by David Lehman
“ ‘Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen’ is itself an exercise in translation. When I reread my poem, I see it as an attempt to convey the atmosphere of those novels and that particular time in my life: the strange bewildering amalgam of desire, wonder, isolation, foolishness, brilliance, holiness, impetuosity, and tempestuousness that one only truly apprehends either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of young adulthood. I’ve taught high school English for over a decade now, and I try to keep in mind that the loneliness and vulnerability I felt as a teenager are an almost universal condition of that stage in life. My students, most of whom are learning disabled, rarely read more than 140 characters for pleasure, but they are, in their own ways, as voracious for narrative and as fragile as I was at that age. At seventeen, I burned for the fate of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Myshkin, Alyosha, Ivan, and, of course, Dmitri. I burned for an impossible sanctified glistening St. Petersburg. As I write this, I am awaiting (any day now) the birth of my first child, a daughter. My wife and our dog are asleep on the couch. It’s snowing out. How grateful I am, for the drab suburban streets of Endwell, New York. How grateful I am to David Lehman and Dana Gioia for including my poem in this volume. How grateful I am that, at nearly forty, I burn less like I did at seventeen and more the way G. M. Hopkins’s ‘fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls.’ What I wanted then, but didn’t know it, is what I have now, and is also what lit Dostoyevsky’s pen: (simple, lambent, clarifying) love.”
NAUSHEEN EUSUF is a PhD candidate in English at Boston University, and a graduate of the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins. She is the author of What Remains (2011), a chapbook from Longleaf Press, and the full-length collection Not Elegy, But Eros (2017), published concurrently by NYQ Books in the United States and Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh. A native of Bangladesh, she was born in Dhaka, its capital, in 1980.
Of “Pied Beauty,” Eusuf writes: “Gerard Manley Hopkins has always been one of my touchstones, so my poem is both response and homage. A meditation on mutability, the poem is about the end of a friend’s fifteen-year marriage to a man who proved to be faithless. But in a world tainted by sin, perhaps we must seek aesthetic value in the maculate rather than the immaculate.”
JONATHAN GALASSI was born Seattle in 1949. He has published three books of poems, including Left-Handed (Knopf, 2012); translations of Italian poets Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi; and a novel about publishers and poets, Muse (Knopf, 2015). He lives in New York City, where he works as president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Galassi writes: “ ‘Orient Epithalamion’ is a poem infected with late-season melancholy—one of the most seductive themes there is. It is a love song to the small place where we spend the summer and a marriage song for friends: a wish for their life together, and for the survival of so much that seems in danger of slipping through our fingers as the sweet summer light lessens.
“The poem is a contraption of oppositions, starting from the opening line: ‘Fall will touch down in golden Orient.’ Autumn decay and disappearance (Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ is the hovering locus classicus for this trope) hits up immediately against the trope of recurrence that is contained in the place-name itself, for the sun rises daily, and decay and disappearance are just one act in the endlessly ‘re-rehearsed’ pageant of the seasons. The ‘real people’ who live here year-round know this, but Orient is also a place of escape, a rural ideal (exemplified in Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’) for the city folk—the agents, architects, and writers—who come here for refreshment in the green time and see it as one season only. Yet Orient is not a mere idyll; it is a modern place beset by traffic, the vagaries of climate change, and a troubled racial history. This seeming paradise is as potentially fragile as any marriage.
“It’s a satire in a Horatian vein, a balladlike still life of characters, flora, fauna, all poised with bated breath at a moment of calm, as the oppositions converge in the resolution of marriage—in this case a very up-to-date same-sex one. A charm against the future, a defiant assertion of what we hope against hope life will be—for Barry and Bill, and for all.”
JESSICA GOODFELLOW was born in Salt Lake City in 1965, and grew up outside of Philadelphia. She has graduate degrees from Caltech and the University of New England, in Australia. She currently teaches at a women’s college in Kobe, Japan, where she lives with her husband and sons. Her books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (Mayapple Press, 2015), and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (Isobar Press, 2014). Recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal and several awards from the Emrys Foundation, she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in the summer of 2016.
Of “Test,” Goodfellow writes: “This poem, and all the poems in Whiteout, are about my uncle Steve Taylor who, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox expedition to Denali, died in a terrible and historic ten-day storm having 300-mph winds. My uncle was twenty-two years old. He had lived with our family the previous summer, working and saving money for his senior year at university. I was too young to have any memories from that time. Afterward my grandparents and my mother were stunned into an almost complete silence concerning my uncle and his life. Still, he was a mythic figure in my childhood, perhaps all the more so because of my family’s silence. In this poem I wanted to show how grief undealt with is passed along intergenerationally; how profound and long-lasting this secondhand sorrow can be; how it can appear, unbidden, at random moments after many years. Because this poem is also about the SATs, I wanted to use the form of a multiple-choice test, but I found that having only intermittent lines be test questions allowed more narrative flow. I also used in the poem as many words as I could from an official SAT vocabulary list.”
SONIA GREENFIELD was born in Peekskill, New York, in 1970. Her book Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review Prize and was published in 2018. She lives with her husband and son in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and codirects the Southern California Poetry Festival.
Greenfield writes: “When I read of the ‘Ghost Ship’ fire in Oakland at the artists’ warehouse, and I read of the individuals who were lost in the fire, I realized how much those people were like me twenty years ago trying to make it in the Bay Area, trying to figure out my sexuality and in love with the creativity and drama of being young in the city. Besides the years between us—the then and now—the only thing that separates them from me is chance: my luck and their misfortune. My warehouse, their warehouse. It’s a terrible story and too true in terms of how fate works. We can let that freeze us or we can let that free us. In between those distinctions, we grieve.”
JOY HARJO was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015), her most recent book of poetry, was shortlisted for the international Griffin Prize. She was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is at work on a new poetry collection, a historical memoir, and a musical play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented (for which she is writing the book of the play and the music). She is the founder of For Girls Becoming, a mentorship program in the arts for Mvskoke tribal young women, and holds the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Of “An American Sunrise” Harjo writes: “The poem is a Golden Shovel, a form concocted by Terrance Hayes in which he borrowed a line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem and used each word as an end line. You can use this form with any poem. I went traditional and used a line from Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ to form the end words and went from there. The end words gave the poem a momentum. I could barely keep up. Brooks is still a teacher, always will be. And in pool halls and bars will always be found the dancers, dreamers, and visionaries. It’s a tough road here in this country of Natives, immigrants, and refugees, and many get lost. History is a layered dynamic force car
ried forth in our songs, poems, and stories. We are many voices and will never be captured in the voice of a single authoritarian speaker who hard lines the ideal.”
TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He is the author, most recently, of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018). His other books are How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He won the National Book Award in 2010 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014. He served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.
Of “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes writes: “Love poems, like love, can/should transmit a few mixed messages and unanswerable questions.”
ERNEST HILBERT was born in Philadelphia in 1970. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets (Red Hen Press, 2009), All of You on the Good Earth (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Caligulan (Measure Press, 2015), which was selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer, opera librettist, and literary journalist. He writes about books for The Washington Post.
Hilbert writes: “I encountered Mars Ultor on a visit to the palatial Getty Villa. There I stood, confronted by this robust, warlike figure, his muscles coiled, his powerful right arm held up in triumph—a provocative sight, yet only four inches tall: small enough to slip into my pocket, a lararium statuette, which is to say a household god. Here was the mighty and vengeful warrior god on the scale of a Hummel figurine, a portable deity, suitable for a shelf or for travel on campaign with a legionary; a symbol of confidence, conquest, success, domination; a charm for winners. Despite his daunting moniker, he is easy to miss amid the museum’s more than forty thousand ancient Mediterranean artifacts.
“I drew out my notebook. He had me thinking about power, how it underpins any republic or empire, ordered or chaotic, and is felt most acutely in times when power is transferred, a process that can be orderly but is more often than not tumultuous in some regard, even in democratic civilizations. It brought to mind unsettling notions I first encountered long ago when I read James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The aging king must be strangled upon his throne in order for a proper exchange of power to occur.
“The term virtù appears in the poem. Niccolò Machiavelli used it to describe the potency and force of a leader. The word summons qualities of civic pride but also some amount of ruthlessness. Is virtù virtue? We take solace in the rule of law, believing no one is above it, understanding that it is a transcendent organizing principle used to correct dangerous political aberrations. Yet history has shown that law without the final threat of force behind it can all too often prove toothless. The treaties I invoke are like those high-minded and cunning documents that bound the capitals of Europe (many of them secret) in the years of ‘The Great Game’ while hastening the suicidal Great War that enveloped the continent. The poem considers such devices used to constrain, redirect, or, at times, cloak pure power and allow societies to function.
“ ‘Mars Ultor’ first appeared in a sober, high-circulation journal called Academic Questions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars. Not long after, with the election of Donald Trump, the poem took on a second life. It was enlisted by publisher Henry Wessells for the pages of his protest magazine Donald Trump: The Magazine of Poetry, issued in the spirit of Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry. Following Trump’s inauguration, protesters at Trump Tower took to reading my poem aloud in the lobby. In the long view that informs ‘Mars Ultor,’ a blustering giant may one day be deemed harmless, another lararium statuette reduced in size from a colossal temple god.”
R. NEMO HILL was born on Long Island, New York, in 1955. He attended college for one semester, but quickly dropped out. After a brief stint as a baker, he plunged almost immediately into travel and various entrepreneurial endeavors—including a greeting card company, a Balinese import company, and (at present) an indigo dyeing operation. He has lived in New York City, San Francisco, and Portugal, and has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. All along the way he has been writing. He is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, organized around the processes of Medieval alchemy, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a narrative poem based upon a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook in heroic couplets, Prolegomena to an Essay on Satire (Modern Metrics/EXOT BOOKS, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016). Forthcoming is a book of ghazals, Magellan’s Reveries. He is also editor and publisher of EXOT BOOKS, www.exot.typepad.com/exotbooks.
Hill writes: “ ‘The View from The Bar’ is an elegy for a very real place in New York City, a gay dive bar known as The Bar, which was located on the corner of 4th Street and 2nd Avenue. True dive bars are, unfortunately, an endangered species in the newly sanitized New York, and though this one still exists, I wonder how much longer it can hold on. It was a seminal place for me for decades, and living in a tiny tenement apartment in the East Village for thirty-five years it became my home away from home. Many of my drinking companions from those days have died, and others have drifted away less dramatically. A fire devastated The Bar, and its name has changed twice since then, along with its clientele. I have fled the city myself now, alarmed by the arguably brutal changes in my old neighborhood. But I can no sooner forget those many intimate nights in The Bar than I can forget the murky, low-rent Camelot of my own youth.”
TONY HOAGLAND (b. 1953) teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere. He has published eight books, including most recently the poetry collections Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Books, 2018) and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (Graywolf Press, 2018).
Hoagland writes: “I wrote the best lines of ‘Into the Mystery’ as part of a birthday poem for a friend whose house we were going to for dinner one night. We ate at a picnic table in the backyard, with candles and Christmas lights on strings on a perfect summer night in New Mexico. It was a nice evening, and I read the poem out loud, but my friend didn’t seem especially impressed and so I put it away in a drawer, thinking it not very good. But the best lines seemed true to me and I pulled them out a year later in another place and transplanted them to a different, more enclosed backyard garden, in Houston, a place where I would often sit by myself in the dark and recover from city life. The poem became imaginatively reassigned to my friend Lillie Robertson, whom I imagined coming there to sit in her own solitary reverie. The second poem is much shorter, more lyrical, and its mostly endstopped couplets are meant to evoke the state of wonder, and arrival, suitable for a soul that has had the character to endure.”
ANNA MARIA HONG’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and was published in the spring of 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in early 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2019. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has joined the literature faculty at Bennington College.
Hong writes: “I drafted ‘Yonder, a Rental’ toward the end of my seven-year run of writing sonnets, a project that yielded more than three hundred poems, which I winnowed down to the sixty-four sonnets that constitute Age of Glass. In composing this poem, I eschewed the familiar English and Italian rhyme schemes that I’d inhabited in previous sonnets, working instead with pairs of rhymes that appear throughout the lines to create a kind of double helix of sound.
“The figure of the moon and the event of collapsed empire that animate this poem also recur throughout Age of Glass. I chose the antiquated word ‘Oriental’ to exploit its Eurocentric associations with otherness.”
PAUL HOOVER was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946, in the Shenandoah Valley, and raised in the rural Midwest. He is now professor and acting chair of the creative writing department of San Francisco State University. Following the departure of coeditor Maxine Chernoff, he serves as sole editor of the literary annual New American Writing. His fifteen books of poetry include The Book of Unnamed Things (Plume Editions/MadHat Press, 2018), Desolation: Souvenir (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012), and In Idiom and Earth/En el idioma y en la tierra, a selection of poems, 2002–2006, translated by María Baranda (Mexico City: Conaculta Práctica Mortal, 2012). His translation with Baranda of the complete Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz will be published in late 2018 by Milkweed Editions.
Hoover writes: “The phrase ‘I am the size of what I see’ appears in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith. I took the book with me on a trip to Barcelona, because I was traveling alone and knew that, for all its existential rawness, it would make good company. In my early seventies, I am now a man ‘of a certain age,’ as they say, and since I began writing poetry I’ve had the feeling of arriving late. I can speak as quietly as any leaf and expect to depart unnoticed, ‘not even a smudge on the glass.’ I didn’t plan to write on that theme. It seemed to arrive with the pronoun ‘I.’ I’m fascinated, too, by the relativity of youth and age. How much of the water we drink is new and how much is ancient? Both young and old eyes can see that the match flaming in one’s fingers is the size of a tree in the distance. It’s that kind of natural magic/metaphysics that interests me as a poet.”
