-ray or daguerreotype, of the artist’s life.”

  DICK DAVIS is professor emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University, where he chaired the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures from 2002 to 2012. He has written scholarly works on both English and Persian literature, as well as eight volumes of his own poetry. His publications, including volumes of poetry and verse translation, have been chosen as books of the year by The Sunday Times (UK, 1989), The Daily Telegraph (UK, 1989), The Economist (UK, 2002), The Washington Post (2010), and The Times Literary Supplement (UK, 2013). He has published numerous book-length verse translations from medieval Persian, most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Penguin, 2012), and has been called by The Times Literary Supplement “our finest translator from Persian,” while The Washington Post has referred to him as “our pre-eminent translator from the Persian.” His Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations was published by Carcanet Press in 2017.

  Davis writes: “I’m in my seventies now, and I think many people my age look back on their lives and feel, ‘However did all that happen?’ ‘A Personal Sonnet’ is about that feeling, and about what has persisted and stayed with me, often things I could never have imagined when I was young: a tragedy involving my younger brother, my marriage (our honeymoon was in Kerala, India, hence the reference; the sunset was over the bay in Cochin), my long involvement with both English and Persian poetry, my life as a scholar and translator of medieval Persian. One of the things that first attracted me to medieval Persian poetry is that it is highly, almost fetishistically, formal, and my own poems tend to be the same. This poem for me calls up regret, surprise, and great gratitude.”

  WARREN DECKER was born in the United States in 1977. He has lived in Japan for the last seventeen years and is currently teaching at Momoyama Gakuin University in Osaka.

  Decker writes: “Although it may seem paradoxical, my creative process is greatly enhanced by tight restrictions. For ‘Today’s Special,’ my commitment to the rhyme and repetition of the traditional triolet form allowed me to create something that could have never emerged in my prose. I am also convinced that there is a metaphysical power in rhymes. Certain words just long to be together.”

  SUSAN DE SOLA was born in New York and lives near Amsterdam with her family. She is a past recipient of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of several books on architecture and design. As a photographer, she created the chapbook Little Blue Man (Seabiscuit Press, 2013). She is assistant poetry editor for the journal Able Muse.

  Of “The Wives of the Poets,” de Sola writes: “The lines ‘All poets’ wives have rotten lives / Their husbands look at them like knives’ intrigued me, in part because they have led a popular afterlife as a quotation, detached from the fragmentary poem from which they were lifted. The loose ‘Doggerel Beneath the Skin’ appears in books about Delmore Schwartz in differing versions. I enjoy the idea of a poem in conversation with other poems, and it was intriguing to come across a twentieth-century poem that was both elusive as to its final form, and that gave rise to a quotation that became popular in other contexts, despite its gnomic quality. I suppose I had a desire to tease out its possible meanings, and to give a further perspective on the stock figures of the philandering male poet and his long-suffering wife.

  “The poem nearly wrote itself, falling into an anapestic rhythm that seemed to fit with throwing knives, both figuratively ‘looking daggers,’ and the vaudeville or circuslike atmosphere suggested by the image. The rhythm evoked for me not just the sharp points of knives sailing through the air, but a high-wire trapeze act, a man and a woman swaying dangerously back and forth through the air, just catching or missing each other. Despite its rather neat and control
led form, there was a semi-deliberate decision to break the rhyme scheme in the last stanza. This variation was perhaps an act of closure and of judgment, a handful of daggers landing with finality around their target—but whether it is the male poet or the wife who is skewered in place remains uncertain. The poem’s title is right out of the epigraph, but is also a wink at that fount of poetic biography, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”

  DANTE DI STEFANO was born in Binghamton, New York, in 1978. He is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2019). He is the poetry editor for DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he coedited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). He teaches high school English in Endicott, New York, and resides in Endwell, New York, with his wife, Christina.

  Of “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen,” Di Stefano writes: “I’m not sure how I stumbled onto Dostoyevsky, but during my senior year in high school I read Crime and Punishment, Demons (in a version titled The Possessed), The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. I read them on the bus ride to school, I read them in homeroom, I read them in remedial math class and in AP English, I read them in the lunchroom, I read them at the food pantry where I volunteered every Friday after school, I read them on the bus rides home from soccer games and track meets, I read them at Mass on Sundays, and, every evening, I read them with a flashlight in bed the way seventeen-year-olds today binge-watch Netflix; if I close my eyes, even now, I can still feel the size and shape of the Signet Classic versions that I carried with me constantly like talismans in those days. Reading those novels was the most significant experience of my adolescence, and the defining moment in my education. Dostoyevsky satisfied a hunger for experiences that were unavailable to me in the ramshackle one-horse towns of Upstate New York. Although I didn’t write it in high school, my understanding of poetry owes everything to the complex psychological, spiritual, and philosophical architecture of Dostoyevsky’s (translated) prose.