Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

  ALFRED NICOL was born in 1956 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, where he attended the French-Canadian parochial school in which his parents both began and ended their education. He found a mentor in Sydney Lea at Dartmouth College, and another in Rhina Espaillat of the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife Gina DiGiovanni. Nicol is the author of three books of poetry: Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016), Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2009), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award.

  Nicol writes: “My poem ‘Addendum’ riffs on a survival method that Jesus—among the greatest of didactic poets—recommended to his first-century friends: ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God.’ That would still seem the best way for a twenty-first-century poet to balance the demands of the world with the demands of his art, but there’s a lot of pressure from the Caesar side to increase its share. I’m old-fashioned enough to consider poetry—and any art that results from inspiration—as stuff to which Caesar should have no claim. But my poem takes the ironic position that, things being what they are, everything should go to Caesar.”

  NKOSI NKULULEKO, a musician and writer, was born in Harlem, New York, in 1996. He has received fellowships from Poets House, the Watering Hole, and Callaloo. He is the author of the chapbooks American/Unknown (Penmanship Books, 2016) and Bone Discography (self-published, 2016). He has performed for TEDxNewYork and the Aspen Ideas Festival. He would like to give a shout out to Harlem.

  Nkululeko writes: “ ‘Skin Deep’ attempts to bridge intimate duties with the consequences of the external world. At a young age, many are taught concepts of contribution in the home, the importance of sustaining the family’s society, but in the poem, I dive into questions of what it means for the society of a country to betray you and the vision of blackness. To clean and be cleaned, these are the physical actions I wished to show in order to highlight the horrors; how one sees the self, how the world (or more specifically, those who seek to control and torment it) distorts identity. The line in which ‘the / spoon bends’ refers to a scene in The Matrix. How much has our reality been stained? What other simple duties do we adhere to that are, in fact, in the service of blurring truths?”

  SHEANA OCHOA is a second-generation Mexican American born in Pomona, California, in 1971. Her book, Stella! Mother of Modern Acting (Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2014) is the first biography of acting legend Stella Adler. Ochoa, who works as a cultural critic, is writing a historical novel set against the backdrop of the Ludlow Massacre. You can find her most days on Twitter @SheanaOchoa.

  Of “Hands,” Ochoa writes: “A poem’s ability to reflect the temporal, ever-changing mind-set of the reader is miraculous. Stop and think about how many times you’ve returned to a favorite poem and how each time it revealed something new to you according to your state of mind. As I reread my own poem, it has little resemblance in meaning to the poem I first put down on paper. Today, it is less homage to my lineage than wonder at the elusive nature of identity. Today, I find myself reinventing who I am, conscious that whatever I come up with will simply be another story I am telling myself, another narrative that can at any time be altered, lost, denied, or affirmed. Even the mole on my hand, which is real, has changed. It is no longer flat and brown, but raised and white like a wart. What does this say about the mysteries hidden there? And how my body, which I merely thought of as a machine if I thought of it at all when I originally wrote ‘Hands,’ has become the gateway to a deeper, more fulfilling understanding of who I am? It becomes palpable how, like human beings, poetry is alive, just waiting for you to come and look into its shifting mirror again.”

  SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco, California, in 1942. Her most recent collection of poems, Odes, was published by Knopf in 2016; her other books include The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University, and was a founder, in 1986, of the Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshops. She was New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000.

  Olds writes: “ ‘Silver Spoon Ode’ was one of the odes that came along during the year or two after my book Odes was published. It was written, I think, in June 2016, in the Sierra Nevada, at the writing conference I’ve been going to for something like thirty years. Each morning, each poet there, including the staff poets, brings a new first draft, or fragment, or something new, to one of the five tables with one of the five staff poets as part of the circle. We don’t suggest revisions, but try to describe what we see as the strengths of the piece.

  “The first line, I remember, first occurred halfway through another poem—then I had the idea (the idea had me) that it might have a poem of its own. And this was a gathering of writers wanting to push ourselves beyond our usual limits—which helped me notice my complaining and bragging. And that noticing called up Lucille—wise woman, wild woman—and the poem was handed to her, and she finished it for me.”

  JACQUELINE OSHEROW was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1956. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Looking for Angels in New York (University of Georgia Press, 1988), Conversations with Survivors (Georgia, 1994), With a Moon in Transit (Grove Press, 1996), Dead Men’s Praise (Grove, 1999), The Hoopoe’s Crown (BOA Editions, 2005), Whitethorn (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) and Ultimatum from Paradise (LSU, 2014). She has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the creative writing program. “Tilia cordata” will appear in My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2019.

  Of “Tilia cordata,” Osherow writes: “This poem—generated by the strange conjunction of a tremendous sense of disorientation and unease on my first visit to Germany and the jarring familiarity of Germany’s iconic, ubiquitous tree—seems to me now to function as a sort of off-balance thumbnail autobiography. My parents each make an appearance, my daughters, my ex-husband, as well as the teacher who opened my nine-year-old eyes—in Hebrew—to the limitless possibilities of language. The poem tracks my lifelong habit of alternating between obsessive wandering and stationary dreaming as well as my exchange of a city full of green, green parks—where, from spring through summer, some floral scent (lilac, honeysuckle, rose) was always hanging on the humid air—for a parched, usually tawny, semidesert city in which one has to make a great effort to smell a flower. And casting its immeasurable pall over everything: the enduring ethnic shell shock into which I was born. I speak, of course, of the unassimilable horror of mid-twentieth-century Jewish history and the sense that I—undeservedly, through sheer luck and eleven years—had escaped, by the skin of my teeth, mass murder.

  “I chose rhyming couplets—in which I’d written only one previous, much shorter poem—because I hoped they’d lend all this intensity a bit of restraint. I’m accustomed to writing long poems in terza rima and, to some degree, I see these rhyming couplets as a sort of austere, disciplined, perhaps foreshortened terza rima, replacing the forward-reaching intervening rhyme with silence.

  “The personal inadequacies described in this poem—my complete inability to deal with Germany, German, or German people, my sense that I simply couldn’t get out of Germany fast enough—ultimately didn’t sit well with me. This poem became the genesis of the poems I’ve been writing for the past year. With the help of the University of Utah’s Research Committee, the same committee that sent me to Darmstadt, I spent three months in Berlin in the hope of ‘producing a series of poems in which I come to terms with and perhaps even modify and improve my tortured relationship with Germany.’ What can I say? I’m working on it.”

  MIKE
OWENS has been in prison for more than twenty years. A survivor of childhood abuse, he is serving a life-without-parole sentence in the maximum security prison in California, where he first read and wrote poetry. His journey of introspection and growth began there. He holds a certification for group counseling and is pursuing a degree in social and behavioral science. In 2010 he won the Pen American Dawson Prize for his poem “Black Settlement Photo: Circa 1867.” He self-published his first book of poetry and essays, Foreign Currency (lulu.com, 2012). His latest book, The Way Back (2017), includes the poem “Sad Math” and is available from Random Lane Press (Sacramento, California; Randomlanepress@gmail.com).

  Of “Sad Math,” Owens writes: “This piece came from a very dense writing period. I was serving time at High Desert State Prison, which was, in the early 2000s, California’s most violent maximum-security prison. Twenty-four hour confinement in a two-man cell regularly lasted months, and sometimes years on end. Acts of aggression and inhumanity were the norm, between staff and inmates alike. Poetry was for me a place where I could safeguard my humanity. I learned to look for, and capture, opportunities to reinforce my decision to not surrender to the cold. I may have been powerless to change the culture of violence around me, but by collecting moments of innocence and vulnerability, I was able to keep the best of me alive.

  “Contrary to what people may take from the poem, Larry wasn’t a naturally sympathetic figure. He was a fiftysomething, low-level member of a Los Angeles street gang. He was prone to fantastical lies for no apparent reason. He was perpetually in trouble with guards, or in debt to some other prisoner, and seemed uninterested in anything that wasn’t instantly gratifying. Despite all of that, I could see the child in him that desperately wanted to be loved and valued. That is the part of him I held space for in the poem.”

  ELISE PASCHEN, who was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard University and received her MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University. She is the author of The Nightlife (Red Hen Press, 2017), Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009), Infidelities (Story Line Press, 1996), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1985). Paschen is coeditor of Poetry in Motion (W. W. Norton, 1996) and Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks, 2001), and editor of Poetry Speaks to Children (Sourcebooks, 2005) and Poetry Speaks Who I Am (Sourcebooks, 2010). She is a former executive director of the Poetry Society of America and a cofounder of Poetry in Motion, a nation-wide program that places poetry posters in subways and buses. She teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Of “The Week Before She Died,” Paschen writes: “This poem was drawn from a dream I had a week before my mother died, so I suppose it could be called a dream elegy, an occasion that allowed me to experience my mother young again. My mother was eighty-eight years old when she passed away and had been suffering from dementia for many years. During those months before her death I had been contemplating writing a prose piece about the summer when she and my father were separated—a period when my mother, the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, met and became romantically involved with the dancer Rudolph Nureyev and then introduced Nureyev to the dancer Erik Bruhn, with whom he fell in love. The dream, which served as a springboard for the poem, distilled the drama of these relationships into one scene. I have struggled to recall the elegance and brilliance of my mother before the onset of her dementia and writing this poem offered me a glimpse of her infatuation and of her resilience. ‘The Week Before She Died’ is included in my most recent book, The Nightlife, which is comprised of many dream narratives.”

  JESSICA PIAZZA teaches at the University of Southern California, where she received a PhD in English literature and creative writing. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections from Red Hen Press (Interrobang in 2013 and—with coauthor Heather Aimee O’Neill—Obliterations in 2016), as well as the 2014 chapbook This is not a sky from Black Lawrence Press. A cofounder of Bat City Review and Gold Line Press, she curates the website Poetry Has Value, which explores the intersections of poetry, money, and worth. She was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency, which will begin in 2019. She is from Brooklyn, New York.

  Piazza writes: “While ‘Bells’ Knells’ generally fits my usual poetic style in terms of wordplay, rhythm, and rhyme, the subject matter is different from the majority of my work. I’m not a religious person . . . though the iconography, imagery, philosophy, and cultural impact of religion do show up in my work once in a while. However, I am attracted to people’s obsession with and attachment to religion, and the ways religion can be used to justify behavior, both helpful and harmful. There’s such darkness surrounding cultural notions of the Catholic Church right now, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the evil hidden within this ostensibly loving institution isn’t so different from the darkness hidden in individuals, especially regarding personal relationships. Just as religions promise salvation, marriage (and other lifelong romantic commitments) have been offered up as another kind of saving; a way to escape our fears, our loneliness, the world’s ridicule, and more. Marriage and religion both offer a sort of community, and in ‘Bells’ Knells,’ the speaker realizes that her community is false at best and monstrous at worst. She must now ask herself what complicity she had in the darkness, and what signs she missed or pretended to miss. Whether the community in question is a personal one or a spiritual one is up to the reader. Thus, it’s a strange little piece; both literal and metaphorical at once, a mingling of the theological and the personal. On one hand, I’m writing about a speaker considering her religion and its crimes. But I’m also writing about another speaker entirely; one considering her disastrous and broken marriage. For me, they have equal weight in the poem, but are not fully thematically integrated. This double vision pleased me a lot, as do my continued attempts to juxtapose the two themes to figure out how they illuminate each other. I don’t have concrete answers, unfortunately. But, hey, do any of us?”

  Born in 1973 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, AARON POOCHIGIAN earned a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. His first book of poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), was published in 2012. Winner of the 2016 Able Muse Poetry Prize, Manhattanite, his second book, came out in 2017 as did his thriller in verse, Mr. Either/Or (Etruscan Press). Stung with Love, his book of translations from Sappho, was published in 2009, and his translation of Apollonius’s Jason and the Argonauts in 2014, both from Penguin Classics. For his work in translation he was awarded a 2010–2011 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Poochigian writes: “One of the original femmes fatales, Salome danced for her father, King Herod II, on his birthday. Herod was so ‘pleased’ that he ‘promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask of him (Gospel of Matthew 14:6–11). At her mother Herodias’s urging, Salome asked that he give her the head of John the Baptist on a dish. True to his word, Herod had John executed and his head brought on to Salome. In a form intended to be as sinuous as Salome’s dance, my poem ‘Happy Birthday, Herod’ expresses, in the eternal present, well, quite a bit, I hope—the allure of living flesh, revulsion at dead flesh, the temptation to choose immediate titillation over morality, and the ease with which one can remain a mere bystander in the face of an atrocity.

  “I am far from the first poet to write on this theme. There is, of course, Mr. Prufrock’s vision of his ‘head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter.’ In one of the most gorgeously devastating poems ever written, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ Yeats multiplies Salome into the mysterious ‘daughters of Herodias’:

  Herodias’ daughters have returned again,

  A sudden blast of dusty wind and after

  Thunder of feet, tumult of images

  Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind.”

  RUBEN QUESADA was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1976. Dr. Quesada has taught writing, literature, and literary translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts and at Columbi
a College in Chicago. He is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011) and Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda (Aureole Press, 2008).

  Quesada writes: “The year I wrote ‘Angels in the Sun’ I was traveling to art museums. I had received a grant to write a book-length collection of ekphrastic poems. I visited museums from New York to San Francisco, Los Angeles to DC, Miami to Indianapolis, and so many more. I was drawn to naturalistic landscape paintings of the Romantic period and to American paintings of the late nineteenth century whose focus was urban landscapes.

  “In early 2015, I visited the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles where I found an atmospheric scene painted by Joseph Mallord William Turner. The painting was The Angel Standing in the Sun. The tragic scene depicts Archangel Michael on Judgment Day foregrounded by other biblical figures. The canvas is covered in bright orange and yellow color—a fiery scene. Here in Turner’s painting is a confluence of heaven and hell—the Apocalypse. My poem is an attempt to reinterpret that moment from a singular perspective located somewhere in the background.

  “Turner’s painting The Angel Standing in the Sun is part of the permanent exhibit at the Tate Britain in London but that spring it made its West Coast debut. The artwork was originally exhibited in London in 1846.”

  ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO was born in El Salvador in 1972. Matria, her book of poems, was the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Cofounder of Kalina publishing, she has written, edited, or translated more than ten Central American–themed books including Vanishing Points: Contemporary Salvadoran Prose (2017). She received the 2015 Coniston Poetry Prize. Her photo-essay project about El Salvador, through_the_bulletproof_glass, is on Instagram. For more info visit: www.alexandralyttonregalado.com.