by David Lehman
Of “Metaphor-less,” Daniels writes: “I have brought my poetry into healthcare settings for twenty-five years as poet-in-residence at Duke and Vanderbilt Medical Centers and as a writing teacher at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, nothing prepared me for the violent shock of discovering, in 2012, that a member of my family had been drawn into the national opioid epidemic. Since then, I have written many poems emerging from the experience. They are collected in two volumes: Three Syllables Describing Addiction and In the Months of My Son’s Recovery. I also conduct workshops, called “Writing for Recovery,” aimed at people whose lives have been affected by other people’s addictions. Like all the poems I have written on this subject, ‘Metaphor-less’ concerns itself with the collateral human damage of addiction (the ‘Family Illness’), and does not try to represent the experience of Substance Use Disorder, or those afflicted by it. For more information, see my website at www.katedanielspoetryandprose.com.”
CARL DENNIS was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1939. His most recent book of poems, Night School, was published by Penguin Books in 2018. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, he taught for many years in the English department of the State University of New York, and in the Warren Wilson writing program in North Carolina. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
Dennis writes: “ ‘Armed Neighbor’ is presented as an effort to reason with someone whom the speaker is not likely to address directly, working on the magical faith that an imaginary conversation may with luck become a real one.”
TOI DERRICOTTE was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1941. Her sixth poetry collection, I: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. With poet Cornelius Eady, she cofounded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. This much-honored poet is professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Derricotte writes: “ ‘An apology to the reader’ is another kind of argument with silence.”
THOMAS DEVANEY was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1969. His new book is You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2019). He is a 2014 Pew Fellow. His new and selected Getting to Philadelphia is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose) and The Picture that Remains with the photographer Will Brown (The Print Center). He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Haverford College.
Devaney writes: “My poem ‘Brilliant Corners’ is a map of a life fortified by music. From my early teens to my late twenties I was a musician and started off college as a music major. The poem is dedicated to the visual artist Jennie C. Jones. At parties Jones and I often wind up in a corner somewhere talking up a storm about our appetites for sound. It dawned on me that Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners is an apt description of some of Jennie’s work. Now I realize that in those passionate, hilarious, extended conversations, Jennie and I were both swapping notes about our own sonic lodestars.”
NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River.
Diaz writes: “In ‘Skin-Light,’ I was thinking about a ball game that was played throughout the Americas, in several different forms, part ceremony, part social. It was similar to what we now might call basketball and even futbol or soccer. My knowings and inquiries of my body have been shaped by my experience of the game of basketball. I have a freedom from and tethering to the body that carry over into the way I do and feel most things, including touch and tenderness. This poem is an inquiry, a wonder about what it means that violence and pain exist in simultaneity with joy and the ecstatic. And is submission to desire victory or defeat? What does it mean that I have been made, both in a game and in love, by these relationships? And what if the answer to all of these is ‘light,’ which is the beginning of a question?”
JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER was born in Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York. She currently resides in Northern New Mexico. Her book of poems is Belle Laide by Sarabande Books, 2013. She has received a Rona Jaffe Award and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s program for writers. She cites her time spent in her local community with elderly and teens, through the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and the Witter Bynner Foundation, respectively, as her most profound experience of poetry as a means of metamorphosis and transcendence.
Dwyer writes: “When revisiting my poem ‘Decline in the Adoration of Jack-in-the-Pulpits’ in order to provide commentary, I became aware of the hefty sorrow in the poem that I was not so acutely aware of while creating it. The impetus for the poem—a small plant, which resembles a sermonizing man—transmigrated into a commentary on the deficit of appreciation for nature and for the simpler things and ways of life, in stark comparison to contemporary aberrant focus on self-infatuation and electronic devices. Revisiting the poem was a bit like caliginous water rising up from a sealed and derelict basement to a sunlit widow’s peak lookout. A more dexterous perception of my deep-cut heartbreak around that cultural obsession that orients away from reverence of the natural world engulfed me and continues to do so.
“It has since occurred to me that during the process of fabricating our poems, of conjuring, galvanizing, and animating images, free associating and riding the wave of instinct, of adjuring forth our lines, words, syllables, and sounds, at times as if we are blindfolded and trying to pin the tail on the donkey or randomly selecting Bingo coordinates from a bowl, we are in a bubble of protection, in a velvet or silk cloth of separation from emotive content or rhetorical agenda. Despite dark content, we sail a bit in a bath of mood-elevating neurotransmitters that are the byproduct of engaging and minding the stove of imagination.
“For me, imagination reigns sublime; is as sacred as love.
“My gratitude to Major Jackson.
“And to Tony Hoagland, who, because of his wildly generous spirit, would have celebrated my poem landing in this volume. And then he would have also reminded me of the fleeting, fragile, and impermanent nature of everything.”
MARTÍN ESPADA was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006), and Alabanza (Norton, 2003). His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Of “I Now Pronounce You Dead,” Espada writes: “The poem focuses on a historic injustice that still resonates: the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Many of the details come from an account of the execution in the August 23, 1927, edition of The New York Times. The poem draws a connection between the repression of immigrants past and present, as well as the ultimate futility of that repression. The former site of Charlestown State Prison, where Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, is the current site of Bunker Hill Community College—a school with a large immigrant population, speaking in many tongues. As the saying goes: Aquí estamos y no nos vamos. Here we are and here we stay. (I have visited and read at the college multiple times.) The poem is also about the paradox of a good man in a bad system—Warden William Hendry, ‘almost overcome by the execution’ according to the Times—and the compromise with lethal injustice that would haunt him.”
NAUSHEEN EUSUF is a PhD candidate in English at Boston University. She is the author of Not Elegy, But Eros (2017), published simultaneously by NYQ Books in the United States and Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh. A native of Bangladesh, she was born in its capital, Dhaka, in 1980.
Eusuf writes: “ ‘The Analytic Hour’ is about psychoanalytic therapy as an experience of estrangement and alienation, rather than connection. Even with a well-meaning therapist, the experience can be profoundly disorient
ing—a loss of self, a mortification of the self. Therapy has the potential to harm as well as to heal: like Plato’s pharmakon, the poison and the cure are the same.”
VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and Forest Primeval, which won the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in three previous volumes of The Best American Poetry (2010, 2014, and 2017). She teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (United States, United Kingdom, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is an associate editor of Callaloo and teaches at Dartmouth College.
GABRIELA GARCIA was born in New York City in 1984 to immigrant parents from Cuba and Mexico. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She received an MFA in fiction from Purdue University. Of Women and Salt, a novel, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins. Connect with her at www.gabrielagarciawriter.com.
Garcia writes: “ ‘Guantanamera’ is the title of a famous Cuban song and poem that my mother would sometimes sing to me when I was a child: ‘I am a sincere person from the land where the palm grows / and before I die I want to cast these words from my soul . . . / with the poor of the Earth I want to share my lot.’ The nineteenth-century Cuban independence fighter and poet Jose Martí penned the original verses, which eventually became a song covered by dozens of artists from Joan Baez to Wyclef Jean. ‘Guantanamera’ also became one of salsa queen Celia Cruz’s best-known numbers. I’ve danced to ‘Guantanamera’ at parties in Miami, heard it played on melancholy guitars along the malecón in Habana, and read its words etched onto the marble busts of freedom fighters on both sides of the ocean. I wanted to capture the cadence and rhythm of this song so etched into my own history, and pay tribute to the larger forces that shaped it—the poets, the fighters, the artists, the complex issues of race and class and politics and migration that have shaped its lyrics and music. I wanted to pay tribute to the complicated history that led to me, a child sitting at a kitchen table in Miami, listening to my displaced mother hum a tune to dissolve the years and miles weighing heavy on her. I was also thinking about the resilience of my parents, of all immigrants, of their children: that there is no ocean deep enough—or wall high enough—to break our spirit.”
AMY GERSTLER was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. Her books of poems include Scattered at Sea (Penguin Books, 2015) and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009), which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. In 2019 she received the C.D. Wright Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.
Of “Update,” Gerstler writes: “An unsent letter to the dead is how I mostly think of this poem. The state of lost-ness and confusion I tumbled into after my mother’s death, which re-seizes me from time to time no matter how many years have passed since her demise, dominates this elegy for me. I have long depended upon the power of poems to speak to and about the dead, to construct a bridge, however imaginary or aspirational, between the dead and the living. This poem I think attempts to make that connection in a moment when the speaker is feeling particularly unmoored and bereft, and looks to surrounding household objects and aspects of nature to reflect and amplify her longing for someone long gone. The poem is also inflected with dejection about the results of the 2016 American presidential election, about which the speaker ‘updates’ the dead loved one in a euphemistic sort of way, as the speaker vainly begs for comfort, or some hint about what’s to come. At least that’s my read. What’s yours?”
CAMILLE GUTHRIE was born in Seattle in 1971. Her books of poetry include Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (Subpress, 2013). Diamonds, her new book, will appear from BOA Editions in fall 2021. She lives in Vermont, where she is the director of undergraduate writing initiatives at Bennington College.
Of “Virgil, Hey,” Guthrie writes: “The urgency of school mornings induces hyperbole. A tribute to my mom friends, who know well the hell it is to get your kids ready for school in the morning, this poem alludes to Canto I of Dante’s Inferno in the Longfellow translation: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost. // Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say.’ Surely Dante speaks for us middle-aged parents whom love has separated us from our reason. I also allude to a poem by T’ao Ch’ien (or T’ao Yüan-ming) called ‘Scolding My Sons,’ translated by David Hinton, which begins: ‘My temples covered all in white, I’m / slack-muscled and loose-skinned for good // now.’ ”
YONA HARVEY was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1974. She is the author of two poetry collections: Hemming the Water (2013), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the forthcoming You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (2020), both from Four Way Books. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda (2016) and is coauthor with Ta-Nehisi Coates of Marvel’s Black Panther and The Crew (2017).
Of “Dark and Lovely After Take-Off (A Future),” Harvey writes: “I used to judge harshly two women. I called them ‘The Women from Mars.’ It didn’t take long, though, before I realized I was one of them. When I was revising this poem, I was also finalizing a piece for the visual artist Alisha Wormsley. Alisha’s art views black women through the lens of what she calls the Fifth Dimension: the past, present, and future coexist alongside one another. This poem honors that holistic existence and values its own preoccupations and tangents. One more thing: when I’m overwhelmed by too many ideas and emotions, I sometimes use formal (or informal) parameters—in this case, syllabics. I’m indebted to the joyful artistry of both Alisha and the poet Ross Gay, who gave me the courage to let this poem go.”
ROBERT HASS was born in San Francisco in 1941. He teaches literature at the University of California at Berkeley. A book of his poems, Summer Snow, is forthcoming from Ecco Press. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001.
Of “Dancing,” Hass writes: “For the account of the history of the Kalashnikov, I am indebted to the work of C. J. Chivers in The New York Times, February 15, 2018. The description of Robert La Salle’s entry into the Great Lakes is to be found in Francis Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869). There have been so many mass murders in the United States in the two decades since fifteen children were killed in a school in Colorado in 1999 that it is probably necessary to remind readers of the occasion that elicited this poem. It was the murder of forty-nine people in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016.”
TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. His most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018) and To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018). He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.
Of “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes writes: “I mostly just want to recommend the poems of LeRoi Jones to fellow poetry lovers. You may be familiar with the title poem of his 1961 debut, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, but I’m telling you those other poems are fire, too. Near the end of the poem he writes:
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there . . .
It’s almost as if he hears his daughter talking to a premonition, a phantom of his future self. . . . The second and final poetry collection of LeRoi Jones, 1964’s The Dead Lecturer, is also tremendous. In ‘Footnote to a Pretentious Book’ when Jones writes, ‘A long life, to you. My friend. I / tell that to myself, slowly, sucking / my lip,’ it’s almost as if he is speaking to the Baraka h
e will become following the assassination of Malcolm X a year later. ‘Footnote to a Pretentious Book’ is a phenomenal poem. LeRoi Jones? Amiri Baraka? Poetry lovers, you do not have to choose between them.”
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA was born in Fowler, California, in the Central Valley of San Joaquín, in 1948. He has served as poet laureate of California (2012–2015) and United States Poet Laureate (2015–2017). His most recent collection of poems is Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights, 2015).
Herrera writes: “ ‘Roll Under the Waves’ is an attempt to cut into the existential layers of our migrant experience, an illegalized life, these days—that of running, escape, being chased by patrols, feverish, for an illusory openness to a land we once called home. Under extreme odds, as always. The border-crossing trail is ever-present danger, suffering, the last seconds of survival. I am interested in drawing out the inscapes of women, men, and children pulled down into such torturous depths. What happened to kindness?”
EDWARD HIRSCH was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. “Stranger by Night” is the title poem of his tenth collection, which will be published by Knopf in 2020. He has published five prose books, among them Poet’s Choice and A Poet’s Glossary, a compendium of poetic terms. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2016. He is a MacArthur Fellow and serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Of “Stranger by Night,” Hirsch writes: “A. R. Ammons said that ‘a poem is a walk.’ My short-lined one-sentence poem is a daily urban walk that has suddenly become more hesitant, difficult, and precarious. I wanted to treat my eye disease with matter-of-fact exactitude and enact how it has estranged my relationship to the world after dark, a world that has grown deeper and more mysterious by night. My friends have been dying at an alarming rate, and I wrote this poem at a time when I kept getting sideswiped by memories.”
