The Best American Poetry 2019

by David Lehman

  Of “Nord-Sud,” Palmer writes: “Now close to two years ago, the French poet and translator Jean Daive asked me to contribute to a colloquium at the Centre International de Poésie in Marseilles celebrating the work of the remarkable and singular poet Pierre Reverdy. This poem resulted. In 1917, Reverdy founded the experimental literary review Nord-Sud (North-South) with fellow poets Vicente Huidobro, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire. His ‘north’ here becomes Paris, his ‘south’ Rome, both cities where I had recently spent time among rivers and butterflies. In 1926, Reverdy burned many of his manuscripts before a group of friends by the Seine.”

  MORGAN PARKER was born in California in 1987. She is the author of the poetry collections Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night. Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? will be published in September 2019 by Delacorte Press, and her first book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World/Random House. She lives in Los Angeles.

  Of “The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth,” Parker writes: “I began this poem during a residency at Denniston Hill in June 2017.”

  WILLIE PERDOMO, born in New York City in 1967, is the author of The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, Smoking Lovely, which received the PEN/Open Book Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.

  Perdomo writes: “ ‘Head Crack Head Crack’—originally titled ‘Crazy Bunch Couplets’—was inspired by ‘Two Words,’ a hip-hop song written by Kanye West, featuring Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), Freeway, and the Boys Choir of Harlem. I started the poem at First Wave @ University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I facilitated a workshop using ‘Two Words’ as a model. ‘Head crack’ has an obvious literal meaning. You can hear a verse that is so bangin’ that, as Emily Dickinson would have it, it makes you feel physically as if the top of your head were taken off. But ‘head crack’ is also gambling parlance. In the three-dice game, Cee-Lo, ‘head crack’ is a trump roll, a 4-5-6, a roll that usually breaks the bank. The rhythm of the poem is in tune with the song it was inspired by. The content of the poem is informed by a crew’s trajectory. The crew was called ‘The Crazy Bunch,’ which became the title of my fourth collection in which the poem was included. I like to think that this poem would have made for solid #bars were I invited to get in on ‘Two Words.’ Peace.”

  CARL PHILLIPS was born in Everett, Washington, in 1959. His new chapbook is Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), and his new book of poems, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, will be out in 2020 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

  Of “Star Map with Action Figures,” Phillips writes: “I got lost, a little bit, last summer. I can’t say, anymore, how this poem came about, exactly, but it seems to me now a way in which I mapped my way forward out of one of desire’s many conundrums to a point of recognizing a future beyond conundrum. As the poem suggests, many have fallen on the field of intimacy. Fallen doesn’t have to mean it’s over, though—hence the open-endedness with which the poem closes; who can say what’s next? Disaster, maybe. But joy, too, is possible.”

  ISHMAEL REED was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1938. He is the author of more than thirty books to date, including his eleventh novel, Conjugating Hindi (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018); his eleventh nonfiction work, The Complete Muhammad Ali (Baraka Books, 2015); and New and Collected Poems, 1964–2007 (Carroll & Graf, 2007). New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café presented a staged reading of his play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in January 2019. A new essay collection, Why No Confederate States in Mexico, appeared from Baraka Books in 2019. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for more than thirty years, he retired in 2005 and is now a distinguished professor at California College of the Arts. He is a MacArthur Fellow. His author website is located at www.ishmaelreed.org.

  Of “Just Rollin’ Along,” Reed writes: “My early poetry was influenced by the modernists whom I studied at the University of Buffalo. The poetry was heavy in symbolism and weighty in obscure allusions. In 1963, I joined a group of black writers in a workshop called Umbra. We were brutal with each other. But my poetry became less pretentious. I began to be comfortable with the vernacular language and forms in the work of Langston Hughes, who was responsible for the publication of my first novel. In my second book of poetry, Conjure, I included a blues song based upon the legend of Betty and Dupree. Kip Hanrahan sent my poems to some of the leading jazz musicians and composers, among them Taj Mahal, Carla Bley, Allen Toussaint, David Murray, and Steve Swallow. The result was a concert called Conjure at the Public Theater in 1982. The Conjure band, which performs my poems and songs, has been traveling to Europe and Japan for thirty years. The last concert was performed at a jazz festival in Sardinia in 2012. Though I still write in a variety of genres, I return to the blues, and I am lucky enough through the efforts of David Murray and Kip Hanrahan to get some of the leading artists to record them, including Cassandra Wilson, Taj Mahal, Bobby Womack, and Macy Gray. ‘Just Rollin’ Along’ is one of the latest. The idea came from a radio show called Blues by the Bay, hosted by Tom Mazzolini, broadcast over KPFA in Berkeley. The encounter between L. C. Good Rockin’ Robinson and Bonnie and Clyde was recounted on that show.”

  PAISLEY REKDAL was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1970. She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000, and Vintage Books, 2002); a hybrid-genre memoir entitled Intimate (Tupelo Press, 2012); a book-length essay, The Broken Country (University of Georgia Press, 2017); and several books of poetry, including A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Her latest book of poems, Nightingale, is just out from Copper Canyon Press. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the editor and founder of the web history archive project, Mapping Salt Lake City (www.mappingslc.org). In May 2017, she was appointed Utah’s poet laureate.

  Of “Four Marys,” Rekdal writes: “I had the great fortune to be granted a residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, where the director, Dana Prescott, would take the residents out on art tours to look at Piero della Francescas. Her lectures were incredibly thought-provoking and detailed: the opening of my poem comes from her observations of the Madonna del Parto’s unusual visual framing, which makes the direction of Mary’s movements appear so ambiguous. I am eternally grateful for Dana’s knowledge, her enthusiasm, and her support for the arts. This poem is for her.

  “The information I include about Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley comes from years of teaching Frankenstein. I trained as a medievalist before I turned to poetry, so some aspects of the poem come from my early education. It may interest the reader to know that I don’t have any children myself, and have never given birth, but I am getting older and considering the weight of mortality, as I can see half a lifetime both ahead of and behind me now. For me, that’s the true heart of the poem: that strange balance we all experience between death and life.”

  SONIA SANCHEZ was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934. Her books include Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Beacon, 1999). Morning Haiku, from the same publisher, appeared in 2010. She has written plays and books for children. For many years she taught at Temple University. In 2018, she received the Wallace Stevens Award. She lives in Philadelphia.

  Sanchez writes: “ ‘Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines’ was written as a commission on the occasion of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s exhibition at Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in 2013. The poem is about women who are killed, who are raped and experimented on by doctors; the poem is a thank-you to my dear sister for shedding light in her art on how women are desecrated, how women are killed, how women are mauled, how women are raped and sometimes even fall in love with their accusers, those who misuse them, who abuse and debase them
. The poem is a celebration of her art (papier-mâché, photographs, collages, and sculptures) that tells the story of these women in different forms, touching upon themes of beauty and the environment.”

  NICOLE SANTALUCIA was born in Johnson City, New York, in 1980. She is the author of Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015) and Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press, 2018). She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and has taught poetry workshops in the Cumberland County Prison, Shippensburg Public Library, Boys & Girls Club, and nursing homes.

  Of “#MeToo,” Santalucia writes: “Within my classroom, more than a dozen students wrote about their sexual assault experiences last year and a few bravely spoke publicly about rape during campus events. The weight of each person’s story pressed against my chest all year, making this poem bound to happen. An early draft derived from a writing exercise that I did with my students. We often write together in class and it was their stories, their assaults, their pain, their courage that engulfed me. Their voices unified and amplified—the room, me, them, the pages overflowed (talk about a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’). I finished the poem months later, after slowly unearthing a horrific experience with my high school soccer coach. Once I gained more clarity of the memory I searched online to find the coach, discovering that he really did run for mayor as a Democrat and he really did name his daughter Nicole. By resituating #MeToo, compressing my memories, and by separating object from subject, I reached clarity for a brief moment. This poem is the convergence of many moments, some are mine, some belong to my students and those who trusted me with their stories, and other moments still live in the silent darkness of survivors.”

  PHILIP SCHULTZ was born in Rochester, New York, in 1945, and is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing. His books include The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), Failure (Harcourt, 2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, The Wherewithal (W. W. Norton, 2014), and, most recently, Luxury (Norton, 2018). Schultz lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, the sculptor Monica Banks. Their two sons are Eli and Augie.

  Schultz writes: “I wrote ‘The Women’s March’ soon after my wife and I returned from the march in New York City. I was surprised by how quickly it came and how little revision it required, which is seldom the case with me. It was a fraught time and the march offered refuge, an oasis, as cantankerous and all-consuming as it was. We found it hard to move at times, and often felt more like bystanders than participants. I was so moved by the strong-willed faces everywhere I wasn’t always certain where I was; at times it seemed a reprisal of all those marches in San Francisco in the sixties, the startled past reawakened, dreamlike and unconscious. I never before felt quite so honored to be included, and that’s what this great onslaught of humanity was all about, inclusion, visibility, and being present. The faces of so many resolute women reminded me of my mother, and I tried to imagine what she would make of all this, if she would understand the significance through me, her only child. The image of her only made the event all the more focused, and inspiring. Her immigrant world with all its limitations for women was now being expanded before our very eyes, in every direction and meaning. I began writing the poem on the bus going back home to East Hampton. The poem felt coauthored, as though once again the role I was being assigned was that of bystander to history.”

  LLOYD SCHWARTZ was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. He is the author of four poetry collections: These People (Wesleyan University Press, 1981), Goodnight, Gracie (1992), Cairo Traffic (2000), and Little Kisses (2017), from the University of Chicago Press. He edited Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (University of Michigan Press, 1983), Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America, 2008), and Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). For thirty-five years, he was classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and in 1994 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his “skillful and resonant” reviews. He is the longtime commentator on classical music and the arts for NPR’s Fresh Air. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

  Of “Vermeer’s Pearl,” Schwartz writes: “I fell in love with Vermeer when I started taking the subway by myself to visit the great art museums in Manhattan. Moving to Massachusetts for graduate school, I was still a ‘T’ ride away from another Vermeer. So what I say in this poem is true—I had never lived in a city without a Vermeer. But in 1990, while I was in Brazil giving a series of talks on Elizabeth Bishop for the U.S. Information Agency, the morning after the still-unsolved Gardner Museum heist, I got a phone call from a friend informing me that I no longer lived in a city with a Vermeer. So I take advantage of every possible opportunity to see Vermeers—just in case. In 2013, the Frick Collection had a show of masterpieces on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in which the most famous (and most mysterious?) of Vermeer’s paintings, the Girl with a Pearl Earring, had the place of honor. I practically moved in. Spending so much time with that painting triggered all sorts of new thoughts—and new questions—about Vermeer and his uncanny pearls. Those questions eventually led to this poem.”

  ALAN SHAPIRO was born in Boston in 1952. His new book of poems is Against Translation (University of Chicago Press).

  Of “Encore,” Shapiro writes: “After finishing my recent book Life Pig, I told myself I’d pretty much said all I have to say about my mother’s dying and the maddeningly complicated person that she was. I was working under the Aristotelean assumption of writing as catharsis, that writing about what pains you can free you from the pain. ‘Encore’ is about the recognition of the limits of catharsis. No matter how much one writes about some forms of trauma, the trauma remains.”

  JANE SHORE was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. She is the author of six books of poems. That Said: New and Selected Poems was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, she has taught at Harvard (as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English), Sarah Lawrence, Tufts, M.I.T., the University of Washington, and the University of Hawai‘i in Manoa. She teaches at the George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC, and in Vermont.

  Shore writes: “ ‘Who Knows One’ is based on the eponymous ‘Echad Mi Yodea,’ ‘a traditional cumulative song in Hebrew, sung at the Passover Seder and found in the Haggadah. It enumerates common Jewish motifs and teachings: “Two are the tablets, Three are the fathers, Four are the mothers, Five are the books of the Torah,” and so on. It is meant to be fun and humorous, while still imparting important lessons to the children present. Sometimes it is played as a memory game, recited without looking. Sometimes the goal is to recite the entire verse in one breath.’—Wikipedia

  “I wanted to write a secular version of ‘Echad Mi Yodea,’ using numbers drawn from high or popular culture, sayings, idioms, proverbs, etc., while purposely ditching the strictly religious subject matter of the original. Revising my poem over the course of a whole year, as I drifted further away from the original song, I found that a darker subtext (and a distinct voice) began to emerge. I tried to make each of the song’s traditional thirteen stanzas its own little cohesive poem, while at the same time disrupting it with oddball, unpredictable lines. Unlike the original, where each ‘number/line’ is repeated in its entirety, and without variations, I wanted only my refrain lines to repeat. My brain is wired for grids, quilts, repeating images, sequences, all of which give me much pleasure. I am terrible at math.”

  TRACY K. SMITH was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), and served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

  Smith writes: “ ‘The Greatest Personal Privation’ is an erasure poem and an act of willful listening. The text is drawn from letters sent between members of the Charles Colcock Jones family, but I was listening against the grain, hoping to decipher or imagine the vo
ices of the people enslaved to the Jones family. I imagine that the speaker of my poem is Patience, Phoebe, or one of the other enslaved people whose name has been lost to history.”

  A. E. STALLINGS, born in 1968, grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her fourth collection of poems, Like, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, and a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days appeared from Penguin Classics (2018). She lives with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos, and their children, Jason and Atalanta, in Athens, Greece.

  Stallings writes: “ ‘Harm’s Way’ very much came about as one would expect from the poem’s ‘it sounds like’ opening—contemplating the phrase itself, which suddenly went from an abstraction to an address, in a rural county. ‘Harm’ could very well be a surname in that neck of the woods, with a road once attached to that family’s property. From there, the poem easily led to other dangerous ways, roads, highways, and paths. (Perhaps that I have a teenager very keen to start driving is not irrelevant.)

  “This feels to me like a song—even a country song. I think the form is partly influenced by song meters (here I’ve got trimeters with the odd tetrameter filling out the ghost beats that trimeters tend to call forth), and partly I think by the first six lines of ottava rima, where you have to push through to get three iterations on each rhyme. (I have been writing some longer poems in ottava rima, so I think that pattern started to get under my skin.) But I gave myself the freedom to rhyme only on the even lines.

  “In terms of influence, it now occurs to me it might be distantly related to Kipling’s delightfully spooky ‘The Way Through the Woods.’

  “I remember having some qualms in revision about whether the fairy-tale path belonged with these other roads and paths, and trying to take that stanza out and putting it back in, but in the end I think all the ways are on the same map.”