The Best American Poetry 2019

by David Lehman

  JANE HIRSHFIELD, born in New York City in 1953, is the author of eight poetry books, including The Beauty and Come, Thief. She has also written two books of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and is editor or cotranslator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. A chancellor emerita of The Academy of American Poets, she has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. “Ledger” is the title poem of her forthcoming book, to be published by Knopf in 2020.

  Hirshfield writes: “I wrote ‘Ledger’ in 2016, on Captiva Island in Florida, while working at the late painter Robert Rauschenberg’s former studio and home, now an artists’ retreat. That January–February was the wettest in Florida records, and Captiva, as the poem indicates, is five feet above sea level at its highest point. I had already been writing poems about climate change and the environmental crisis. Wading each day to my studio calf-deep in the reality of sea-rise magnified both urgency-awareness and the sharpness of grief. Midway through my time there, the Army Corps of Engineers released into the Caloosahatchee River the rising waters from Florida’s central Lake Okeechobee. A plume of algae toxic from agricultural runoff poured into the Gulf. For the rest of my stay, dead fish washed up on the beaches.

  “Climate-change science consists largely of numerical accounting. In both rising and falling numbers, we track the damage already done and predict the biosphere’s future. ‘Ledger,’ then, is a poem of both precise noting and mourning. Its repetitions of sound are the metronome ticking of loss. The “million fired-clay bones” allude to a project (http://www.onemillionbones.net/the-project/) one of my fellow artists-in-residence had helped create: the bones, handmade by many different communities, were laid out in 2013 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to make visible the world’s mounting toll of war-atrocity and genocide. The poem’s ancient Chinese measurement of distance (li), its Russian music and poetry, Polish potatoes, and elk heads on the wall of a U.S. bar, are equally meant to acknowledge and make visible the measures of our shared fates. Ecological catastrophe crosses time, border, species, and boundary. What happens to any of us happens to us all.

  “The account books of art and of science are inseparable and mutually needed. Each brings a way to take in realities hard to see without assistance; each helps us ponder—individually and together—how to live in this paradise-beauty we have been given, ours to pass on or destroy.”

  JAMES HOCH was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1967. He lives in the Hudson Valley and is a professor of creative writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a visiting faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College.

  Of “Sunflowers,” Hoch writes: “I like to drag my sons to museums. They usually go reluctantly. But, after a period of adjustment, they settle in nicely with a piece. Hardly ever am I right about which piece will draw their eye. When they are ready to leave, they are really ready to leave.

  “Intimacy, proximity and exchange, is something I think about often. It’s a complicated space. I suppose this poem is a way of engaging some of the difficulties that come from intimacy. Uncertainty and vulnerability chief among them.

  “How do I say to my child the facts of war? How do I not minimize nor glorify war, especially when the war is so proximate to your life? Sometimes exposition is blunt force trauma. Sometimes it unclouds.

  “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, my brother signed up for the special forces and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2003. I stayed home and wrote poems.

  “The war is still going on, though not so many Americans are paying attention, and sometimes I, too, forget it wages. Then, I will be doing something, like looking at a painting, or talking to my son, and it will find its way in. Once anything is inside you, you can’t help but feel complicit.”

  BOB HOLMAN founded the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. A Columbia graduate, Bob ran inventive poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café and other venues. He has two new books coming out—Life Poem, a book-length poem he wrote when he was twenty, and a new and selected volume, The Unspoken, both from YBK/Bowery Books. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard College, and The New School and is cofounder of the Endangered Language Alliance. www.bobholman.com

  Holman writes: “ ‘All Praise Cecil Taylor’ first appeared in Quincy Troupe’s NYU literary magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, and was performed at the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Marathon, 2019. I take this poet job seriously, learned the griot part from Papa Susso, who taught me all about Praise Poems. Poems are made of words, they make memories real, and they become music. Cecil told me that. Now you know.”

  GARRETT HONGO was born in Volcano, Hawai’i, and grew up in Los Angeles. His work includes Coral Road: Poems, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i, and The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship (to Italy). He is at work on The Ocean of Clouds (poems) and The Perfect Sound: An Autobiography in Stereo (nonfiction). He teaches at the University of Oregon.

  Of “The Bathers, Cassis,” Hongo writes: “I spent an early summer month at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, one year, and lived in an apartment overlooking the bay and out toward the Mediterranean Sea. My view was spectacular. Besides the azure waters paradisal, all along one edge of my sight was the imposing, buff-colored bluff of Cap Canaille, to my mind, a kind of Yeatsian Ben Bulben over the entire seascape before me. I say ‘buff-colored,’ but the truth is it’s a chameleon, changing hue and tint under sunlight throughout the day, darkening and sublimely forbidding under rainclouds or at dusk.

  “Other constants were noises from the harbor (boat engines and the blaring spiel of tour guides) and occasional shouts from the crowd of sunbathers who occupied the beach and promontory that bordered the Camargo property. But, working at my desk in my studio, I was always inside, away from the bustle and the gleeful sexuality of the throng of bathers. I felt their joyous whoops and screams were an indictment against my own sexual indolence somehow and was reminded of Section XI in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ wherein the poet reflects on ‘Twenty-eight young men’ who ‘bathe by the shore’ and a woman who ‘owns the fine house by the rise of the bank. . . .’

  “It seemed incongruous and profligate for me to be at a desk, doing the fine, mental work of poetry while the scene around me was so vibrant with sensuous splendor. And I imagined myself at twenty, when I surfed and swam most every afternoon in California, when I was once among the bathers myself, reveling in my own body electric, diving into the sea and cutting through waters jeweled in sunlight.

  “In a way, the poem is about the life of the mind as it contrasts with the life of the sensuous body, as it then itself becomes the ‘unseen hand’ that finally retrieves that sensuous body in a moment of imagination.”

  ISHION HUTCHINSON was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, in 1983.

  Of “Sympathy of a Clear Day,” Hutchinson writes: “The poem’s setting is Marrakesh, the summer of 2010. But the present is tinged with the colonial/wartime era, specifically with, or via, Winston Churchill’s watercolor of the city. His painting is quaint, ochre and pastel. False serenity like a radio turned off: Churchill painted it in January 1943 while on break from the Casablanca conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which they struck the ‘unconditional surrender’ doctrine, prolonging the war. Nothing of the rage and fury (careless of political sides) appears in his painting. All is mute and dull beneath the imperial gaze. (There is no denying, the poem admits however, the beautiful tonal variants of the sky.) How therefore to look and hear beyond this aesthetico-political silence—the silencing of history—into the present? This question haunts the poem.”

  DIDI JACKSON was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1970, and was raised in Florida, where she lived for forty years. The author of the forthcoming collection Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020), she teaches creative writing at the University of Vermont.

  Jackson writes: “I wrote ‘The Burning Bush’ immediately after hearing of Brianne’s murder. She was my dance stude
nt, and we worked closely together for several years. Thanks to social media, I was able to keep in touch with her over time and watch her grow into a beautiful woman who was raising her young son in Central Florida. When the news came that she had been shot by her estranged boyfriend in a murder-suicide, I was devastated, as was our entire community.

  “I want more than anything to speak her name, to keep at least her name and her memory alive, and for the world (and the grand audience of The Best American Poetry) to know who she was and once again to consider the needless tragedy of gun violence—domestic or otherwise. I want her story, which is the story of so many, to be known.

  “ ‘The Burning Bush’ contains many dualities, a kind of double-speak in both language and imagery. My frustration and grief are inconsolable when I think of the possibility of a man’s capacity to love and to kill simultaneously, how he can confuse the expressions of passion and murder, veil the communication of beauty and joy and death, and is so often prone to destroy what he cannot control and keep for himself.”

  MAJOR JACKSON was born in Philadelphia in 1968 and educated at Temple University and the University of Oregon. He is the author of five collections of poetry: The Absurd Man (W. W. Norton, 2020), Roll Deep (Norton, 2015), Holding Company (Norton, 2010), Hoops (Norton, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of The Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems and Renga for Obama: An Occasional Poem. He is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

  Of “In Memory of Derek Alton Walcott,” Jackson writes: “Unlike many poets of my generation, I never studied with Derek Walcott; still, he was an important influence. Derek modeled a discipline and sensitivity that early on helped me to hear the music beneath the music, the great groundswell and centers of thought and feeling from which his poetry pulses as a distinct sound. In my presence, he generously identified this attribute in Yusef Komunyakaa, another poet whom I also profoundly admire: ‘That man is at the center of language, at the center of the song.’ I have lived with that utterance echoing in my ears for the better part of two decades. But I have also had to contend with the man off the page.

  “Recently I asked an elder poet about Derek Walcott, and he plainly stated, ‘Extraordinary poet, regrettably more renowned for his distasteful behavior with women.’ Then tacked on: ‘I would not let my daughter near him.’ In similar discussions with dear friends, women poets who knew Derek early in their lives, a few confirmed, dismissed, then qualified Derek’s behavior within the context of his age of rampant and ubiquitous sexism, and yet also quickly added, someone who never sought retribution against women who did not respond to his advances.

  “Others who studied with Derek shared unsavory stories that confirmed his reputation. I acknowledged and shared in their pain at being reduced to objects of desire rather than valued primarily for their intelligence and talents.

  “This critical ambivalence haunts Walcott’s poetry and prodigious legacy as a teacher and writer. Derek’s severity as a poet and his moral failings as a man emerge from the same person. So do his lesser-known qualities of generosity and humor, to which I bore witness on several occasions. My writing this elegy allowed me to work through and process my profound gratitude as well as my suppressed anger at a man of enormous complexity, in whom many have found inspiration.”

  ILYA KAMINSKY was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1977, and now lives in Atlanta. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press), and coeditor of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins).

  Of “from ‘Last Will and Testament,’ ” Kaminsky writes: “I wanted to write a very brief ‘good-bye’ lyric. It was going to be a short poem of the last moment that (somehow) refuses grief. But that brief poem refused to end—it kept going. It is still going, somewhere. One day I will catch up with it.”

  RUTH ELLEN KOCHER was born in 1965 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016), Ending in Planes, winner of the Noemi Poetry Prize, Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), and domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013). Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is the current divisional dean for arts and humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

  Of “We May No Longer Consider the End,” Kocher writes: “I’m working on a book that recalls my life as a black girl in a working-class white family and in some tough neighborhoods. I’ve been trying to articulate how my white father understood my anger and helped me to weaponize it as a way to survive in a world he knew could be cruel. He knew what I was up against, as a white man in a white man’s world. He wanted to raise ‘a young lady’ but also made sure that I could fight, and win. This, I think of as a triumph. There is no greater male privilege than the privilege to express anger and so he gave me permission to expect any male privilege, any white privilege, was equally mine.”

  DEBORAH LANDAU was born in Denver, Colorado. Her books include Soft Targets, The Uses of the Body, The Last Usable Hour, and Orchidelirium. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in and directs the creative writing program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

  Of “Soft Targets,” Landau writes: “I spend six weeks each year in Paris (directing NYU’s writing programs there) and began writing these poems during the string of recent terror attacks in France. It was an intense and frightening time, and the sequence grew into my fourth book, Soft Targets, which considers a world beset by political tumult, gun violence, terror attacks, and climate change. I’ve always written about the vulnerabilities of the body, but here the fear of annihilation extends beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which we are all ‘soft targets.’

  “The last three lines of the second section of this poem are from ‘Frenchman Plotting “Imminent” Attack Is Charged With Terrorism’ (The New York Times, March 30, 2016).”

  QURAYSH ALI LANSANA was born in 1964 in Enid, Oklahoma. He is the author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, and three children’s books; the editor of eight anthologies; and the coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is an upper school humanities teacher at Holland Hall School. From 2002 to 2011 he was the director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for black literature and creative writing at Chicago State University. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His most recent books include the skin of dreams: new & selected poems 1995–2018 (Purple Basement Poetics, 2019); The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent, with Georgia A. Popoff (Haymarket Books, 2017); and Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, with Sandra Jackson-Opoku (Curbside Splendor, 2017).

  Of “Higher Calling,” Lansana writes: “While sitting in an aisle seat on a plane from Chicago to the 2016 AWP Conference in Los Angeles, I witnessed a poignant and spectacular kerfuffle. An elderly nun from a Central American nation either didn’t understand it was against FAA policy to talk on her mobile phone in flight, or just plain refused to close her flip-phone. Dressed in full habit, with a four-inch cross dangling from her neck, her mellifluous tongue was nonstop. Most passengers in earshot laughed at the young blond flight attendant, who grew more frustrated with every attempt to end her conversation. But he didn’t speak either language, Spanish or grace.”

  LI-YOUNG LEE was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957.

  Of “The Undressing,” Lee writes: “The poem enacts a dialogue between a time-bound, desire-entangled, foolish, disoriented mortal man with that orienting Goddess Sophia.”

  DAVID LEHMAN was born in New York City in 1948. Two books were published in 2019: Playlist, a poem written in dai
ly increments (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press, 2019).

  Lehman writes: “Kevin Young suggested that I use ‘It Could Happen to You’ as the title of my poem. I often write while listening to music, and Rosemary Clooney’s great version of the song was playing as I approached the end of my poem. Jimmy Van Heusen (music) and Johnny Burke (lyrics) wrote this standard in 1943. Jo Stafford’s rendition made it on the Billboard best-seller list a year later. Besides Rosemary Clooney, vocalists who recorded the song include Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, Frank Sinatra, and Sarah Vaughan. Miles Davis mutes his trumpet in an upbeat version that features John Coltrane on tenor sax. Chet Baker’s version incorporates both a scat solo and a trumpet solo.”

  ADA LIMÓN was born in Sonoma, California, in 1976. She is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, The Carrying, was released by Milkweed Editions in 2018.

  Limón writes: “ ‘Cannibal Woman’ is a poem that explores both the power and the danger of female rage. I am interested in the stories we tell ourselves about who the monsters are and what happens when we look at monsters with more tenderness and empathy.”

  REBECCA LINDENBERG was born in Minneapolis in 1978 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Love, an Index (McSweeney’s, 2012) and The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014). She teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University, and is the poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review.

  Of “A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse,” Lindenberg writes: “I’ve been hearing the term ‘apocalypse’ a lot lately—zombie apocalypse, dystopian apocalypse novel, postapocalyptic landscape, etc. Lately I’ve been hearing it more and more in the context of sociopolitical issues. I find I have a complicated response to all this, because my understanding tells me that what we mean by ‘apocalypse,’ like ‘drastic, cataclysmic event’ or ‘tyrannical regime change’ or ‘massive-scale sudden transformation’ or generally speaking a disruption of the status quo, is less a futuristic science fiction premise and more of a historical (and in some cases, current cultural/geographical/demographical) fact. But in the ancient meaning of the word, which is also a sort of William Blakean understanding of the word, apocalypse doesn’t just mean chaos and destruction. It means revelation, renewal, transformation. I think I wrote this poem to try to remind myself of that—that deep personal grief can be followed by love, that war and cultural conflict can be followed by peace, that in the loam left by a catastrophic volcanic explosion, the best tomatoes grow. But also, crucially, that we have a role in that—to be open to love, to win the peace and equality and liberty for ourselves and our fellows, to plant the tomatoes where the volcano used to be. I wanted to remind myself that it might not be okay, but then again, as much as it is in human nature to ruin things, it is in our nature to care-take and remake them, too. Poetry is one of the ways we do so.”