Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

  Of “La Mano,” Regalado writes: “The poem takes place in El Salvador when I was in the beast mode of the new mom: breastfeeding round the clock, rawboned tired, overprotective and overwhelmed. Sure, caring for my son included moments that kicked the door open to wonder, spikes of joy, and at times an awe that felt like terror. But there was a sad undertone that I couldn’t quite pin down until I put my firstborn’s life in context with the exodus of more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors. In El Salvador parakeets were once very common; you’d see the green smear flash across the sky twice a day—as they left and returned to their roosts in the early mornings and at dusk. Nowadays those sightings are less constant as more trees are cut down to make room for the growing city. At the same time, more children are leaving their homeland—their parents hopeful, desperate for them to find someplace better, fully cognizant of the terrifying risk of that trip across the border. Richard Wilbur and Maya Angelou’s words are flags of other exoduses, of other populations. For my son, it was the birds’ flight that intrigued and fascinated him—not their staying there on the sill. He knew their beauty was in their ability to fly. I’m left watching the birds’ departure with my child in my arms, thinking of those fleeing children, in wonder and terror, of how they will get there, if they get there, and how they will be received once they arrive.”

  Born in Seattle in 1970, PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon Books, 2000, and Vintage Books, 2002); a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Books, 2012); and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), and Animal Eye (Pittsburgh, 2012), which won the UNT Rilke Prize. Her newest poetry collection is Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and her latest nonfiction work is The Broken Country (Georgia, 2017), which won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s poet laureate.

  Rekdal writes: “I’m just finishing a book of poems, Nightingale, that rewrites several of the myths that appear in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. ‘Philomela’ is one of the first I wrote, and is also—for the reader of Ovid—a fairly big departure. In Ovid’s version, Philomela is not only raped but dismembered, as Tereus (Philomela’s rapist and brother-in-law) cuts out her tongue. Philomela is able to tell her sister about her violation because she weaves a tapestry that depicts the crime; later, this tapestry sets in motion another series of horrific events that culminates in the transformation of Philomela into a nightingale: Western symbol for lyric poetry. For me, the myth is about art, violence, and voicelessness, in particular the conflicted roles that art—and particularly poetry—play in the communication of trauma.

  “ ‘Philomela’ also has a companion piece I wrote, entitled ‘Nightingale: A Gloss.’ My gloss deconstructs Ovid’s myth, my own retelling of it, and traces the literary evolution of the nightingale symbol. It’s a very personal essay, too, since it addresses a violent assault I experienced years ago. For me, ‘Philomela’ is part of a long conversation I’ve been having—with literature, and with myself—about violence. It’s a myth that’s meant a lot to me over the years, one I’ve argued with, and feared, and rejected, and admired. I think I will struggle with it for the rest of my life.”

  MICHAEL ROBBINS was born in Topeka, Kansas, during the Vietnam War. Raised in Kansas and Colorado, he holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Montclair State University. His poetry books are Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012) and The Second Sex (Penguin, 2014). A book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2017.

  Robbins writes: “ ‘Walkman’ came about because I was bored with the sort of poem I’d been writing. I resolved to do everything differently, formally and thematically—to mostly eschew rhyme, for instance, and to risk vulnerability. This entailed some flailing about for a few months, until I hit on the idea of immersing myself in the work of a poet as different from me as I could imagine. I ended up reading James Schuyler’s Selected Poems front to back. I’d always preferred Ashbery and O’Hara, but this time Schuyler broke something open in me. ‘Walkman’ doesn’t sound much like Schuyler—his confident medley of digression and surprise is inimitable—but he was its impetus. Along with the desire not to stay in one place. I wrote it in one long burst over about nine hours, which never happened before and hasn’t happened since.”

  J. ALLYN ROSSER was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1957. She has published four collections of poems, most recently Mimi’s Trapeze (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches at Ohio University, where for eight years she served as editor of the New Ohio Review.

  Of “Personae Who Got Loose,” Rosser writes: “Henry James often drew on bits of gossip heard at dinner parties to generate his characters and launch his plots. But he complained that all too often he was not able to stop the teller in time—too many facts were offered, which ruined the ‘virus of suggestion,’ ‘the wandering word, the vague echo,’ and spoiled the artistic process. ‘One’s subject,’ he said, ‘is the merest grain, the speck of truth, of beauty, of reality, scarce visible to the common eye.’ You can readily see James’s desire to preserve mystery reflected in the character of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors; Strether spends much of the novel trying not to learn too much about the very thing he has been sent abroad to investigate. ‘Personae Who Got Loose’ provides only the stray suggestive grains of its personae, in an effort to prevent the essentially reductive effect of fleshing out—to save them even from their own desire to be narrated to death.”

  MARY RUEFLE was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016). Vermont has been her home since 1971.

  Of “Genesis,” Ruefle writes: “When I look at this poem now, I think I may have been reading the Bible (I like very much reading the Bible but seldom ‘have the time’), because the words ‘and’ and ‘then’ appear most frequently in that book; I don’t rightly remember, but the title, surely, is another clue. It is only now that I see the poem may be read in a political context, as if its subtext were our great environmental crisis. Another take on it could be that the poem alludes to the election of our own President Trump, but neither of these things were on my mind when I wrote the poem. That often happens, you know—one looks back and sees multiple readings of a poem they thought was ‘about’ something else; in any case, events unfold in the poem, some very big things happen, and presumably some things are going to happen in the future when the girl children and boy children come together and make more children.”

  KAY RYAN was born in California in 1945. She has published nine books of poetry, including Elephant Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005), The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010), and Erratic Facts (2015) all from Grove Press. The Best of It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010.

  Of “Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless,” Ryan writes: “I cannot hope to attain the transcendent uselessness George Steiner attributes only to ‘a handful of human beings’ (Mozart for one), but perhaps I will have occasionally managed the undoing of a few things that needed it. This poem hopes that.”

  MARY JO SALTER was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. She is the author of eight books of poems published by Knopf, most recently Nothing by Design (2013) and The Surveyors (2017). She is the editor of The Selected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2010) and has been coeditor for three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, including the sixth editio
n, published by W. W. Norton in 2018. Her poems have been set to music by Caroline Shaw (in a world premiere sung by Renee Fleming) and by Fred Hersch (in the song cycle Rooms of Light: The Life of Photographs). Salter is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.

  Salter writes: “I can’t count how often a spoonerism, a malapropism, or a misheard expression has jump-started a line of poetry for me—or even a whole poem. This was the case for ‘We’ll Always Have Parents.’ I must have thought of Humphrey Bogart’s reassurance to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (‘We’ll always have Paris’) a thousand times before I heard that last word as ‘parents,’ and laughed out loud. Did the phrase suddenly twist because, in the past few years, I’ve had the unfunny experience of watching a nonagenarian father decline into dementia? Was the poem a gesture toward accepting that I would not always have a father? In any case, the poem (which came in a rush) is also a celebration of the great Hollywood melodramas—a source of ever-fresh entertainment for both my father and me.”

  JASON SCHNEIDERMAN was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1976, and is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016), Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004), as well as the editor of Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is an associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. His husband, Michael Broder, is the publisher of Indolent Books.

  Schneiderman writes: “I had known that 3-D printing was based on some kind of tiny blocklike unit, but when I first saw the word ‘voxel’ (a portmanteau of ‘volume’ and ‘pixel’), the connection between 2-D screens and these newly printable objects sort of blew my mind.

  “Over the course of my life, I’ve watched pixels get smaller and smaller. My first pixels were on the video game Centipede at a laundromat in England on a console designed for two players sitting opposite each other, with a screen facing up through a glass tabletop. The images of the quick moving arachnids, insects, and lasers were composed of giant moving dots. To be honest, video games held very little fascination for me. I only truly began to pay attention when we had a home computer, and the pixels had shrunk enough to form glowing green letters against a black screen, composing texts that could be printed up on a dot matrix printer. From there, it was a steady progression to ink jet and laser jet printers, to WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) word processing programs, to laptop computers, to notebook computers, to smartphones, to tablets. It would seem that the pixel reached its final size in Apple’s 2012 Retina Display, which promised a pixel so small as to be indistinguishable to the human eye. The word ‘voxel’ put me at the start of a vertiginous new evolution, though one that felt predictable. I’d seen this movie before: as the unit gets smaller and more accessible, it becomes increasingly integrated into the fabric of your life.

  “The day I learned that this poem would find new life in The Best American Poetry, I happened to walk past a store offering 3-D printed figurines of yourself and your loved ones. You stand in a cross between an airport scanner and an elephant cage to be scanned from all sides, and you get a slightly fuzzy, delicately colored version of yourself. So that part of the poem is already coming true. Still, as of this writing, ‘voxel’ is not in the Oxford English Dictionary.”

  Born in St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, NICOLE SEALEY is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has also won an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. She holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at the Cave Canem Foundation.

  MICHAEL SHEWMAKER was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1979. His first collection of poems, Penumbra, won the 2016 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2017. He is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.

  Shewmaker writes: “ ‘Advent’ started with a scene I witnessed at an advent service at Stanford Memorial Church. The balconies were opened because of the crowd and during one of the hymns a boy tried to pull himself onto the railing. His mother was attentive, though, and caught him before any harm was done. That moment stayed with me and I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if she had looked away, if only for a moment. At that point, the metaphor—between the boy and Christ—was unavoidable and the poem largely unfolded on its own.”

  CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press, 2013). Her most recent poetry collection is Cruel Futures (City Lights Publishers, 2018) and Be Recorder is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019. She is coeditor of Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014). She is chair of the planning committee for CantoMundo and is the publisher of Noemi Press. She is professor of English at Virginia Tech and, with Stephanie Burt, poetry editor of The Nation.

  Of “Dispatch from Midlife,” Smith writes: “I wrote this poem to describe what being ‘midlife’ actually means to me, a quick take, but also a message to a younger me. When I was a teen in California and went dancing at One Step Beyond (RIP), I’d always see a guy who looked like a forty-year-old Klaus Kinski in MC Hammer pants dancing like his life depended on it. I watched him with wonder and disbelief from a very selective puritanical stance about what spaces were appropriate for young people versus older people. I saw midlife as a boring space of work, family, and waiting for death. Now, when I see a face of someone my age (forty-seven) or even older, I see the younger face in that face—like I have a new superpower. I can see all the people they’ve been, and I see it with love and loyalty having also grown and changed and widened. I also see the younger person in my current face, and only occasionally feel the self-loathing women my age are conditioned to feel, but, most importantly, I feel like I am still myself at twenty, at thirty, at forty. She is still in me and has mostly not changed despite what my body looks like after giving birth, feeding my children with my body, illness, and aging. I know more about the world, and I know that if I wanted to go to dance like no one was looking, someone might be looking, but IDGAF. I’m this thing that I made with time and work and error and triumph. I’m also relieved by the freedom of being able to wear a caftan or long flowy scarves, and that’s where the wanton indifference comes in. I would add, however, that for a minute the last line read ‘sexual indifference,’ but that’s not exactly true. I’m still pretty sexy and sexual predation is about power, not beauty or age.”

  TRACY K. SMITH is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015) and four books of poetry, including Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018). She is the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States, and a professor at Princeton University.

  Of “An Old Story,” Smith writes: “I wrote this poem thinking it might be nice to take a stab at creating a new myth. Instead of brushing aside my own sometimes-bleak feelings about the failings of the twenty-first century, I tried to embrace them, and fashion them into a story that culminates in humankind finding its way to a compassionate existence.”

  GARY SNYDER was born in San Francisco in 1930 and attended elementary schools in Seattle and Portland. He received his BA from Reed College in 1951 and studied East Asian languages at UC Berkeley between 1953 and 1956; during this period he also worked in the logging industry, and for the US Forest Service as a fire lookout. For many years he studied Buddhism in Japan. From 1986 to 2002 he taught at UC Davis, where he is now professor emeritus of Eng
lish. He has received the Bollingen Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974). His most recent collection of poems is This Present Moment (Counterpoint, 2015).

  Of “Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany,” Snyder writes: “One early autumn in 2011 or so, I was visiting with Giuseppe Moretti, who’s active with the Italian Bioregional Movement and who lives and works a historic farm quite near the Po River. I also spent some days at Etain Addey’s sprawling farm project nearby. I couldn’t help but see the parallels between this part of Italy (which surely had been a mixed forest of drought-adapted bushes and trees in preagricultural times) and earlier California. The numerous large fireproof stone and plaster farmhouses—many vacant—are instructive. And I thought about how the American West Coast over the next millennium will probably go through a similar process, but the houses won’t last that long. I’m not sure which I’d favor.”

  A. E. STALLINGS, born in 1968, studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and has lived in Athens, Greece, since 1999. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, she has recently published a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days with Penguin Classics. Like, a new volume of poems, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Of “Pencil,” Stallings writes: “Writing about this poem on a computer (not with a pencil, although the poem was drafted in pencil), I’m given to wonder whether the central metaphor will be easily understood in a decade or so. I have poems about landline telephones that perhaps now need explanations to be grasped by the very young! But I think the pencil, like print itself, is here to stay, it is so simple and elegant a technology. I am somewhat haunted by school and office supplies, perhaps because these are deep, powerful memories, stirred up by a stint of school teaching and then again by my own children’s school-going. Getting out of one’s seat to sharpen a pencil was sometimes the only moment of pure escape into daydreaming in those faraway classrooms, and maybe the nursery-rhyme ballad swing to this (as well as that it is almost a riddle with the answer in the title) comes from childhood.