by David Lehman
If many of the poets assembled here would like to put the world in order, their poetry returns us to a state of grace by balancing this impulse with the demands of their art. The shadowy presence of our current political moment hangs over their work. Some refuse to turn away from the horrors of gun violence. Others add to the haunting tales of the #MeToo movement by coming to terms with historical wrongs owed to abuses of male power and narratives of gendered violence.
For some readers, American poetry begins with Whitman and Dickinson; for others, Anne Bradstreet holds that honor. For me, Phillis Wheatley inaugurates America’s contribution to world poetry, for she is the first to “finger its jagged grain,” expose the complexity of being an American and a casualty of its history of subjugation and plunder, the qualities which animate her poems.
The whole of last year I kept returning to the question: What does it profit a nation to uphold a national literature? Is this itself a kind of wall that delimits and determines who is American? Does “best” describe an articulation of poets whose work most signifies American-ness? I contemplated heavily these questions along with: What is American about American poetry? Does it mean we dream American dreams? Or possess American bodies? Maybe what defines us is our suppressed history or a need for psychic healing where art and poetry serve as a kind of rapprochement? Or is it our inalienable freedom to address aesthetic, political, and social concerns in our art without reprisal or fear?
I settled on the idea that despite our abstruse equivocations about the line between poetry and politics, poets today write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance in American poetry. They heed the ethical imperative to bear witness, to speak out, to advocate for social and economic equality, to combat the forces of various “-isms,” yet not at the expense of artful language or a loyalty to the self—a duality of purpose that is consistent from generation to generation. In the most successful poems of witness, the lyric greatness we inherit is fully intact. As Martín Espada observes, poets who tackle issues such as sexuality, immigration, rampant technology, and anti-Semitism go beyond mere “protest to articulate an artistry of dissent.” For all the worry about the homogenization of graduate creative writing programs and community workshops, we can take solace in knowing that the professionalization of poetry has not tamed the impulse of conscientious poets to put language to the service of righting injustices or vociferously claiming one’s right to be heard.
With the many societal issues and challenges we face today, it is difficult at times for readers to hear the import of quieter poems. You’ll find in these pages poems about love, the shock of aging, the consumptive spirit of desire, and the fear of hitting animals while driving at night. No less urgent, compelling, and aesthetically demanding, a strong thread of lyric poetry characterizes this volume. Many of the struggles, observations, and celebrations here are private, emotive, and affective.
Our education and reading practices have fully acquainted us with the orthodoxy of lyric poetry: a speaker who, in a state of rapture, disequilibrium, or acute possession, utters intense feelings and arrives, by poem’s end, at some sacred cynosure of herself. Yet I found myself drawn to poems—some of them relatively long—in which the speaker seems discursively to work through questions of selfhood by addressing some existential dilemma that generously involves us in the drama and surge of its unfolding. The performance of the mind at work is one of the great pleasures of poetry and never more evident than on the surface of the poem that is imbued with an unassailable and visceral music.
Correspondingly, I listened intently to poems that reveal a distinctive American vernacular, unlike any heard before. The result? The poems in The Best American Poetry 2019 represent a rich playlist of idioms and attempts at fastening the voice to the page. One hears the plaintive and melancholy as well as the ardent and fiery. One is likely to encounter the natural tendencies of unadorned, demotic speech as well as the eloquent propulsion of discursive, sculpted language. In all the poems, one realizes that the poets have come to terms with the imperative to refresh language so that its usage does not merely recycle clichéd beliefs that render us entombed in our aging mythologies, false histories, and unreliable memories. As Susan Sontag has written: “Language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made . . . It’s scarcely possible for the artist to write a word (or render an image or make a gesture) that doesn’t remind him of something already achieved.” The poets gathered here assure us that poetry is not a dead technology, that we have not exhausted the potential for language to stir us and advance us toward greater epiphanies.
A number of cherished poets have died in the last year or so: Meena Alexander, Lucie Brock-Broido, Linda Gregg, Donald Hall, Tony Hoagland, Mary Oliver, Ntozake Shange, Derek Walcott. Mindful of their example, I have been consumed with the living and our sacred duty to remember the poets whose words have wrought our age to the effect that we can live with a little more decency, with a little more levity, a little more enlightened and wiser than before. This imperative I take to heart, for many of the poets who are passing from our lives have profoundly changed me; I have been “changed utterly” by their uncanny poems, guiding essays, fierce intellects, and literary citizenship. I fear the swiftness by which time, brutal critic that she is, grinds down their memories and the significance of their work. A few who were a continent in our imagination are reduced to a mere isthmus, a mere entry in the index of some academic textbook. It is painful to consider that their gifts might not trespass and survive into the next century with the same amount of force with which they have touched so many readers. The time will soon come, I hope, when we might lobby for a day in the United States to celebrate poets with a national holiday. Until then, we must teach and be engaged by the poems of the masters who have left us.
In my senior year of high school with plenty of turmoil at home defining much of my existence, I attempted to ease my anxieties by writing what I thought were poems in my book of rhymes. Even though I had friends who, like me, were melancholy and sui generis, and also wrote raps, I secreted away this book by covering it with a brown paper bag (something we public school students were required to do back then or our parents would be fined) so that it blended with my textbooks. I found poetry when I needed it. I could not fathom the decisions adults in my life made regarding their well-being and my safety. This is what brought me to the written word—this and the fact that, from a young age, I was enthralled by the mystery of existence. As a child, I thought an answer, a meaning, was just around the corner. Poetry allowed me, as a teenager, to participate in the making of that meaning.
Does the assertion still hold water that classrooms are where adults first learn to hate poetry? I wonder in how many classrooms across America right now some kid feels debilitated by the assignment to analyze a poem and is humiliated as a result. I know this is what happened to my prose-writing friend. In childhood, she and her brothers wrote poetry, an assignment given by their mother, who studied with Robert Hayden at Fisk University, to help pass the summer days. Her mom had them read the work out loud, to which she gave positive yet rigorous feedback. My friend treasured her mother’s encouragement and the exchange of rhymes with her siblings. However, when she arrived in college, she encountered professors who predictably made the reading of poetry a chore akin to scrubbing the shower wall. For her, the interpretative act fetishized and eclipsed the pleasures of poetry; competing readings were rewarded or derided. She felt embarrassed and inept in the classroom; in her words, “not worthy of the form.” The feeling of shame behind her abandonment of poetry probably holds true for many detractors of the art.
I want to remind the reader of The Best American Poetry 2019 that far too many of us feel cornered when faced with the task of reading poetry. We feel compelled to reach irritably after fact and reason rather than to live and exist in the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, as John Keats would have us do. Poems are works of art, not nece
ssarily meaning-making machines meant to be reverse-engineered. As someone who has assigned and taught previous editions of The Best American Poetry, I hope that teachers of this volume instruct students how to experience language and its designs, to embrace what reaches them and what eludes them, to accept and exist in that space of wonder and mystery. Mastery over a poem is a fiction and should be discouraged; but the skills drawn from discerning the nuances of speech and sensitivities of form are manifold. Moreover, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the space of confusion students complain about (“I don’t get it”) can itself be inspirational and freeing.
My high school English teacher at Central High School in Philadelphia, Mr. Plummer, was a man of immense affect with an exaggerated mustache that, depending on your TV habits, put you in mind of period actors Billy Dee Williams or Burt Reynolds. He primarily taught Shakespeare; I still have my copy of The Merchant of Venice from his class. He came alive reading any number of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but he saved his best performances for Robert Frost. He’d recite “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Birches” with great enthusiasm.
Mr. Plummer would begin classes the first Monday of the month while calling roll by asking each student if he or she were ignorant—a question to which each of us would have to reply with these exact words, “Yes Mr. Plummer; I am ignorant.” He worked as a high school teacher long enough to convince the school district to grant him a comfortable chair at his desk and a tea station that he kept stocked with fresh boxes of Lorna Doones. After downshifting his recliner into a restful position, he would lounge and, while sipping from a steaming cup of Earl Grey, call each of us by name beginning with the first row. “Mister Jeffrey Arons, are you ignorant?” “Yes Mr. Plummer, I am ignorant.” The whole routine was entertaining. He seemed increasingly to beam from inside with each admission, which to many of us felt like a public shaming.
Once, one morning, after I petulantly replied “No, Mr. Plummer, I am not ignorant,” he took a bite from his cookie, set the other half on the saucer, and walked over to my desk in the second row and dramatically pronounced: “Everyone! Mr. Jackson has the whole of human knowledge inside his large globular noggin.” He then proceeded to squeeze—for what felt like a long time—my head while he lectured on the ancient philosopher Socrates and the virtues of ignorance, a pedagogical moment that today could land him in court.
On another occasion, when I accidentally handed in my book of poems, mistaking it for my textbook, Mr. Plummer looked down at me, then read silently one of my poems. I was terrified at what was to come next. To my surprise, he announced to my friends that indeed I was a poet and asked if he could recite what he had just read silently to himself, which he said was slightly impenetrable but fulfilling in its strangeness. I do not remember the poem, only his mouthing the words with deep relish as if they were his own, a transaction to which I would become addicted. He became a champion, someone whose readings and valuing of poems would partially dictate my path in life.
With The Best American Poetry 2019 I wish to pay homage to all teachers who inspire their students to find sustenance from poetry. I also want to acknowledge the inimitable Alice Quinn, who announced during my long year of reading that she was stepping down as executive director of the Poetry Society of America. In her work there and at The New Yorker, Alice displayed a vision of and service to the art, and helped not only to widen audiences through innovative programming but also to aid in the growth and development of many young poets, including yours truly. She approached her protean duties like a true impresario. If we are in the throes of a great age for poetry, it is to such stewards of our literature that we owe our thanks. In their honor, enjoy the poems in The Best American Poetry 2019.
DILRUBA AHMED
* * *
Phase One
For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.
For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.
I forgive you for hideous visions
after childbirth, brought on by loss
of sleep. And when the baby woke
repeatedly, for shouting silently
in the dark, “What’s your beef?”
I forgive your letting vines
overtake the garden. For fearing
your own propensity to love.
For losing, again, your bag
en route from San Francisco;
for the equally heedless drive back
on the caffeine-fueled return.
I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth
only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
I forgive you. For singing mostly
when the shower drowns
your voice. For so admiring
the drummer you failed to hear
the drum. In forgotten tin cans,
may forgiveness gather. Pooling
in gutters. Gushing from pipes.
A great steady rain of olives
from branches, relieved
of cruelty and petty meanness.
With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen
gray pigeons. Ointment reserved
for healers and prophets. I forgive you.
I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried
you had, perhaps, no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive
you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable
to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.
from Asian American Literary Review
ROSA ALCALÁ
* * *
You & the Raw Bullets
Why the image just now of a bullet entering the mouth? Why call it raw, when it isn’t sticky and pink like a turkey meatball, just the usual: gold, and shiny, and cylindrical? What about this bullet is uncooked? Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions of the you that you were, swallowing raw bullets as you walked? The images come without assailant, without gun, just the holes the bullets opened, the holes through which they went. And now at the age in which you ride enclosed in glass like the Pope or President you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices. You are shitting them out, feeling them drop from you in clumps of blood, in the days of bleeding left. But you cannot expel all of them. Some, raw as the day they entered, have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh, or lodged their hot tip into the taste center of the brain. Will the tongue’s first encounter with pomegranate seeds be forever a lost Eden, that fruit of your girlhood, which, also meaning grenade, was perhaps never innocent? Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my friends? Let us legislate the active voice, instead. Not, “Many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans.” But, “Here are the men who pulled the trigger, look at them.”
from Poem-a-Day
MARGARET ATWOOD
* * *
Update on Werewolves
In the old days, all werewolves were male.
They burst through their bluejean clothing
as well as their own split skins,
exposed themselves in parks,
howled at the moonshine.
Those things frat boys do.
&nbs
p; Went too far with the pigtail yanking—
growled down into the pink and wriggling
females, who cried Wee wee
wee all the way to the bone.
Heck, it was only flirting,
plus a canid sense of fun:
See Jane run!
But now it’s different:
No longer gender specific.
Now it’s a global threat.
Long-legged women sprint through ravines
in furry warmups, a pack of kinky
models in sado-French Vogue getups
and airbrushed short-term memories,
bent on no-penalties rampage.
Look at their red-rimmed paws!
Look at their gnashing eyeballs!
Look at the backlit gauze
of their full-moon subversive halos!
Hairy all over, this belle dame,
and it’s not a sweater.
O freedom, freedom and power!
