by David Lehman
MARIE HOWE is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017). She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Of “Walking Home,” Howe writes: “The last time I walked out of my mother’s home I took a piece of the jigsaw puzzle she’d been working with on the card table. I took some of the sky—my mother had just died—and later put it in a frame, and hung it on my studio wall.
“Life collects into such moments: walking with a daughter, the give and gab of it, the easy talk, walking the round of errands in New York City. The actual—when framed—assumes a completeness, although it is a piece of something so much larger.
“Is it the frame that makes it seem so?”
MANDY KAHN (b. 1978) is the author of two poetry collections, Glenn Gould’s Chair (2017) and Math, Heaven, Time (2014), both from London-based Eyewear Publishing. She frequently collaborates with composers to create works that combine poetry with classical music and was a librettist for MacArthur fellow Yuval Sharon’s mobile opera Hopscotch. She lives where she was born: in Los Angeles.
Of “Ives,” Kahn writes: “In the 1890s, when he was a college student, composer Charles Ives was writing music that was astoundingly complex for its time—music that was polytonal and polyrhythmic, that featured quarter tones and tone clusters—and he was disappointed that others considered it strange. Soon after graduating, Ives declared he did not intend to ‘starve on dissonances’ and took a job selling insurance. He continued to compose, privately and quietly, after-hours. Two decades passed this way. When a heart attack made Ives fear his life might be nearing its end, he self-published his music and sent it to a group of working conductors. Only then did his public career begin.
“The poem ‘Ives’ appears in my collection Glenn Gould’s Chair, a book that weaves snippets from the lives of composers into a larger consideration of the creative life. While researching the book, I began to think of the comfort or discomfort each composer experienced surrounding the great privilege, the great burden of bearing their gifts as forming a kind of spectrum, with Claude Debussy on the far left, the extreme of discomfort, and beside him, Mozart, whose life was also plagued by wild frustration—and with Philip Glass, whose peacefulness astounds me, sitting furthest to the right. I’d often think of Debussy’s and Mozart’s desperate letters to patrons or friends, begging for commissions or loans or understanding, and then I’d think of Glass’s daily routine—meditation, writing, food, meditation, all suffused by a gentle but powerful calm. And then there was Ives, seated nearest to Glass, with his life’s output squirreled away in drawers, ready to be shared or not shared, enriching him just by having stepped forth, just by being. And I’d wonder, Do we choose how comfortably we live as what we are, or do our propensities choose for us? Did Ives choose? Does Glass? Did Mozart? Do I? Or: How can I choose better? How can I more fully welcome peacefulness into the body—peacefulness through practice, peacefulness through allowing? And: To honor our gifts fully, must we share them? Or is it enough for them to enrich us, unshared? Can we ourselves, and privately, love the bird, the work—or is it only a bird when it has flown?”
ILYA KAMINSKY was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1977, and currently lives in San Diego. His books include Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and Deaf Republic (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019). He is the coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins, 2010) and other books.
Of “We Lived Happily During the War,” Kaminsky writes: “This poem is a response to George W. Bush’s wars. I was visiting the poet Eleanor Wilner at the time. The poem is dedicated to her. I tend to keep poems in a drawer for several years before they get published. Unfortunately, this piece seems just as timely now as when it was written; I wish it was otherwise.”
STEPHEN KAMPA was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1981 and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. Educated at Carleton College and Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of three collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser, 2014), and Articulate as Rain (Waywiser, 2018). He teaches at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, Florida, and from time to time works as a musician.
Of “The Quiet Boy,” Kampa writes: “Sometimes, to break the ice, I ask my students what superpower they would choose if they could choose any. This often ends up seeming like a one-question personality test. Lots of kids want to fly. Some want to be super-strong or -fast. I caution them about time travel: it just messes everything up, and besides—as Albert Goldbarth has reminded us in more than one poem—we are all already traveling through time anyway. At least one of them argued for immortality as a superpower, and who could fault him for that? But the students that break my heart are the ones who choose invisibility. Faced with a question about power, they pick the only option that is literally self-effacing.
“Surely it must seem that I wrote this poem in response to that response, but the truth of the matter is that the poem preceded the question: I only started asking my students what superpower they might want after I had finished the poem, which began in woolgathering during a cross-country drive. Although I wish I could say ‘The Quiet Boy’ arose out of compassion for my students’ unintentional vulnerability, it didn’t. Then again, poems aren’t always about responses. Sometimes they’re about what questions we should be asking.”
DONIKA KELLY was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1983. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (500 Places, 2017), and the full-length collection Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.
Of “Love Poem: Chimera,” Kelly writes: “The chimera I’m thinking of in the poem is the one with a lion’s body and a serpent for the tail. That part of the configuration makes sense to me in an associative way. But there’s also a goat’s head placed, inexplicably, in the middle of the lion’s back. Part of what sparked the poem was my confusion at that placement, and I wanted to think about its genesis and birth, and what it might mean to find a family within oneself.”
SUJI KWOCK KIM’s parents and grandparents were all born in what is now North Korea, where her grandfather, uncle, aunt, and cousins still live. She is the author of Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), which won the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (selected by Charles Simic), the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), and the Northern California Book Award/Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and Disorient, which is forthcoming. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio, and translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Bengali, and Arabic.
Kim writes: “ ‘Sono’ is dedicated to my son, when he was ‘not yet alive but not not,’ ‘scudding wave after wave of what-might-never-have-been.’ The poem’s working title, for several drafts, and several miscarriages, had been ‘Fugue,’ from the Latin, fuga, related to both fugare (‘to chase’) and fugere (‘to flee’). Thankfully, things changed.
“Special thanks to both editors: Dana Gioia, on the American side of the Atlantic, and Patrick Cotter, in Ireland, without whom this poem would not be in print here now.”
KARL KIRCHWEY was born in Boston in 1956 and has lived in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Italy. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including most recently Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems (TriQuarterly/Northwestern, 2017). He has translated Paul Verlaine’s first book as Poems Under Saturn (Princeton University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a first Selected Poems in English by Italian poet Giovanni Giudici (1924–2011). He also edited the Everyman’
s Library Pocket Poets volume Poems of Rome (Everyman’s Library, 2018). For many years director of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, Kirchwey has taught in the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College and served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. He is professor of English and creative writing at Boston University, where he is associate dean of faculty for the humanities.
Kirchwey writes: “ ‘Palazzo Maldura’ refers to the building housing the Department of Language Studies and Literature at the University of Padua (Italy), and is a meditation on my own relationship to books and to learning, as well as on the nonchalant grace with which ancient Italian buildings sometimes accommodate modern functions. The poem acknowledges several poetic predecessors: ‘book-worming’ is borrowed from Robert Lowell; the ‘nymphs and satyrs’ might also figure on Keats’s Grecian urn; and the ‘local habitation’ originates with Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (It was also part of the stated mission of Dr. William Kolodney, when he founded The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in 1939, to provide for poetry ‘a local habitation and a name.’) But the spirit of the poem is really that articulated by Chaucer when he wrote, ‘The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne’: there is an infinite amount for a poet to know. My own literary education encouraged a deep humility, when confronted with this infinity. And the only permanent thing, perhaps, is the curiosity that keeps someone tracking an idea from one book to another on the library shelves. This can be a solitary pastime, but it is also a deeply exciting one. The speaker of the poem turns the corner in the stacks, thinking he recognizes another seeker: but it is only his own reflection, since the risk of solipsism, for a writer, is always present. And the mirrored wall also suggests that the search cannot be an indefinite one, since it is limited by a human lifetime.”
NATE KLUG was born in Minneapolis in 1985. He is the author of Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil’s Eclogues (The Song Cave, 2013), and Anyone, a book of poems (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He works as a Protestant minister and lives in Albany, California.
Klug writes: “ ‘Aconite’ began in the experience of reading, as I discovered these amazing names (wolfsbane, monkshood, devil’s helmet) for a flower I thought I had seen recently on a walk. Once I found out that this plant (which looked to me like a buttercup) could poison human beings but nourish smaller creatures such as moths, I was hooked. The poem unspooled as I played with names and sounds.
“At some point, with the help of the internet, I stumbled upon Pliny’s and Ovid’s different discussions of the flower. They each speculate on aconite’s etymology and hardscrabble origins (a-conite, ‘without dust’). As one story goes, Cerebrus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades, was dragged from the Underworld by Hercules. While the dog struggled in the unfriendly daylight, he ‘spit his slavering froth / Upon the greenish grasse. This froth (as men suppose) took roote / And thriving in the battling soyle in burgeons forth did shoote, / To bane and mischief men withall’ (Ovid, tr. Arthur Golding).
“Spit and blossom, sustenance and toxin—commixed in the language itself. As I wrote, I remembered that the flower I’d seen on the trail was white, not the more common purple-blue of aconite (though aconite can also be white). So it may be that I misidentified the plant in the first place. Where do our stories come from? How much does it matter that they are true, and why does truth seem to waver in our telling?”
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is the poet laureate for the city of Los Angeles, a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Southern California, and an Art of Change fellow at the Ford Foundation. She was born in Compton, California, and her family is from New Orleans. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), winner of the National Book Award for poetry—and the first poetry debut to win the award in many years. With Kevin Young, she has written a series of commissioned poems that accompany Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings in Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (MoMA, 2017).
Of “Using Black to Paint Light,” Lewis writes: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition on Matisse’s creative process, for me, was an interrogation of the aesthetic uses of obsession. For me, the exhibition re-framed intense desire as a gift rather than a burden. Matisse would paint or sketch the same subject over and over and over again. It felt like the best kind of love to me. At the time that I wrote this poem, I was working on a large project regarding Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. I was obsessed with Henson’s biography and his location in history. Like Matisse, I was writing poems about Henson over and over and over again. I was particularly obsessed with Henson’s passion to reach the North Pole as a black man, to gain further honor for African Americans—an elegant black passion that remains on some historical academic shelf called institutional racism. So many under-investigated narratives still linger there, including the history of the Arctic. And so walking through this Matisse exhibit, I had Henson very much on my mind. But more than that, I had obsession on my mind. Matisse, Henson, and I formed a love triangle, and what we had/have in common, what their lives continue to teach me is that passion, as an aesthetic tool, is the liberator.”
DAVID MASON was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1954 and now teaches at Colorado College. He served as Colorado poet laureate from 2010 to 2014. Among his many books are The Country I Remember (Story Line Press, 1996), Ludlow: A Verse Novel (Red Hen Press, 2007; 2nd ed., 2010), The Sound: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018), and Voices, Places: Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2018). He wrote the libretti for Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter and Tom Cipullo’s After Life, both of which are available on CD from Naxos. Mason divides his time between the United States and Australia.
Of “First Christmas in the Village,” Mason writes: “Some of my favorite poems about religion—Cavafy’s ‘Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340’ and Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ spring to mind—see it from outside the circle of belief. In such poems, the mysteries of birth and death are both literal and figurative, like moments of changing consciousness. There is a true story behind this poem, set in Greece in 1980, in a village where superstition and custom still exerted atavistic power. Fire really was carried in a bucket from one hearth to another. Sleep really was like a grave with the covering stone rolled away.”
ROBERT MORGAN was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1944, and grew up on the nearby family farm. He has published fifteen volumes of poetry, most recently Terroir (Penguin, 2011), and Dark Energy (Penguin, 2015). He is the author of ten works of fiction including Chasing the North Star (Algonquin Books, 2016) and three books of nonfiction including Lions of the West (Algonquin Books, 2011). He has taught since 1971 at Cornell University, where he is Kappa Alpha Professor of English.
Morgan writes: “ ‘Window’ was inspired by a walk in the woods of Upstate New York in late fall when most of the trees were bare, except for one oak that still had leaves of orange, lavender, and silver. The colors were so striking I thought of a stained glass window over an altar, in the dark woods, with the scent of rotting leaves and mulch all around. We never know when and where we may encounter the sacramental.”
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1974. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018); Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal in poetry; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year, the last of which are from Tupelo Press. With Ross Gay, she is coauthor of the chapbook Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (Organic Weapon Arts Press, 2014). A collection of nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She is poetry editor of Orion magazine and has served as faculty for the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. She is professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
Of “Invitation,” Nezhukumatathil writes: “The poem started out as one of the
only direct addresses to the reader in my most recent collection and it was the first time I had ever used the word ‘oceanic’ in a poem. In revision, I found myself imagining not only the reader, but my husband (before and after our marriage), our children, my students, beloved friends, and perhaps even that stranger who thinks she won’t like to read poems. I originally intended it as an ars poetica, a poem about the act of writing poetry, but now I also see it as a kind of manifesto—in fact, this poem might be a gentle dare for all of us to make joyful note of outdoor wonderments before they disappear entirely from this planet. I’m gratefully reminded of Toi Derricotte’s speech at the National Book Awards where she asserted, ‘Joy is an act of resistance.’ ”
HIEU MINH NGUYEN was born in 1991, the son of Vietnamese immigrants. His debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar, appeared from Write Bloody Publishing in 2014; Not Here was released by Coffee House Press in 2018. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Vermont Studio Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Literary Center. He attends the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Minneapolis.
Of “B.F.F.,” Nguyen writes: “I cannot talk about this poem without first talking about my favorite movies: Kirsten Dunst washes a car in San Diego, Molly Ringwald applies lipstick (no hands! no hands!), Kate Hudson on Quaaludes, Julia Stiles covered in paint, Rachael Leigh Cook covered in paint—am I making any sense? I really really hope so. For most of my life, it seemed impossible to want the things I wanted. I thought, if I couldn’t have it—the boy outside my window, the surprise serenade in the bleachers—I could, at least, be in proximity to it. If I couldn’t be deemed beautiful, I could stand next to beautiful things.”
