The Best American Poetry 2019
Page 15
The wallet hide is wafer thin. He could count,
were he so inclined, the various archipelagos
which map the folds, stained a tasteful oxblood.
Thus money is a kind of poetry, though to be so
its binding must be flawless, Francophilic,
like a leather-bound Laforgue or Mallarmé,
pages rustling en plein air, a garden perhaps,
a girl in a straw hat, mouthing some pages aloud.
& now, a close-up of the contents: Kodak
of Elsie, her new stove a-gleam. Holly riding
upon his shoulders against a backdrop
of Connecticut snow. Calling cards with logo
of the Hartford Indemnity—the imperious stag.
& beyond all this, the iambs to mold
the Golem of the Major Man. Melodies
of trumps & zithers, of variegate colors
unknown in nature. O Imagination—
stupefyingly Grand. But the heart,
the heart is human, vexed & brittle. The heart
will not suffice. O the twenties & the tens,
& the lowly Jeffersons. & the tie clasp, the lapis
cufflinks. Seltzer dispenser & a decent scotch,
The Miami Herald, dated 29 July, 1932. The Bonus Army’s
Hooverville in sepia rubble. The roiling Potomac,
an equestrian General George S. Patton, his terrible
swift sword raised up above the dead & gassed.
In the distance, the reflecting pool, the obelisk
& Memorials. But here, in the oval glass, two soft hands
administer pomade, a tortoiseshell comb has fashioned
an exacting part, dabs of cologne beneath
each ear. Time for highballs as the sun begins
its regal plummet, & the twilit palms
commence their susurrant adagios.
from AGNI
KEVIN YOUNG
* * *
Hive
The honey bees’ exile
is almost complete.
You can carry
them from hive
to hive, the child thought
& that is what
he tried, walking
with them thronging
between his pressed palms.
Let him be right.
Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy
who carries the entire
actual, whirring
world in his calm
unwashed hands,
barely walking, bear
us all there
buzzing, unstung.
from Poem-a-Day
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS
* * *
DILRUBA AHMED was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1973. Her book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, she has taught at Bryn Mawr College and in Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program.
Of “Phase One,” Ahmed writes: “After #45 was voted into office, I found myself grappling daily with a mix of very strong feelings: resentment, anger, what felt like hatred. Worse, my bitterness was not directed strictly toward some abstract or nameless entity, but also toward some individual people in my life. I knew I’d be unable to function with such terrible feelings, and yet I struggled to find a way beyond them. What kind of mind-set, I wondered, could grant one the perspective that transcends resentment and anger, and inches toward understanding, or even healing? A parental view, one of unconditional love? An effort to approach a godlike sense of distance, so far removed it might enable one to observe with what I imagined to be a mix of big-hearted forgiveness, maybe pity, or gentle reproach? Or simply detachment? Nothing I could envision felt authentic or even feasible to me.
“I found myself pondering what it takes to be truly empathetic, to have genuine compassion, to open oneself to understanding even under seemingly impossible circumstances. I grew interested in the notion of forgiveness, with self-forgiveness as a precursor to that. The idea of turning inward, as some kind of initial step, felt both genuine and viable. The notion that the understanding or forgiveness that we might extend to others must begin within began to resonate with me.
“While I’ve tried to funnel my strong feelings into action via local political movements, I don’t know that I’ve found effective ways to cope with my anger and bitterness, or whether healing and forgiveness are possible—or even warranted—in some scenarios. In the meantime, this poem happened. I owe a debt to Ross White for providing critical feedback on early versions of ‘Phase One.’ The ‘white curtain’ in the poem refers to ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ by Adam Zagajewski.”
ROSA ALCALÁ was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1969, to Spanish immigrants. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). As a translator she has focused on contemporary Latin American women poets living in the United States. She edited and cotranslated The New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and is a professor of creative writing in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual MFA Program, where she has taught since 2004.
Alcalá writes: “ ‘You & the Raw Bullets’ is part of a series in the second person that began as a way to speak to versions of who I had been as a younger woman. The poem began while I listened to someone on the radio talk about the importance of referring to the perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault, not just the victims—that sexual assault was actively committed, not just passively received. Thinking through this while the radio report played, I had a vision of a bullet, or bullets, which I called ‘raw,’ entering my mouth over and over again. These bullets were the many times my younger body had to accept and swallow subtle or outright violations and feelings of fear in public spaces: the grope on public transportation, the catcall on the street, a physical assault in a park. And all the bullets I’d swallowed over the course of my life were still lodged in my older body. This realization made me angry, not just for myself, but for all the others whose bodies—some of them targets for real bullets—must navigate daily all types of dangers normalized by a racist and patriarchal culture. It made me angry for my daughter, whom I had brought into this toxic world. The poem began to transform these feelings of personal desperation into something powerful: the recognition that my body in midlife was stronger than ever, and the possibility from there of collective action: What if we all took what we’ve swallowed and spit it back?”
MARGARET ATWOOD was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014); her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015). Of her many novels, The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000; Alias Grace won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Montello in Italy; and The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and became the basis of a critically acclaimed television series. The Door is her most recent volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent nonfiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
CATHERINE BARNETT was born in Washington, DC, in 1960. She is the author of three collections, Human Hours (winner of the 2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry and a New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets), and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. She has won a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in the creative writing program at NYU, is a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College, and lives in New York City, where she also works as an independent editor.
Of “Central Park,” Barnett writes: “I see I carried both Elizabeth Bishop (with a slight variation to the opening of her marvelous ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’) and Emily Dickinson (with her radical negations) into Ce
ntral Park, where the benches seem flush with praise and lament. When I found out how expensive the benches are, and how few remain, my old kleptomaniac tendencies were aroused, along with an echo of Eliot’s (echoing Dante’s) ‘so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.’ I just saw the Bruce Nauman exhibition at MoMA and was moved by the way he subverts time and makes absence a presence (see his Venice Fountains). I love the way the benches in Central Park invite us to take the place of those who have disappeared, making our own inevitable disappearances all the more palpable and turning the benches into a common way station. Whether named for you or not, a bench is a humanizing form, allowing several people to sit together at the same time and take a rest of uncertain duration from clamor and uncertainty. In history, chairs were saved for the VIPs; benches were for all.”
JOSHUA BENNETT was born in New York, New York, in 1988. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series winner, as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. In 2010, he delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.
Bennett writes: “I wrote ‘America Will Be’ a little over a year ago, during a New York summer where my father and I would get breakfast at IHOP every other week. My father integrated his high school in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1966, and many of his most striking tales were about his time as a teenager in the Jim Crow South. He never made the experience sound all that heroic. Mostly, he described it as lonely, confusing. He talked about the difficulty of his schoolwork, and the forms of physical violence he had to navigate every day. He emphasized what it meant for him, as an individual human being, to spend his senior year in such an unforgiving, unfamiliar place; one that was, by design, meant to exclude him and the people he loved.
“The poem is my attempt to reflect this set of concerns, while also highlighting the astonishing fact of my father’s courage, and persistence, in the midst of what might appear to be an altogether unlivable situation. The situation is always inextricably linked to what James Baldwin and others have called the black condition: our perpetual state of emergency and emergence. In that vein, this is a work of celebration, repair, and reclamation. It is my assertion that my father’s irreducibly black America is a historical corrective, a present reality, and a vision for the future. It is a song for the myriad who are unheralded and nonetheless loved beyond measure.”
FLEDA BROWN was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1944. The Woods Are on Fire, her new and selected poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. Driving with Dvorák, her memoir, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.
Of “Afternoons at the Lake,” Brown writes: “I’m not a game player, except under duress. I am so glad to have gotten a poem, at least, out of hours of suffering through Monopoly. Oh, that’s not true. As often as I could, I’ve pawned off the chore on those who enjoyed it. It’s the sheer greed, even in fun, that makes me twitchy. The game’s orchestrated stages of wealth-gaining, with its nasty side effects. Midas with his literally hardened heart. And that iconic rich guy in the top hat, the God of the whole thing, who wins past wanting to win. The best antidote to that I know is Keats. Is poetry. Is standing on the end of the dock where there are no goals except remembering the lines of the poem.”
SUMITA CHAKRABORTY was born in Nyack, New York, in 1987 and raised in Massachusetts. She has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize from the Poetry Foundation. She teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “Essay on Joy” is from her first poetry collection, Arrow, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom in September 2020.
Of “Essay on Joy,” Chakraborty writes: “This poem is about the afterlives of acts that occur at the intersections of emotional and physical violence, especially in the context of domestic violence, especially during childhood. I wanted to think about the simultaneously ritualized and unpredictable nature of this kind of violence—which is why I hope the poem reads both as a cohesive and circular myth and as though its loops of thought sometimes jump with a verse-paragraph break into a strange new space—and I wanted to think about what kinds of affect scripts we write in the aftermath of such violence, for which I draw on autobiography and on Spinoza’s Ethics. Along the way the poem is invested in thinking through the relationship between embodied self-perception, physical exertion, appetites (for eros, for food, for danger, for pain), and labor. What kinds of bodily encounters follow a body’s encounter with these forms of violence? That’s one of the poem’s largest questions.
“The story of a large number of dead grackles falling from the sky in Boston—which is where I spent most of my life (although I didn’t live there when this happened)—is true, and remains unexplained. It is true, too, that one of their toes points backward.”
VICTORIA CHANG was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1970. Her new book of poems, OBIT, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Barbie Chang was published by Copper Canyon in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other poetry books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in Antioch’s low-residency MFA program.
Of “Six Obits,” Chang writes: “After my mom died in 2015 following a long illness (pulmonary fibrosis), I absolutely did not want to write about it or write elegies. One day on the radio, I learned about a documentary film called Obit about writers of obituaries. That word with the long O and the hard T rung and touched me. I sat at a stoplight thinking about how when someone dies, everything dies. I went home and over two weeks and in a state of frenzy (and deep sadness), wrote seventy-five of these OBIT poems. I meant their formal shape to resemble newspaper obits. The form helped both to constrain my sadness and expound upon it in new ways.”
CHEN CHEN was born in Xiamen, China, in 1989. He is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the 2018 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He teaches at Brandeis University.
Of “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party,” Chen writes: “I wrote this poem after a conversation with Muriel Leung in which she asked what would happen if I imagined my parents having to make a bridge to me, instead of the other way around. For so long I’ve had to be the one reaching out to them, doing that draining work of educating them out of their homophobia. Also, I’ve realized how frustrated I am with movies and TV shows that depict the coming-out process as a onetime event, either immediately triumphant or tragic. I think usually the process is recursive, messy, the pains as well as the joys stranger than one might anticipate.”
LEONARD COHEN (1934–2016) was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The Jewish-Canadian singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, and painter was born in the Westmount area of Montreal. Brought up as an orthodox Jew, he was educated at McGill University, where he studied with Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. A member of the “Montreal School of Poets,” he published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, at the age of twenty-two. In 1967, Cohen moved to the United States to pursu
e a recording career. He wrote “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Bird on a Wire,” and “I’m Your Man.” Cohen continued to observe the Sabbath even when on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Bob Dylan said that Cohen’s “gift of genius is his connection to the music of the spheres.” Cohen’s thirteen books of poems include Flowers for Hitler, Book of Mercy, and Book of Longing. He wrote two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers. “People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant,” he observed. “But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.”
LAURA CRONK was born in New Castle, Indiana, in 1977. She is the author of Having Been an Accomplice from Persea Books and teaches at the New School in New York. Her second book of poems is forthcoming from Persea in 2020.
Of “Like a Cat,” Cronk writes: “This poem emerged during a period when I was trying to write a poem a day in the spirit of David Lehman’s The Daily Mirror. Writing every day, when I manage it, makes space to take passing thoughts seriously. During this time my family was in the midst of deciding to get a dog. This poem let me access the sadness I still had about not being able to have a cat. It was a bargain I made when I married my husband. His cat allergies are no joke. But his many catlike qualities came rushing toward me as I wrote. He’s even a Scorpio, like all true cats.”
KATE DANIELS, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1953, is director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She also teaches writing at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her sixth collection of poetry, In the Months of My Son’s Recovery, was published earlier this year.