ALLISON ADAIR was born in Pittsburgh in 1977 and grew up in Gettysburg and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She studied at Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Boston College.
Adair writes: “Though I continued to read and study poetry intensely after graduate school, I didn’t write for several years, until one day I had to. During my first pregnancy, I was vacuuming one of two antique Persian rugs, bought online, when suddenly I felt that something was wrong. Something small, wordless. By the following week, the pregnancy had ended. Around that time, moths began to swarm my apartment. I rolled up the edge of the rug I’d been tending to find it threaded through with larvae—they’d been there all along.
“Months later, I was pregnant again. Pregnancy was reconnecting me, physically, to poetry, especially in terms of metaphor: as transfer, and as a paradox wherein the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the unfamiliar familiar. This strange time is the occasion of ‘Miscarriage.’ After the second pregnancy ended, I sat down, exhausted, and wrote, from somewhere underneath craft. The poem is decidedly spare—straightforward and bereft. The rug is described literally; the title refuses any play. The only technique I allowed myself, really, comes in the line breaks, which are annotated both in meaning and in sound. But I also couldn’t help reflecting on the hands that might have woven that rug, on where the women in the pattern might have existed before arriving in my apartment, on all they’d seen, all their terrible wisdom.”
KAVEH AKBAR was born in Tehran, Iran. Calling a Wolf a Wolf, his first book, was published in 2017 by Alice James Books in the United States and by Penguin in the United Kingdom. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.
Of “Against Dying,” Akbar writes: “In the summer of 2013, in the throes of one of many rock bottoms, my body began giving up. I was getting sicker and sicker, closer and closer to a Rubicon that, once crossed, could never be crossed back again. One day, grace of graces, I crawled my way toward help and (very) long story short, I slowly began getting better. The poem asks: ‘how shall I live now / in the unexpected present?’ It was a kind of rebirth. To whom do you submit your gratitude, your bewilderment at being given a second chance? And what to do with a body ravaged by its previous occupant? Roethke said, ‘The serious problems in life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.’ This poem is deeply invested in that promise.”
JULIA ALVAREZ was born in New York City in 1950, and grew up in her parents’ native country of the Dominican Republic. She recently retired as a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In addition to poetry, she has written fiction, nonfiction, and books for young readers; titles include: Homecoming (Plume, 1996), The Other Side/El Otro Lado (Plume, 1996), and The Woman I Kept to Myself (A Shannon Ravenel Book, 2011). She received a 2013 National Medal of the Arts and is a founder of Border of Lights, an annual gathering of activists, artists, educators at the border of Haiti and the DR. Visit her at juliaalvarez.com.
Of “American Dreams,” Alvarez writes: “When we arrived in New York in 1960, refugees from the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, my parents kept telling my sisters and me that this was the land of freedom where we had the opportunity to become whatever we wanted to be. They believed in the American Dream. I wish I could say that I shared their high-mindedness. But I was a kid, and my American Dream was all about candy. I couldn’t get enough of it. In Queens where we lived there was a whole store dedicated to candy, owned by an immigrant mother and her son, earlier-generation versions of us. I roamed the aisles, pronouncing the alluring names under my breath, the son watching me in a way that unsettled me. (Now, I wonder if he was just worried about shoplifting, not interested in my skinny—despite all that sugar—prepubescent body.) During those early years of my sweets-fixation, Martin Luther King was marching; demonstrators were being attacked by dogs, getting jailed, lynched; girls my age were dying in bombed churches. I’m astonished that those scenes on the news didn’t register. Or maybe I was subliminally aware, and that’s why I didn’t buy the un-nuanced version of the American Dream. The violence on TV was not unlike the violence of the regime we had escaped. The American Dream was not equally accessible to all. The Land of Good and Plenty was still just the name of a candy.”
A. R. AMMONS was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, in 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a US Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific in World War II. After his discharge, “Archie”—everyone who knew him called him Archie—attended Wake Forest University, where he studied the sciences. He took a class in Spanish, married the teacher, and went on to work as an executive in his father-in-law’s biological glass company before he began teaching poetry at Cornell University in 1964. Ammons wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, many published by W. W. Norton, including Glare (1997), Garbage (1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), and Sphere (1974). His posthumous books include Bosh and Flapdoodle (Norton, 2005), Selected Poems (Library of America, 2006), and a two-volume set of his collected poems from Norton in 2017. A longtime and greatly beloved professor at Cornell University, Archie was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. He died on February 25, 2001, a week after turning seventy-five.
DAVID BARBER is the author of two collections of poems published by Northwestern University Press: Wonder Cabinet (2006) and The Spirit Level (1995), which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books. “Sherpa Song” is included in his forthcoming collection, Secret History, to be published by Northwestern in 2019. He is the poetry editor of The Atlantic and teaches in the Harvard Writing Program.
Of “Sherpa Song,” Barber writes: “Mountaineering is known to be a spiritual pursuit and a technical feat. So, too, poems, at least the ones that move mountains. ‘Sherpa Song’ is one of a series of numbers in my forthcoming collection Secret History cast in a stringent nonce form: five stanzas of five lines, all lashed together in a cat’s cradle of slant rhymes. The gambit is to grapple with syntax and cadence in tight quarters to get to a vantage point that would otherwise remain out of reach. In this case, hitching my gear to the double-edged cognomen ‘sherpa’—both the ancestral and occupational collective term for the storied alpine guides of the Himalayas—was a way of groping toward a rough sympathetic magic that might turn formal stricture into lyric resonance. If pressed on why the form has gotten under my skin, I’d have to echo George Mallory’s gnomic rationale for his assaults on Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’ ”
ANDREW BERTAINA was born in Merced, California, in 1980. He was raised in Chico, California, and lives in Washington, DC. He works at American University in the library and as an adjunct in the department of literature. His work is available at andrewbertaina.com.
Bertaina writes: “When I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ I had been reading essays about translation, and thinking about the process and about many of the great writers that I’ve read only in translation. In these essays about translation, particularly with, say, War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, I kept reading arguments as to why one translation or another was more artful or precise than what had come before. It seemed, at least to me, that an argument could be made that every book deserved a thousand translations to try and capture all of the nuances of language and thought of the original.
“From there, I thought about the immense amount of importance we attach to meeting a writer, as though in their presence, some of their true essence is distilled, and the residual effects attach themselves to the person witnessing them like dust around stars. With those intertwining notions of translation and authorship in mind, I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ as though merely seeing a writer and the way he bent to talk to a woman somehow superseded the boundaries of language.”
FRANK BIDART was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939. In 1957 he entered the University of California, Riverside. In 1962 he began graduate work at Harvard, where he studied with Reuben Brower and Robert Lowell. His books include Star Dust (2005) and Desire (1997), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Desire received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 (FSG) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2018. Bidart is the coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (FSG, 2003). He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
BRUCE BOND was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954 and is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Five books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020). He is a regents professor of English at the University of North Texas.
Of “Anthem,” Bond writes: “This sonnet, as part of a book-length sequence entitled Black Anthem, appears in the final section, where the book reflects upon its choices. Why a book of sonnets? Why that form—that intimate space so associated with autonomy and closure—that has, for many, reached the status of the political? Doubtless, it is for this reason, in part, that I wanted to use it, to subvert an ironically rigid reading of form, to illuminate more precisely our relationship to beauty and perception—to music, in particular, whose play of echo and disorder bear associations without becoming identical to them. So odd an age that shed so much light on how language works and does not work seemed so quick to regard the semiotics of certain forms as fixed—not only unrealistic in terms of the way signs work, but also revelatory of a psychology of critical and political engagement. Music, in particular the anthem, seemed a good place to explore this shared psychology, since the anthem resists our projections even as it gives them flesh, and the stakes of musical persuasion can be so high. What I stumbled on, in writing the poem, is how music’s resistance can likewise be ‘read.’ It resonates, not only as the rhetoric that inspires commitment, but also as the extinction of that rhetoric. Music’s pulse is made of singular beats, like bodies, lost in time to the equally ephemeral whole. The resistance of form to meaning thus occasions a surprising return to meaning, to a reimagined affirmation and resistance to beauty as a space apart, a veteran’s park, a haunted absence at the heart of each, anxious to believe.”
GEORGE BRADLEY was born in Roslyn, New York, in 1953 and was educated at Yale University and the University of Virginia. He is the editor of The Yale Younger Poets Anthology and the author of five books of verse: one from Yale University Press, three from Knopf, and most recently a volume from Waywiser Press (A Few of Her Secrets, 2011). A short story of his was included in the 2010 PEN/O. Henry award anthology. He has worked as a construction foreman, a sommelier, a copywriter, and an editor. Currently, he imports olive oil from a property outside of Florence. He can often be found in Chester, Connecticut.
Of “Those Were the Days,” Bradley writes: “The poem chosen for this year’s BAP depends on a reader’s passing familiarity with some of the proverbs and idioms one hears every day, and it progresses—methodically, implacably—by giving each saying a twist. Prior to composition, the idea for the piece floated around in the back of my mind for some time, in part because our culture’s old saws so often struck me as at once trenchant and stupid. That is, they contain the wisdom of generations, but it is the conventional wisdom, and while they are food for thought, they are often uttered in lieu of thinking. The more I pondered these sayings, the more they took on ominous overtones. Or perhaps, as I hope the poem suggests, it is the passage of time that alters one’s view of such expressions. Contemplating a language is like gazing at stars. You view the past through the lens of the present, and what you see necessarily depends on where you stand.”
JOYCE CLEMENT was born in Upstate New York in 1961. In 1986, after a brief stint as a high school English teacher, she moved to central Connecticut where she still lives and works as a sales and marketing systems manager. Her book Beyond My View (Endionpress, 2011) received a Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. She was also a 2014 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award winner. Since 2011, she has served as a director of The Haiku Circle, an annual gathering of haiku poets held each June in Northfield, Massachusetts. From 2016 through 2018 she was coeditor of The Haiku Society of America’s Frogpond journal.
Clement writes: “The haiku sequence ‘Birds Punctuate the Days’ arose over the course of a year, primarily during writing sessions consisting largely of not-writing. Pen and keyboard were neglected as my thoughts drifted somewhere behind, ahead, and away from me. Then there would occur a sudden flutter of light or startle of sound—a bird moment—that instantly returned me to the present. In this way birds punctuated my days.
“In haiku, the writer is asked to avoid direct metaphor or personification. Instead two images, a fragment and a phrase, are typically placed next to one another, allowing the resulting associations to push, pull, or vibrate between them. Good haiku often offer levels of association, a touch point and then variants that ripple away from the central moment.
“My intent when writing ‘Birds’ was to present a visual or aural resemblance between bird moment and punctuation mark that would create an immediate and satisfying connection. Beyond that, I wanted to encapsulate the function of the mark through the moment. Beyond that, I wanted to consider the feeling of the mark, to think about how the marks absorb or enhance the essence of what proceeds and follows them. And then, how does the choice of bird species, their known habits and characteristics, shape the feeling and meaning of mark and poem? Then what other natural pauses, shifts in direction, stillnesses, patterns do we encounter in the flow of thought or day that serve as unwritten punctuation? And so on.
“The haiku are small. They leave plenty of white space for a reader to take a breath, contemplate, or let the mind drift . . . and then they punctuate the page again.”
BRENDAN CONSTANTINE was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1967. A poet and teacher, Constantine has published four books of poetry: Letters to Guns (Red Hen Press, 2009), Birthday Girl with Possum (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), Calamity Joe (Red Hen Press, 2012) and Dementia, My Darling (Red Hen Press, 2016). He has received grants and commissions from the Getty Museum, James Irvine Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches creative writing at the Windward School.
Of “The Opposites Game,” Constantine writes: “This poem brewed for quite a while. The scenes described actually occurred and were repeated in different classrooms over a few years. I knew I wanted to write about them, but I couldn’t make a start, or rather, I tried too hard. It’s an old problem: How does one overcome that first (and often shortsighted) understanding of where a poem ‘might’ end?
“It ultimately came together for a rally held in honor of Gun Violence Awareness Day in Tucson, Arizona. Activist Patricia Maisch, to whom the piece is dedicated, invited me to read at the event. Her name may be familiar in connection to the infamous attack in 2011 at which Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with nineteen others. Six people died, including nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green. As horrifying a tragedy as it remains, it could’ve been much worse, for it was Maisch who noticed the shooter trying to reload after he was subdued. She boldly pried bullets from his hand that day and has been protecting her community ever since.
“I knew I would never be able to compose a poem worthy of her spirit. But when a genuine hero asks you to deliver, you tend to focus. I just wanted to make something useful, if only for an afternoon in a public park. I’m very pleased the poem has continued to serve. Patricia seems to like it, too.”
MARYANN CORBETT was born in Washington, DC, in 1950, grew up in Northern Virginia, moved to Minnesota in 1972 for graduate school, and has lived in Saint Paul since 1986. She earned a doctorate in English in 1981, specializing in medieval literature and linguistics. For almost thirty-five years she worked as an in-house teacher, editor, and indexer for the Minnesota Legislature, retiring in 2016. She is the author of four books of poetry: Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter (Able Muse, 2013), Mid Evil, the winner of the 2014 Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2015), and Street View (Able Muse, 2017).
Of “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers,” Corbett writes: “When the Catholic Church in the United States adopted a new English translation of the Mass a few years ago—a translation that was touted as being more correct and closer to the Latin—many Catholics found the new wording stiff, stilted, and uncomfortable. Many were angry, and I was one of them. Most people gave up being angry, having little choice. But I stayed mad, and one day a couple of years back, this poem bubbled up out of my subconscious, very nearly writing itself.”
ROBERT CORDING was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1949. He has published eight collections of poems, including What Binds Us to This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991), Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1996), Against Consolation (CavanKerry Press, 2002), A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2013), and, most recently, Only So Far (CavanKerry, 2015). He taught for thirty-eight years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and two poetry grants from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts.
Of “Toast to My Dead Parents,” Cording writes: “This poem began where it ends up: with the idea of a toast. Because a toast is basically honorific and loving, it can also probe and caricature the fault lines of our humanness. A few years after both my parents had died, I was looking for a form that could capture my response to their devoted sixty-three-year marriage, a marriage that also consisted of, from the moment of their rising to the moment they fell asleep, a kind of constant bickering. Despite their basic contentment, something was always not quite right and whatever that something was, it was the other’s fault. In the end, the poem turned out to be my own search for whatever it was that lay at the center of their marriage, that made it work and not work, that made their connection both so deep and so unsettling.”
Born in Germany in 1968, CYNTHIA CRUZ grew up in Northern California. She is the author of How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, will appear from Four Way Books in 2018. She is editing an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics, which is forthcoming in 2019. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Notes Toward a New Language, a collection of essays on silence and marginalization, is forthcoming in 2018 from BookThug. A doctoral student in German at Rutgers University, she lives in Brooklyn and in Berlin and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Of “Artaud,” Cruz writes: “Artaud has been haunting me for most of my life. A ghostly apparition, but always only on the periphery.
“I could never, can never, begin to attempt to articulate how his presence is felt in my life. More importantly, I cannot, have never, been able to articulate Artaud’s life. His presence in the world, the many experiences he lived through, the myriad ways he changed the world—there is no way for me to reduce his life. ‘Words say little to the mind,’ he wrote. Words fail.
“Yet, I wanted to write a poem for Artaud. But how? I knew I could not ventriloquize—how could I ever begin to comprehend what it felt like to live inside his mind and his body? And, at the same time, there was no way I could reduce his life, his presence, to the compression of the form of a poem.
“When students ask me what the difference is between a poem and prose I always tell them the poem’s job is to carry that which cannot be said to the reader. If I have something to articulate, I’ll write an essay.
“And yet—I couldn’t write a poem for Artaud. It felt as if doing so would somehow inflict damage or violence upon him.
“I have been thinking about the archive for the past several years—the act of archiving—lifting memory or images or objects or ‘found’ text or facts from life and dropping them into the poem—and how by doing so, we might make something more whole. Rather than attempt to describe my life—actually paste real-life evidence into the work. This is how I made the Artaud poem.
“ ‘Artaud’ is a found poem. Its beginning is the list of illustrations included in the text Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud. In the same way gathering images from one’s life and then pasting them into a poem may relay more about one’s life than an attempt to describe one’s life through metaphor, the list of illustrations says more about Artaud’s life than any attempt at articulation might.
“I revised this original ‘found poem’ until it seemed finally able to carry the enigmatic and profound weight of the artist’s life—all of its beauty and terror, brilliance and sorrow—and that is what you have before you—a kind of archive of his life from childhood to death in which his creativity and passion, his suffering and sadness, remain complex and feral, uncombed, as it were, an X-ray or daguerreotype, of the artist’s life.”
DICK DAVIS is professor emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University, where he chaired the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures from 2002 to 2012. He has written scholarly works on both English and Persian literature, as well as eight volumes of his own poetry. His publications, including volumes of poetry and verse translation, have been chosen as books of the year by The Sunday Times (UK, 1989), The Daily Telegraph (UK, 1989), The Economist (UK, 2002), The Washington Post (2010), and The Times Literary Supplement (UK, 2013). He has published numerous book-length verse translations from medieval Persian, most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Penguin, 2012), and has been called by The Times Literary Supplement “our finest translator from Persian,” while The Washington Post has referred to him as “our pre-eminent translator from the Persian.” His Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations was published by Carcanet Press in 2017.
Davis writes: “I’m in my seventies now, and I think many people my age look back on their lives and feel, ‘However did all that happen?’ ‘A Personal Sonnet’ is about that feeling, and about what has persisted and stayed with me, often things I could never have imagined when I was young: a tragedy involving my younger brother, my marriage (our honeymoon was in Kerala, India, hence the reference; the sunset was over the bay in Cochin), my long involvement with both English and Persian poetry, my life as a scholar and translator of medieval Persian. One of the things that first attracted me to medieval Persian poetry is that it is highly, almost fetishistically, formal, and my own poems tend to be the same. This poem for me calls up regret, surprise, and great gratitude.”
WARREN DECKER was born in the United States in 1977. He has lived in Japan for the last seventeen years and is currently teaching at Momoyama Gakuin University in Osaka.
Decker writes: “Although it may seem paradoxical, my creative process is greatly enhanced by tight restrictions. For ‘Today’s Special,’ my commitment to the rhyme and repetition of the traditional triolet form allowed me to create something that could have never emerged in my prose. I am also convinced that there is a metaphysical power in rhymes. Certain words just long to be together.”
SUSAN DE SOLA was born in New York and lives near Amsterdam with her family. She is a past recipient of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of several books on architecture and design. As a photographer, she created the chapbook Little Blue Man (Seabiscuit Press, 2013). She is assistant poetry editor for the journal Able Muse.
Of “The Wives of the Poets,” de Sola writes: “The lines ‘All poets’ wives have rotten lives / Their husbands look at them like knives’ intrigued me, in part because they have led a popular afterlife as a quotation, detached from the fragmentary poem from which they were lifted. The loose ‘Doggerel Beneath the Skin’ appears in books about Delmore Schwartz in differing versions. I enjoy the idea of a poem in conversation with other poems, and it was intriguing to come across a twentieth-century poem that was both elusive as to its final form, and that gave rise to a quotation that became popular in other contexts, despite its gnomic quality. I suppose I had a desire to tease out its possible meanings, and to give a further perspective on the stock figures of the philandering male poet and his long-suffering wife.
“The poem nearly wrote itself, falling into an anapestic rhythm that seemed to fit with throwing knives, both figuratively ‘looking daggers,’ and the vaudeville or circuslike atmosphere suggested by the image. The rhythm evoked for me not just the sharp points of knives sailing through the air, but a high-wire trapeze act, a man and a woman swaying dangerously back and forth through the air, just catching or missing each other. Despite its rather neat and controlled form, there was a semi-deliberate decision to break the rhyme scheme in the last stanza. This variation was perhaps an act of closure and of judgment, a handful of daggers landing with finality around their target—but whether it is the male poet or the wife who is skewered in place remains uncertain. The poem’s title is right out of the epigraph, but is also a wink at that fount of poetic biography, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”
DANTE DI STEFANO was born in Binghamton, New York, in 1978. He is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2019). He is the poetry editor for DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he coedited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). He teaches high school English in Endicott, New York, and resides in Endwell, New York, with his wife, Christina.
Of “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen,” Di Stefano writes: “I’m not sure how I stumbled onto Dostoyevsky, but during my senior year in high school I read Crime and Punishment, Demons (in a version titled The Possessed), The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. I read them on the bus ride to school, I read them in homeroom, I read them in remedial math class and in AP English, I read them in the lunchroom, I read them at the food pantry where I volunteered every Friday after school, I read them on the bus rides home from soccer games and track meets, I read them at Mass on Sundays, and, every evening, I read them with a flashlight in bed the way seventeen-year-olds today binge-watch Netflix; if I close my eyes, even now, I can still feel the size and shape of the Signet Classic versions that I carried with me constantly like talismans in those days. Reading those novels was the most significant experience of my adolescence, and the defining moment in my education. Dostoyevsky satisfied a hunger for experiences that were unavailable to me in the ramshackle one-horse towns of Upstate New York. Although I didn’t write it in high school, my understanding of poetry owes everything to the complex psychological, spiritual, and philosophical architecture of Dostoyevsky’s (translated) prose.
“ ‘Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen’ is itself an exercise in translation. When I reread my poem, I see it as an attempt to convey the atmosphere of those novels and that particular time in my life: the strange bewildering amalgam of desire, wonder, isolation, foolishness, brilliance, holiness, impetuosity, and tempestuousness that one only truly apprehends either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of young adulthood. I’ve taught high school English for over a decade now, and I try to keep in mind that the loneliness and vulnerability I felt as a teenager are an almost universal condition of that stage in life. My students, most of whom are learning disabled, rarely read more than 140 characters for pleasure, but they are, in their own ways, as voracious for narrative and as fragile as I was at that age. At seventeen, I burned for the fate of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Myshkin, Alyosha, Ivan, and, of course, Dmitri. I burned for an impossible sanctified glistening St. Petersburg. As I write this, I am awaiting (any day now) the birth of my first child, a daughter. My wife and our dog are asleep on the couch. It’s snowing out. How grateful I am, for the drab suburban streets of Endwell, New York. How grateful I am to David Lehman and Dana Gioia for including my poem in this volume. How grateful I am that, at nearly forty, I burn less like I did at seventeen and more the way G. M. Hopkins’s ‘fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls.’ What I wanted then, but didn’t know it, is what I have now, and is also what lit Dostoyevsky’s pen: (simple, lambent, clarifying) love.”
NAUSHEEN EUSUF is a PhD candidate in English at Boston University, and a graduate of the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins. She is the author of What Remains (2011), a chapbook from Longleaf Press, and the full-length collection Not Elegy, But Eros (2017), published concurrently by NYQ Books in the United States and Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh. A native of Bangladesh, she was born in Dhaka, its capital, in 1980.
Of “Pied Beauty,” Eusuf writes: “Gerard Manley Hopkins has always been one of my touchstones, so my poem is both response and homage. A meditation on mutability, the poem is about the end of a friend’s fifteen-year marriage to a man who proved to be faithless. But in a world tainted by sin, perhaps we must seek aesthetic value in the maculate rather than the immaculate.”
JONATHAN GALASSI was born Seattle in 1949. He has published three books of poems, including Left-Handed (Knopf, 2012); translations of Italian poets Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi; and a novel about publishers and poets, Muse (Knopf, 2015). He lives in New York City, where he works as president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Galassi writes: “ ‘Orient Epithalamion’ is a poem infected with late-season melancholy—one of the most seductive themes there is. It is a love song to the small place where we spend the summer and a marriage song for friends: a wish for their life together, and for the survival of so much that seems in danger of slipping through our fingers as the sweet summer light lessens.
“The poem is a contraption of oppositions, starting from the opening line: ‘Fall will touch down in golden Orient.’ Autumn decay and disappearance (Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ is the hovering locus classicus for this trope) hits up immediately against the trope of recurrence that is contained in the place-name itself, for the sun rises daily, and decay and disappearance are just one act in the endlessly ‘re-rehearsed’ pageant of the seasons. The ‘real people’ who live here year-round know this, but Orient is also a place of escape, a rural ideal (exemplified in Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’) for the city folk—the agents, architects, and writers—who come here for refreshment in the green time and see it as one season only. Yet Orient is not a mere idyll; it is a modern place beset by traffic, the vagaries of climate change, and a troubled racial history. This seeming paradise is as potentially fragile as any marriage.
“It’s a satire in a Horatian vein, a balladlike still life of characters, flora, fauna, all poised with bated breath at a moment of calm, as the oppositions converge in the resolution of marriage—in this case a very up-to-date same-sex one. A charm against the future, a defiant assertion of what we hope against hope life will be—for Barry and Bill, and for all.”
JESSICA GOODFELLOW was born in Salt Lake City in 1965, and grew up outside of Philadelphia. She has graduate degrees from Caltech and the University of New England, in Australia. She currently teaches at a women’s college in Kobe, Japan, where she lives with her husband and sons. Her books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (Mayapple Press, 2015), and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (Isobar Press, 2014). Recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal and several awards from the Emrys Foundation, she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in the summer of 2016.
Of “Test,” Goodfellow writes: “This poem, and all the poems in Whiteout, are about my uncle Steve Taylor who, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox expedition to Denali, died in a terrible and historic ten-day storm having 300-mph winds. My uncle was twenty-two years old. He had lived with our family the previous summer, working and saving money for his senior year at university. I was too young to have any memories from that time. Afterward my grandparents and my mother were stunned into an almost complete silence concerning my uncle and his life. Still, he was a mythic figure in my childhood, perhaps all the more so because of my family’s silence. In this poem I wanted to show how grief undealt with is passed along intergenerationally; how profound and long-lasting this secondhand sorrow can be; how it can appear, unbidden, at random moments after many years. Because this poem is also about the SATs, I wanted to use the form of a multiple-choice test, but I found that having only intermittent lines be test questions allowed more narrative flow. I also used in the poem as many words as I could from an official SAT vocabulary list.”
SONIA GREENFIELD was born in Peekskill, New York, in 1970. Her book Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review Prize and was published in 2018. She lives with her husband and son in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and codirects the Southern California Poetry Festival.
Greenfield writes: “When I read of the ‘Ghost Ship’ fire in Oakland at the artists’ warehouse, and I read of the individuals who were lost in the fire, I realized how much those people were like me twenty years ago trying to make it in the Bay Area, trying to figure out my sexuality and in love with the creativity and drama of being young in the city. Besides the years between us—the then and now—the only thing that separates them from me is chance: my luck and their misfortune. My warehouse, their warehouse. It’s a terrible story and too true in terms of how fate works. We can let that freeze us or we can let that free us. In between those distinctions, we grieve.”
JOY HARJO was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015), her most recent book of poetry, was shortlisted for the international Griffin Prize. She was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is at work on a new poetry collection, a historical memoir, and a musical play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented (for which she is writing the book of the play and the music). She is the founder of For Girls Becoming, a mentorship program in the arts for Mvskoke tribal young women, and holds the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Of “An American Sunrise” Harjo writes: “The poem is a Golden Shovel, a form concocted by Terrance Hayes in which he borrowed a line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem and used each word as an end line. You can use this form with any poem. I went traditional and used a line from Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ to form the end words and went from there. The end words gave the poem a momentum. I could barely keep up. Brooks is still a teacher, always will be. And in pool halls and bars will always be found the dancers, dreamers, and visionaries. It’s a tough road here in this country of Natives, immigrants, and refugees, and many get lost. History is a layered dynamic force carried forth in our songs, poems, and stories. We are many voices and will never be captured in the voice of a single authoritarian speaker who hard lines the ideal.”
TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He is the author, most recently, of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018). His other books are How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He won the National Book Award in 2010 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014. He served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.
Of “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes writes: “Love poems, like love, can/should transmit a few mixed messages and unanswerable questions.”
ERNEST HILBERT was born in Philadelphia in 1970. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets (Red Hen Press, 2009), All of You on the Good Earth (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Caligulan (Measure Press, 2015), which was selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer, opera librettist, and literary journalist. He writes about books for The Washington Post.
Hilbert writes: “I encountered Mars Ultor on a visit to the palatial Getty Villa. There I stood, confronted by this robust, warlike figure, his muscles coiled, his powerful right arm held up in triumph—a provocative sight, yet only four inches tall: small enough to slip into my pocket, a lararium statuette, which is to say a household god. Here was the mighty and vengeful warrior god on the scale of a Hummel figurine, a portable deity, suitable for a shelf or for travel on campaign with a legionary; a symbol of confidence, conquest, success, domination; a charm for winners. Despite his daunting moniker, he is easy to miss amid the museum’s more than forty thousand ancient Mediterranean artifacts.
“I drew out my notebook. He had me thinking about power, how it underpins any republic or empire, ordered or chaotic, and is felt most acutely in times when power is transferred, a process that can be orderly but is more often than not tumultuous in some regard, even in democratic civilizations. It brought to mind unsettling notions I first encountered long ago when I read James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The aging king must be strangled upon his throne in order for a proper exchange of power to occur.
“The term virtù appears in the poem. Niccolò Machiavelli used it to describe the potency and force of a leader. The word summons qualities of civic pride but also some amount of ruthlessness. Is virtù virtue? We take solace in the rule of law, believing no one is above it, understanding that it is a transcendent organizing principle used to correct dangerous political aberrations. Yet history has shown that law without the final threat of force behind it can all too often prove toothless. The treaties I invoke are like those high-minded and cunning documents that bound the capitals of Europe (many of them secret) in the years of ‘The Great Game’ while hastening the suicidal Great War that enveloped the continent. The poem considers such devices used to constrain, redirect, or, at times, cloak pure power and allow societies to function.
“ ‘Mars Ultor’ first appeared in a sober, high-circulation journal called Academic Questions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars. Not long after, with the election of Donald Trump, the poem took on a second life. It was enlisted by publisher Henry Wessells for the pages of his protest magazine Donald Trump: The Magazine of Poetry, issued in the spirit of Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry. Following Trump’s inauguration, protesters at Trump Tower took to reading my poem aloud in the lobby. In the long view that informs ‘Mars Ultor,’ a blustering giant may one day be deemed harmless, another lararium statuette reduced in size from a colossal temple god.”
R. NEMO HILL was born on Long Island, New York, in 1955. He attended college for one semester, but quickly dropped out. After a brief stint as a baker, he plunged almost immediately into travel and various entrepreneurial endeavors—including a greeting card company, a Balinese import company, and (at present) an indigo dyeing operation. He has lived in New York City, San Francisco, and Portugal, and has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. All along the way he has been writing. He is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, organized around the processes of Medieval alchemy, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a narrative poem based upon a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook in heroic couplets, Prolegomena to an Essay on Satire (Modern Metrics/EXOT BOOKS, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016). Forthcoming is a book of ghazals, Magellan’s Reveries. He is also editor and publisher of EXOT BOOKS, www.exot.typepad.com/exotbooks.
Hill writes: “ ‘The View from The Bar’ is an elegy for a very real place in New York City, a gay dive bar known as The Bar, which was located on the corner of 4th Street and 2nd Avenue. True dive bars are, unfortunately, an endangered species in the newly sanitized New York, and though this one still exists, I wonder how much longer it can hold on. It was a seminal place for me for decades, and living in a tiny tenement apartment in the East Village for thirty-five years it became my home away from home. Many of my drinking companions from those days have died, and others have drifted away less dramatically. A fire devastated The Bar, and its name has changed twice since then, along with its clientele. I have fled the city myself now, alarmed by the arguably brutal changes in my old neighborhood. But I can no sooner forget those many intimate nights in The Bar than I can forget the murky, low-rent Camelot of my own youth.”
TONY HOAGLAND (b. 1953) teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere. He has published eight books, including most recently the poetry collections Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Books, 2018) and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (Graywolf Press, 2018).
Hoagland writes: “I wrote the best lines of ‘Into the Mystery’ as part of a birthday poem for a friend whose house we were going to for dinner one night. We ate at a picnic table in the backyard, with candles and Christmas lights on strings on a perfect summer night in New Mexico. It was a nice evening, and I read the poem out loud, but my friend didn’t seem especially impressed and so I put it away in a drawer, thinking it not very good. But the best lines seemed true to me and I pulled them out a year later in another place and transplanted them to a different, more enclosed backyard garden, in Houston, a place where I would often sit by myself in the dark and recover from city life. The poem became imaginatively reassigned to my friend Lillie Robertson, whom I imagined coming there to sit in her own solitary reverie. The second poem is much shorter, more lyrical, and its mostly endstopped couplets are meant to evoke the state of wonder, and arrival, suitable for a soul that has had the character to endure.”
ANNA MARIA HONG’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and was published in the spring of 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in early 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2019. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has joined the literature faculty at Bennington College.
Hong writes: “I drafted ‘Yonder, a Rental’ toward the end of my seven-year run of writing sonnets, a project that yielded more than three hundred poems, which I winnowed down to the sixty-four sonnets that constitute Age of Glass. In composing this poem, I eschewed the familiar English and Italian rhyme schemes that I’d inhabited in previous sonnets, working instead with pairs of rhymes that appear throughout the lines to create a kind of double helix of sound.
“The figure of the moon and the event of collapsed empire that animate this poem also recur throughout Age of Glass. I chose the antiquated word ‘Oriental’ to exploit its Eurocentric associations with otherness.”
PAUL HOOVER was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946, in the Shenandoah Valley, and raised in the rural Midwest. He is now professor and acting chair of the creative writing department of San Francisco State University. Following the departure of coeditor Maxine Chernoff, he serves as sole editor of the literary annual New American Writing. His fifteen books of poetry include The Book of Unnamed Things (Plume Editions/MadHat Press, 2018), Desolation: Souvenir (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012), and In Idiom and Earth/En el idioma y en la tierra, a selection of poems, 2002–2006, translated by María Baranda (Mexico City: Conaculta Práctica Mortal, 2012). His translation with Baranda of the complete Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz will be published in late 2018 by Milkweed Editions.
Hoover writes: “The phrase ‘I am the size of what I see’ appears in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith. I took the book with me on a trip to Barcelona, because I was traveling alone and knew that, for all its existential rawness, it would make good company. In my early seventies, I am now a man ‘of a certain age,’ as they say, and since I began writing poetry I’ve had the feeling of arriving late. I can speak as quietly as any leaf and expect to depart unnoticed, ‘not even a smudge on the glass.’ I didn’t plan to write on that theme. It seemed to arrive with the pronoun ‘I.’ I’m fascinated, too, by the relativity of youth and age. How much of the water we drink is new and how much is ancient? Both young and old eyes can see that the match flaming in one’s fingers is the size of a tree in the distance. It’s that kind of natural magic/metaphysics that interests me as a poet.”
MARIE HOWE is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017). She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Of “Walking Home,” Howe writes: “The last time I walked out of my mother’s home I took a piece of the jigsaw puzzle she’d been working with on the card table. I took some of the sky—my mother had just died—and later put it in a frame, and hung it on my studio wall.
“Life collects into such moments: walking with a daughter, the give and gab of it, the easy talk, walking the round of errands in New York City. The actual—when framed—assumes a completeness, although it is a piece of something so much larger.
“Is it the frame that makes it seem so?”
MANDY KAHN (b. 1978) is the author of two poetry collections, Glenn Gould’s Chair (2017) and Math, Heaven, Time (2014), both from London-based Eyewear Publishing. She frequently collaborates with composers to create works that combine poetry with classical music and was a librettist for MacArthur fellow Yuval Sharon’s mobile opera Hopscotch. She lives where she was born: in Los Angeles.
Of “Ives,” Kahn writes: “In the 1890s, when he was a college student, composer Charles Ives was writing music that was astoundingly complex for its time—music that was polytonal and polyrhythmic, that featured quarter tones and tone clusters—and he was disappointed that others considered it strange. Soon after graduating, Ives declared he did not intend to ‘starve on dissonances’ and took a job selling insurance. He continued to compose, privately and quietly, after-hours. Two decades passed this way. When a heart attack made Ives fear his life might be nearing its end, he self-published his music and sent it to a group of working conductors. Only then did his public career begin.
“The poem ‘Ives’ appears in my collection Glenn Gould’s Chair, a book that weaves snippets from the lives of composers into a larger consideration of the creative life. While researching the book, I began to think of the comfort or discomfort each composer experienced surrounding the great privilege, the great burden of bearing their gifts as forming a kind of spectrum, with Claude Debussy on the far left, the extreme of discomfort, and beside him, Mozart, whose life was also plagued by wild frustration—and with Philip Glass, whose peacefulness astounds me, sitting furthest to the right. I’d often think of Debussy’s and Mozart’s desperate letters to patrons or friends, begging for commissions or loans or understanding, and then I’d think of Glass’s daily routine—meditation, writing, food, meditation, all suffused by a gentle but powerful calm. And then there was Ives, seated nearest to Glass, with his life’s output squirreled away in drawers, ready to be shared or not shared, enriching him just by having stepped forth, just by being. And I’d wonder, Do we choose how comfortably we live as what we are, or do our propensities choose for us? Did Ives choose? Does Glass? Did Mozart? Do I? Or: How can I choose better? How can I more fully welcome peacefulness into the body—peacefulness through practice, peacefulness through allowing? And: To honor our gifts fully, must we share them? Or is it enough for them to enrich us, unshared? Can we ourselves, and privately, love the bird, the work—or is it only a bird when it has flown?”
ILYA KAMINSKY was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1977, and currently lives in San Diego. His books include Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and Deaf Republic (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019). He is the coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins, 2010) and other books.
Of “We Lived Happily During the War,” Kaminsky writes: “This poem is a response to George W. Bush’s wars. I was visiting the poet Eleanor Wilner at the time. The poem is dedicated to her. I tend to keep poems in a drawer for several years before they get published. Unfortunately, this piece seems just as timely now as when it was written; I wish it was otherwise.”
STEPHEN KAMPA was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1981 and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. Educated at Carleton College and Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of three collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser, 2014), and Articulate as Rain (Waywiser, 2018). He teaches at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, Florida, and from time to time works as a musician.
Of “The Quiet Boy,” Kampa writes: “Sometimes, to break the ice, I ask my students what superpower they would choose if they could choose any. This often ends up seeming like a one-question personality test. Lots of kids want to fly. Some want to be super-strong or -fast. I caution them about time travel: it just messes everything up, and besides—as Albert Goldbarth has reminded us in more than one poem—we are all already traveling through time anyway. At least one of them argued for immortality as a superpower, and who could fault him for that? But the students that break my heart are the ones who choose invisibility. Faced with a question about power, they pick the only option that is literally self-effacing.
“Surely it must seem that I wrote this poem in response to that response, but the truth of the matter is that the poem preceded the question: I only started asking my students what superpower they might want after I had finished the poem, which began in woolgathering during a cross-country drive. Although I wish I could say ‘The Quiet Boy’ arose out of compassion for my students’ unintentional vulnerability, it didn’t. Then again, poems aren’t always about responses. Sometimes they’re about what questions we should be asking.”
DONIKA KELLY was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1983. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (500 Places, 2017), and the full-length collection Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.
Of “Love Poem: Chimera,” Kelly writes: “The chimera I’m thinking of in the poem is the one with a lion’s body and a serpent for the tail. That part of the configuration makes sense to me in an associative way. But there’s also a goat’s head placed, inexplicably, in the middle of the lion’s back. Part of what sparked the poem was my confusion at that placement, and I wanted to think about its genesis and birth, and what it might mean to find a family within oneself.”
SUJI KWOCK KIM’s parents and grandparents were all born in what is now North Korea, where her grandfather, uncle, aunt, and cousins still live. She is the author of Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), which won the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (selected by Charles Simic), the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), and the Northern California Book Award/Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and Disorient, which is forthcoming. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio, and translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Bengali, and Arabic.
Kim writes: “ ‘Sono’ is dedicated to my son, when he was ‘not yet alive but not not,’ ‘scudding wave after wave of what-might-never-have-been.’ The poem’s working title, for several drafts, and several miscarriages, had been ‘Fugue,’ from the Latin, fuga, related to both fugare (‘to chase’) and fugere (‘to flee’). Thankfully, things changed.
“Special thanks to both editors: Dana Gioia, on the American side of the Atlantic, and Patrick Cotter, in Ireland, without whom this poem would not be in print here now.”
KARL KIRCHWEY was born in Boston in 1956 and has lived in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Italy. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including most recently Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems (TriQuarterly/Northwestern, 2017). He has translated Paul Verlaine’s first book as Poems Under Saturn (Princeton University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a first Selected Poems in English by Italian poet Giovanni Giudici (1924–2011). He also edited the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets volume Poems of Rome (Everyman’s Library, 2018). For many years director of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, Kirchwey has taught in the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College and served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. He is professor of English and creative writing at Boston University, where he is associate dean of faculty for the humanities.
Kirchwey writes: “ ‘Palazzo Maldura’ refers to the building housing the Department of Language Studies and Literature at the University of Padua (Italy), and is a meditation on my own relationship to books and to learning, as well as on the nonchalant grace with which ancient Italian buildings sometimes accommodate modern functions. The poem acknowledges several poetic predecessors: ‘book-worming’ is borrowed from Robert Lowell; the ‘nymphs and satyrs’ might also figure on Keats’s Grecian urn; and the ‘local habitation’ originates with Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (It was also part of the stated mission of Dr. William Kolodney, when he founded The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in 1939, to provide for poetry ‘a local habitation and a name.’) But the spirit of the poem is really that articulated by Chaucer when he wrote, ‘The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne’: there is an infinite amount for a poet to know. My own literary education encouraged a deep humility, when confronted with this infinity. And the only permanent thing, perhaps, is the curiosity that keeps someone tracking an idea from one book to another on the library shelves. This can be a solitary pastime, but it is also a deeply exciting one. The speaker of the poem turns the corner in the stacks, thinking he recognizes another seeker: but it is only his own reflection, since the risk of solipsism, for a writer, is always present. And the mirrored wall also suggests that the search cannot be an indefinite one, since it is limited by a human lifetime.”
NATE KLUG was born in Minneapolis in 1985. He is the author of Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil’s Eclogues (The Song Cave, 2013), and Anyone, a book of poems (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He works as a Protestant minister and lives in Albany, California.
Klug writes: “ ‘Aconite’ began in the experience of reading, as I discovered these amazing names (wolfsbane, monkshood, devil’s helmet) for a flower I thought I had seen recently on a walk. Once I found out that this plant (which looked to me like a buttercup) could poison human beings but nourish smaller creatures such as moths, I was hooked. The poem unspooled as I played with names and sounds.
“At some point, with the help of the internet, I stumbled upon Pliny’s and Ovid’s different discussions of the flower. They each speculate on aconite’s etymology and hardscrabble origins (a-conite, ‘without dust’). As one story goes, Cerebrus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades, was dragged from the Underworld by Hercules. While the dog struggled in the unfriendly daylight, he ‘spit his slavering froth / Upon the greenish grasse. This froth (as men suppose) took roote / And thriving in the battling soyle in burgeons forth did shoote, / To bane and mischief men withall’ (Ovid, tr. Arthur Golding).
“Spit and blossom, sustenance and toxin—commixed in the language itself. As I wrote, I remembered that the flower I’d seen on the trail was white, not the more common purple-blue of aconite (though aconite can also be white). So it may be that I misidentified the plant in the first place. Where do our stories come from? How much does it matter that they are true, and why does truth seem to waver in our telling?”
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is the poet laureate for the city of Los Angeles, a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Southern California, and an Art of Change fellow at the Ford Foundation. She was born in Compton, California, and her family is from New Orleans. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), winner of the National Book Award for poetry—and the first poetry debut to win the award in many years. With Kevin Young, she has written a series of commissioned poems that accompany Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings in Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (MoMA, 2017).
Of “Using Black to Paint Light,” Lewis writes: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition on Matisse’s creative process, for me, was an interrogation of the aesthetic uses of obsession. For me, the exhibition re-framed intense desire as a gift rather than a burden. Matisse would paint or sketch the same subject over and over and over again. It felt like the best kind of love to me. At the time that I wrote this poem, I was working on a large project regarding Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. I was obsessed with Henson’s biography and his location in history. Like Matisse, I was writing poems about Henson over and over and over again. I was particularly obsessed with Henson’s passion to reach the North Pole as a black man, to gain further honor for African Americans—an elegant black passion that remains on some historical academic shelf called institutional racism. So many under-investigated narratives still linger there, including the history of the Arctic. And so walking through this Matisse exhibit, I had Henson very much on my mind. But more than that, I had obsession on my mind. Matisse, Henson, and I formed a love triangle, and what we had/have in common, what their lives continue to teach me is that passion, as an aesthetic tool, is the liberator.”
DAVID MASON was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1954 and now teaches at Colorado College. He served as Colorado poet laureate from 2010 to 2014. Among his many books are The Country I Remember (Story Line Press, 1996), Ludlow: A Verse Novel (Red Hen Press, 2007; 2nd ed., 2010), The Sound: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018), and Voices, Places: Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2018). He wrote the libretti for Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter and Tom Cipullo’s After Life, both of which are available on CD from Naxos. Mason divides his time between the United States and Australia.
Of “First Christmas in the Village,” Mason writes: “Some of my favorite poems about religion—Cavafy’s ‘Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340’ and Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ spring to mind—see it from outside the circle of belief. In such poems, the mysteries of birth and death are both literal and figurative, like moments of changing consciousness. There is a true story behind this poem, set in Greece in 1980, in a village where superstition and custom still exerted atavistic power. Fire really was carried in a bucket from one hearth to another. Sleep really was like a grave with the covering stone rolled away.”
ROBERT MORGAN was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1944, and grew up on the nearby family farm. He has published fifteen volumes of poetry, most recently Terroir (Penguin, 2011), and Dark Energy (Penguin, 2015). He is the author of ten works of fiction including Chasing the North Star (Algonquin Books, 2016) and three books of nonfiction including Lions of the West (Algonquin Books, 2011). He has taught since 1971 at Cornell University, where he is Kappa Alpha Professor of English.
Morgan writes: “ ‘Window’ was inspired by a walk in the woods of Upstate New York in late fall when most of the trees were bare, except for one oak that still had leaves of orange, lavender, and silver. The colors were so striking I thought of a stained glass window over an altar, in the dark woods, with the scent of rotting leaves and mulch all around. We never know when and where we may encounter the sacramental.”
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1974. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018); Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal in poetry; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year, the last of which are from Tupelo Press. With Ross Gay, she is coauthor of the chapbook Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (Organic Weapon Arts Press, 2014). A collection of nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She is poetry editor of Orion magazine and has served as faculty for the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. She is professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
Of “Invitation,” Nezhukumatathil writes: “The poem started out as one of the only direct addresses to the reader in my most recent collection and it was the first time I had ever used the word ‘oceanic’ in a poem. In revision, I found myself imagining not only the reader, but my husband (before and after our marriage), our children, my students, beloved friends, and perhaps even that stranger who thinks she won’t like to read poems. I originally intended it as an ars poetica, a poem about the act of writing poetry, but now I also see it as a kind of manifesto—in fact, this poem might be a gentle dare for all of us to make joyful note of outdoor wonderments before they disappear entirely from this planet. I’m gratefully reminded of Toi Derricotte’s speech at the National Book Awards where she asserted, ‘Joy is an act of resistance.’ ”
HIEU MINH NGUYEN was born in 1991, the son of Vietnamese immigrants. His debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar, appeared from Write Bloody Publishing in 2014; Not Here was released by Coffee House Press in 2018. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Vermont Studio Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Literary Center. He attends the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Minneapolis.
Of “B.F.F.,” Nguyen writes: “I cannot talk about this poem without first talking about my favorite movies: Kirsten Dunst washes a car in San Diego, Molly Ringwald applies lipstick (no hands! no hands!), Kate Hudson on Quaaludes, Julia Stiles covered in paint, Rachael Leigh Cook covered in paint—am I making any sense? I really really hope so. For most of my life, it seemed impossible to want the things I wanted. I thought, if I couldn’t have it—the boy outside my window, the surprise serenade in the bleachers—I could, at least, be in proximity to it. If I couldn’t be deemed beautiful, I could stand next to beautiful things.”
ALFRED NICOL was born in 1956 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, where he attended the French-Canadian parochial school in which his parents both began and ended their education. He found a mentor in Sydney Lea at Dartmouth College, and another in Rhina Espaillat of the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife Gina DiGiovanni. Nicol is the author of three books of poetry: Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016), Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2009), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award.
Nicol writes: “My poem ‘Addendum’ riffs on a survival method that Jesus—among the greatest of didactic poets—recommended to his first-century friends: ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God.’ That would still seem the best way for a twenty-first-century poet to balance the demands of the world with the demands of his art, but there’s a lot of pressure from the Caesar side to increase its share. I’m old-fashioned enough to consider poetry—and any art that results from inspiration—as stuff to which Caesar should have no claim. But my poem takes the ironic position that, things being what they are, everything should go to Caesar.”
NKOSI NKULULEKO, a musician and writer, was born in Harlem, New York, in 1996. He has received fellowships from Poets House, the Watering Hole, and Callaloo. He is the author of the chapbooks American/Unknown (Penmanship Books, 2016) and Bone Discography (self-published, 2016). He has performed for TEDxNewYork and the Aspen Ideas Festival. He would like to give a shout out to Harlem.
Nkululeko writes: “ ‘Skin Deep’ attempts to bridge intimate duties with the consequences of the external world. At a young age, many are taught concepts of contribution in the home, the importance of sustaining the family’s society, but in the poem, I dive into questions of what it means for the society of a country to betray you and the vision of blackness. To clean and be cleaned, these are the physical actions I wished to show in order to highlight the horrors; how one sees the self, how the world (or more specifically, those who seek to control and torment it) distorts identity. The line in which ‘the / spoon bends’ refers to a scene in The Matrix. How much has our reality been stained? What other simple duties do we adhere to that are, in fact, in the service of blurring truths?”
SHEANA OCHOA is a second-generation Mexican American born in Pomona, California, in 1971. Her book, Stella! Mother of Modern Acting (Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2014) is the first biography of acting legend Stella Adler. Ochoa, who works as a cultural critic, is writing a historical novel set against the backdrop of the Ludlow Massacre. You can find her most days on Twitter @SheanaOchoa.
Of “Hands,” Ochoa writes: “A poem’s ability to reflect the temporal, ever-changing mind-set of the reader is miraculous. Stop and think about how many times you’ve returned to a favorite poem and how each time it revealed something new to you according to your state of mind. As I reread my own poem, it has little resemblance in meaning to the poem I first put down on paper. Today, it is less homage to my lineage than wonder at the elusive nature of identity. Today, I find myself reinventing who I am, conscious that whatever I come up with will simply be another story I am telling myself, another narrative that can at any time be altered, lost, denied, or affirmed. Even the mole on my hand, which is real, has changed. It is no longer flat and brown, but raised and white like a wart. What does this say about the mysteries hidden there? And how my body, which I merely thought of as a machine if I thought of it at all when I originally wrote ‘Hands,’ has become the gateway to a deeper, more fulfilling understanding of who I am? It becomes palpable how, like human beings, poetry is alive, just waiting for you to come and look into its shifting mirror again.”
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco, California, in 1942. Her most recent collection of poems, Odes, was published by Knopf in 2016; her other books include The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University, and was a founder, in 1986, of the Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshops. She was New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000.
Olds writes: “ ‘Silver Spoon Ode’ was one of the odes that came along during the year or two after my book Odes was published. It was written, I think, in June 2016, in the Sierra Nevada, at the writing conference I’ve been going to for something like thirty years. Each morning, each poet there, including the staff poets, brings a new first draft, or fragment, or something new, to one of the five tables with one of the five staff poets as part of the circle. We don’t suggest revisions, but try to describe what we see as the strengths of the piece.
“The first line, I remember, first occurred halfway through another poem—then I had the idea (the idea had me) that it might have a poem of its own. And this was a gathering of writers wanting to push ourselves beyond our usual limits—which helped me notice my complaining and bragging. And that noticing called up Lucille—wise woman, wild woman—and the poem was handed to her, and she finished it for me.”
JACQUELINE OSHEROW was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1956. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Looking for Angels in New York (University of Georgia Press, 1988), Conversations with Survivors (Georgia, 1994), With a Moon in Transit (Grove Press, 1996), Dead Men’s Praise (Grove, 1999), The Hoopoe’s Crown (BOA Editions, 2005), Whitethorn (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) and Ultimatum from Paradise (LSU, 2014). She has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the creative writing program. “Tilia cordata” will appear in My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2019.
Of “Tilia cordata,” Osherow writes: “This poem—generated by the strange conjunction of a tremendous sense of disorientation and unease on my first visit to Germany and the jarring familiarity of Germany’s iconic, ubiquitous tree—seems to me now to function as a sort of off-balance thumbnail autobiography. My parents each make an appearance, my daughters, my ex-husband, as well as the teacher who opened my nine-year-old eyes—in Hebrew—to the limitless possibilities of language. The poem tracks my lifelong habit of alternating between obsessive wandering and stationary dreaming as well as my exchange of a city full of green, green parks—where, from spring through summer, some floral scent (lilac, honeysuckle, rose) was always hanging on the humid air—for a parched, usually tawny, semidesert city in which one has to make a great effort to smell a flower. And casting its immeasurable pall over everything: the enduring ethnic shell shock into which I was born. I speak, of course, of the unassimilable horror of mid-twentieth-century Jewish history and the sense that I—undeservedly, through sheer luck and eleven years—had escaped, by the skin of my teeth, mass murder.
“I chose rhyming couplets—in which I’d written only one previous, much shorter poem—because I hoped they’d lend all this intensity a bit of restraint. I’m accustomed to writing long poems in terza rima and, to some degree, I see these rhyming couplets as a sort of austere, disciplined, perhaps foreshortened terza rima, replacing the forward-reaching intervening rhyme with silence.
“The personal inadequacies described in this poem—my complete inability to deal with Germany, German, or German people, my sense that I simply couldn’t get out of Germany fast enough—ultimately didn’t sit well with me. This poem became the genesis of the poems I’ve been writing for the past year. With the help of the University of Utah’s Research Committee, the same committee that sent me to Darmstadt, I spent three months in Berlin in the hope of ‘producing a series of poems in which I come to terms with and perhaps even modify and improve my tortured relationship with Germany.’ What can I say? I’m working on it.”
MIKE OWENS has been in prison for more than twenty years. A survivor of childhood abuse, he is serving a life-without-parole sentence in the maximum security prison in California, where he first read and wrote poetry. His journey of introspection and growth began there. He holds a certification for group counseling and is pursuing a degree in social and behavioral science. In 2010 he won the Pen American Dawson Prize for his poem “Black Settlement Photo: Circa 1867.” He self-published his first book of poetry and essays, Foreign Currency (lulu.com, 2012). His latest book, The Way Back (2017), includes the poem “Sad Math” and is available from Random Lane Press (Sacramento, California; Randomlanepress@gmail.com).
Of “Sad Math,” Owens writes: “This piece came from a very dense writing period. I was serving time at High Desert State Prison, which was, in the early 2000s, California’s most violent maximum-security prison. Twenty-four hour confinement in a two-man cell regularly lasted months, and sometimes years on end. Acts of aggression and inhumanity were the norm, between staff and inmates alike. Poetry was for me a place where I could safeguard my humanity. I learned to look for, and capture, opportunities to reinforce my decision to not surrender to the cold. I may have been powerless to change the culture of violence around me, but by collecting moments of innocence and vulnerability, I was able to keep the best of me alive.
“Contrary to what people may take from the poem, Larry wasn’t a naturally sympathetic figure. He was a fiftysomething, low-level member of a Los Angeles street gang. He was prone to fantastical lies for no apparent reason. He was perpetually in trouble with guards, or in debt to some other prisoner, and seemed uninterested in anything that wasn’t instantly gratifying. Despite all of that, I could see the child in him that desperately wanted to be loved and valued. That is the part of him I held space for in the poem.”
ELISE PASCHEN, who was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard University and received her MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University. She is the author of The Nightlife (Red Hen Press, 2017), Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009), Infidelities (Story Line Press, 1996), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1985). Paschen is coeditor of Poetry in Motion (W. W. Norton, 1996) and Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks, 2001), and editor of Poetry Speaks to Children (Sourcebooks, 2005) and Poetry Speaks Who I Am (Sourcebooks, 2010). She is a former executive director of the Poetry Society of America and a cofounder of Poetry in Motion, a nation-wide program that places poetry posters in subways and buses. She teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Of “The Week Before She Died,” Paschen writes: “This poem was drawn from a dream I had a week before my mother died, so I suppose it could be called a dream elegy, an occasion that allowed me to experience my mother young again. My mother was eighty-eight years old when she passed away and had been suffering from dementia for many years. During those months before her death I had been contemplating writing a prose piece about the summer when she and my father were separated—a period when my mother, the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, met and became romantically involved with the dancer Rudolph Nureyev and then introduced Nureyev to the dancer Erik Bruhn, with whom he fell in love. The dream, which served as a springboard for the poem, distilled the drama of these relationships into one scene. I have struggled to recall the elegance and brilliance of my mother before the onset of her dementia and writing this poem offered me a glimpse of her infatuation and of her resilience. ‘The Week Before She Died’ is included in my most recent book, The Nightlife, which is comprised of many dream narratives.”
JESSICA PIAZZA teaches at the University of Southern California, where she received a PhD in English literature and creative writing. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections from Red Hen Press (Interrobang in 2013 and—with coauthor Heather Aimee O’Neill—Obliterations in 2016), as well as the 2014 chapbook This is not a sky from Black Lawrence Press. A cofounder of Bat City Review and Gold Line Press, she curates the website Poetry Has Value, which explores the intersections of poetry, money, and worth. She was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency, which will begin in 2019. She is from Brooklyn, New York.
Piazza writes: “While ‘Bells’ Knells’ generally fits my usual poetic style in terms of wordplay, rhythm, and rhyme, the subject matter is different from the majority of my work. I’m not a religious person . . . though the iconography, imagery, philosophy, and cultural impact of religion do show up in my work once in a while. However, I am attracted to people’s obsession with and attachment to religion, and the ways religion can be used to justify behavior, both helpful and harmful. There’s such darkness surrounding cultural notions of the Catholic Church right now, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the evil hidden within this ostensibly loving institution isn’t so different from the darkness hidden in individuals, especially regarding personal relationships. Just as religions promise salvation, marriage (and other lifelong romantic commitments) have been offered up as another kind of saving; a way to escape our fears, our loneliness, the world’s ridicule, and more. Marriage and religion both offer a sort of community, and in ‘Bells’ Knells,’ the speaker realizes that her community is false at best and monstrous at worst. She must now ask herself what complicity she had in the darkness, and what signs she missed or pretended to miss. Whether the community in question is a personal one or a spiritual one is up to the reader. Thus, it’s a strange little piece; both literal and metaphorical at once, a mingling of the theological and the personal. On one hand, I’m writing about a speaker considering her religion and its crimes. But I’m also writing about another speaker entirely; one considering her disastrous and broken marriage. For me, they have equal weight in the poem, but are not fully thematically integrated. This double vision pleased me a lot, as do my continued attempts to juxtapose the two themes to figure out how they illuminate each other. I don’t have concrete answers, unfortunately. But, hey, do any of us?”
Born in 1973 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, AARON POOCHIGIAN earned a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. His first book of poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), was published in 2012. Winner of the 2016 Able Muse Poetry Prize, Manhattanite, his second book, came out in 2017 as did his thriller in verse, Mr. Either/Or (Etruscan Press). Stung with Love, his book of translations from Sappho, was published in 2009, and his translation of Apollonius’s Jason and the Argonauts in 2014, both from Penguin Classics. For his work in translation he was awarded a 2010–2011 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Poochigian writes: “One of the original femmes fatales, Salome danced for her father, King Herod II, on his birthday. Herod was so ‘pleased’ that he ‘promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask of him (Gospel of Matthew 14:6–11). At her mother Herodias’s urging, Salome asked that he give her the head of John the Baptist on a dish. True to his word, Herod had John executed and his head brought on to Salome. In a form intended to be as sinuous as Salome’s dance, my poem ‘Happy Birthday, Herod’ expresses, in the eternal present, well, quite a bit, I hope—the allure of living flesh, revulsion at dead flesh, the temptation to choose immediate titillation over morality, and the ease with which one can remain a mere bystander in the face of an atrocity.
“I am far from the first poet to write on this theme. There is, of course, Mr. Prufrock’s vision of his ‘head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter.’ In one of the most gorgeously devastating poems ever written, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ Yeats multiplies Salome into the mysterious ‘daughters of Herodias’:
Herodias’ daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind.”
RUBEN QUESADA was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1976. Dr. Quesada has taught writing, literature, and literary translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts and at Columbia College in Chicago. He is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011) and Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda (Aureole Press, 2008).
Quesada writes: “The year I wrote ‘Angels in the Sun’ I was traveling to art museums. I had received a grant to write a book-length collection of ekphrastic poems. I visited museums from New York to San Francisco, Los Angeles to DC, Miami to Indianapolis, and so many more. I was drawn to naturalistic landscape paintings of the Romantic period and to American paintings of the late nineteenth century whose focus was urban landscapes.
“In early 2015, I visited the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles where I found an atmospheric scene painted by Joseph Mallord William Turner. The painting was The Angel Standing in the Sun. The tragic scene depicts Archangel Michael on Judgment Day foregrounded by other biblical figures. The canvas is covered in bright orange and yellow color—a fiery scene. Here in Turner’s painting is a confluence of heaven and hell—the Apocalypse. My poem is an attempt to reinterpret that moment from a singular perspective located somewhere in the background.
“Turner’s painting The Angel Standing in the Sun is part of the permanent exhibit at the Tate Britain in London but that spring it made its West Coast debut. The artwork was originally exhibited in London in 1846.”
ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO was born in El Salvador in 1972. Matria, her book of poems, was the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Cofounder of Kalina publishing, she has written, edited, or translated more than ten Central American–themed books including Vanishing Points: Contemporary Salvadoran Prose (2017). She received the 2015 Coniston Poetry Prize. Her photo-essay project about El Salvador, through_the_bulletproof_glass, is on Instagram. For more info visit: www.alexandralyttonregalado.com.
Of “La Mano,” Regalado writes: “The poem takes place in El Salvador when I was in the beast mode of the new mom: breastfeeding round the clock, rawboned tired, overprotective and overwhelmed. Sure, caring for my son included moments that kicked the door open to wonder, spikes of joy, and at times an awe that felt like terror. But there was a sad undertone that I couldn’t quite pin down until I put my firstborn’s life in context with the exodus of more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors. In El Salvador parakeets were once very common; you’d see the green smear flash across the sky twice a day—as they left and returned to their roosts in the early mornings and at dusk. Nowadays those sightings are less constant as more trees are cut down to make room for the growing city. At the same time, more children are leaving their homeland—their parents hopeful, desperate for them to find someplace better, fully cognizant of the terrifying risk of that trip across the border. Richard Wilbur and Maya Angelou’s words are flags of other exoduses, of other populations. For my son, it was the birds’ flight that intrigued and fascinated him—not their staying there on the sill. He knew their beauty was in their ability to fly. I’m left watching the birds’ departure with my child in my arms, thinking of those fleeing children, in wonder and terror, of how they will get there, if they get there, and how they will be received once they arrive.”
Born in Seattle in 1970, PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon Books, 2000, and Vintage Books, 2002); a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Books, 2012); and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), and Animal Eye (Pittsburgh, 2012), which won the UNT Rilke Prize. Her newest poetry collection is Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and her latest nonfiction work is The Broken Country (Georgia, 2017), which won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s poet laureate.
Rekdal writes: “I’m just finishing a book of poems, Nightingale, that rewrites several of the myths that appear in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. ‘Philomela’ is one of the first I wrote, and is also—for the reader of Ovid—a fairly big departure. In Ovid’s version, Philomela is not only raped but dismembered, as Tereus (Philomela’s rapist and brother-in-law) cuts out her tongue. Philomela is able to tell her sister about her violation because she weaves a tapestry that depicts the crime; later, this tapestry sets in motion another series of horrific events that culminates in the transformation of Philomela into a nightingale: Western symbol for lyric poetry. For me, the myth is about art, violence, and voicelessness, in particular the conflicted roles that art—and particularly poetry—play in the communication of trauma.
“ ‘Philomela’ also has a companion piece I wrote, entitled ‘Nightingale: A Gloss.’ My gloss deconstructs Ovid’s myth, my own retelling of it, and traces the literary evolution of the nightingale symbol. It’s a very personal essay, too, since it addresses a violent assault I experienced years ago. For me, ‘Philomela’ is part of a long conversation I’ve been having—with literature, and with myself—about violence. It’s a myth that’s meant a lot to me over the years, one I’ve argued with, and feared, and rejected, and admired. I think I will struggle with it for the rest of my life.”
MICHAEL ROBBINS was born in Topeka, Kansas, during the Vietnam War. Raised in Kansas and Colorado, he holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Montclair State University. His poetry books are Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012) and The Second Sex (Penguin, 2014). A book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2017.
Robbins writes: “ ‘Walkman’ came about because I was bored with the sort of poem I’d been writing. I resolved to do everything differently, formally and thematically—to mostly eschew rhyme, for instance, and to risk vulnerability. This entailed some flailing about for a few months, until I hit on the idea of immersing myself in the work of a poet as different from me as I could imagine. I ended up reading James Schuyler’s Selected Poems front to back. I’d always preferred Ashbery and O’Hara, but this time Schuyler broke something open in me. ‘Walkman’ doesn’t sound much like Schuyler—his confident medley of digression and surprise is inimitable—but he was its impetus. Along with the desire not to stay in one place. I wrote it in one long burst over about nine hours, which never happened before and hasn’t happened since.”
J. ALLYN ROSSER was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1957. She has published four collections of poems, most recently Mimi’s Trapeze (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches at Ohio University, where for eight years she served as editor of the New Ohio Review.
Of “Personae Who Got Loose,” Rosser writes: “Henry James often drew on bits of gossip heard at dinner parties to generate his characters and launch his plots. But he complained that all too often he was not able to stop the teller in time—too many facts were offered, which ruined the ‘virus of suggestion,’ ‘the wandering word, the vague echo,’ and spoiled the artistic process. ‘One’s subject,’ he said, ‘is the merest grain, the speck of truth, of beauty, of reality, scarce visible to the common eye.’ You can readily see James’s desire to preserve mystery reflected in the character of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors; Strether spends much of the novel trying not to learn too much about the very thing he has been sent abroad to investigate. ‘Personae Who Got Loose’ provides only the stray suggestive grains of its personae, in an effort to prevent the essentially reductive effect of fleshing out—to save them even from their own desire to be narrated to death.”
MARY RUEFLE was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016). Vermont has been her home since 1971.
Of “Genesis,” Ruefle writes: “When I look at this poem now, I think I may have been reading the Bible (I like very much reading the Bible but seldom ‘have the time’), because the words ‘and’ and ‘then’ appear most frequently in that book; I don’t rightly remember, but the title, surely, is another clue. It is only now that I see the poem may be read in a political context, as if its subtext were our great environmental crisis. Another take on it could be that the poem alludes to the election of our own President Trump, but neither of these things were on my mind when I wrote the poem. That often happens, you know—one looks back and sees multiple readings of a poem they thought was ‘about’ something else; in any case, events unfold in the poem, some very big things happen, and presumably some things are going to happen in the future when the girl children and boy children come together and make more children.”
KAY RYAN was born in California in 1945. She has published nine books of poetry, including Elephant Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005), The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010), and Erratic Facts (2015) all from Grove Press. The Best of It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010.
Of “Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless,” Ryan writes: “I cannot hope to attain the transcendent uselessness George Steiner attributes only to ‘a handful of human beings’ (Mozart for one), but perhaps I will have occasionally managed the undoing of a few things that needed it. This poem hopes that.”
MARY JO SALTER was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. She is the author of eight books of poems published by Knopf, most recently Nothing by Design (2013) and The Surveyors (2017). She is the editor of The Selected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2010) and has been coeditor for three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, including the sixth edition, published by W. W. Norton in 2018. Her poems have been set to music by Caroline Shaw (in a world premiere sung by Renee Fleming) and by Fred Hersch (in the song cycle Rooms of Light: The Life of Photographs). Salter is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.
Salter writes: “I can’t count how often a spoonerism, a malapropism, or a misheard expression has jump-started a line of poetry for me—or even a whole poem. This was the case for ‘We’ll Always Have Parents.’ I must have thought of Humphrey Bogart’s reassurance to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (‘We’ll always have Paris’) a thousand times before I heard that last word as ‘parents,’ and laughed out loud. Did the phrase suddenly twist because, in the past few years, I’ve had the unfunny experience of watching a nonagenarian father decline into dementia? Was the poem a gesture toward accepting that I would not always have a father? In any case, the poem (which came in a rush) is also a celebration of the great Hollywood melodramas—a source of ever-fresh entertainment for both my father and me.”
JASON SCHNEIDERMAN was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1976, and is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016), Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004), as well as the editor of Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is an associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. His husband, Michael Broder, is the publisher of Indolent Books.
Schneiderman writes: “I had known that 3-D printing was based on some kind of tiny blocklike unit, but when I first saw the word ‘voxel’ (a portmanteau of ‘volume’ and ‘pixel’), the connection between 2-D screens and these newly printable objects sort of blew my mind.
“Over the course of my life, I’ve watched pixels get smaller and smaller. My first pixels were on the video game Centipede at a laundromat in England on a console designed for two players sitting opposite each other, with a screen facing up through a glass tabletop. The images of the quick moving arachnids, insects, and lasers were composed of giant moving dots. To be honest, video games held very little fascination for me. I only truly began to pay attention when we had a home computer, and the pixels had shrunk enough to form glowing green letters against a black screen, composing texts that could be printed up on a dot matrix printer. From there, it was a steady progression to ink jet and laser jet printers, to WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) word processing programs, to laptop computers, to notebook computers, to smartphones, to tablets. It would seem that the pixel reached its final size in Apple’s 2012 Retina Display, which promised a pixel so small as to be indistinguishable to the human eye. The word ‘voxel’ put me at the start of a vertiginous new evolution, though one that felt predictable. I’d seen this movie before: as the unit gets smaller and more accessible, it becomes increasingly integrated into the fabric of your life.
“The day I learned that this poem would find new life in The Best American Poetry, I happened to walk past a store offering 3-D printed figurines of yourself and your loved ones. You stand in a cross between an airport scanner and an elephant cage to be scanned from all sides, and you get a slightly fuzzy, delicately colored version of yourself. So that part of the poem is already coming true. Still, as of this writing, ‘voxel’ is not in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
Born in St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, NICOLE SEALEY is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has also won an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. She holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at the Cave Canem Foundation.
MICHAEL SHEWMAKER was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1979. His first collection of poems, Penumbra, won the 2016 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2017. He is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.
Shewmaker writes: “ ‘Advent’ started with a scene I witnessed at an advent service at Stanford Memorial Church. The balconies were opened because of the crowd and during one of the hymns a boy tried to pull himself onto the railing. His mother was attentive, though, and caught him before any harm was done. That moment stayed with me and I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if she had looked away, if only for a moment. At that point, the metaphor—between the boy and Christ—was unavoidable and the poem largely unfolded on its own.”
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press, 2013). Her most recent poetry collection is Cruel Futures (City Lights Publishers, 2018) and Be Recorder is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019. She is coeditor of Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014). She is chair of the planning committee for CantoMundo and is the publisher of Noemi Press. She is professor of English at Virginia Tech and, with Stephanie Burt, poetry editor of The Nation.
Of “Dispatch from Midlife,” Smith writes: “I wrote this poem to describe what being ‘midlife’ actually means to me, a quick take, but also a message to a younger me. When I was a teen in California and went dancing at One Step Beyond (RIP), I’d always see a guy who looked like a forty-year-old Klaus Kinski in MC Hammer pants dancing like his life depended on it. I watched him with wonder and disbelief from a very selective puritanical stance about what spaces were appropriate for young people versus older people. I saw midlife as a boring space of work, family, and waiting for death. Now, when I see a face of someone my age (forty-seven) or even older, I see the younger face in that face—like I have a new superpower. I can see all the people they’ve been, and I see it with love and loyalty having also grown and changed and widened. I also see the younger person in my current face, and only occasionally feel the self-loathing women my age are conditioned to feel, but, most importantly, I feel like I am still myself at twenty, at thirty, at forty. She is still in me and has mostly not changed despite what my body looks like after giving birth, feeding my children with my body, illness, and aging. I know more about the world, and I know that if I wanted to go to dance like no one was looking, someone might be looking, but IDGAF. I’m this thing that I made with time and work and error and triumph. I’m also relieved by the freedom of being able to wear a caftan or long flowy scarves, and that’s where the wanton indifference comes in. I would add, however, that for a minute the last line read ‘sexual indifference,’ but that’s not exactly true. I’m still pretty sexy and sexual predation is about power, not beauty or age.”
TRACY K. SMITH is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015) and four books of poetry, including Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018). She is the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States, and a professor at Princeton University.
Of “An Old Story,” Smith writes: “I wrote this poem thinking it might be nice to take a stab at creating a new myth. Instead of brushing aside my own sometimes-bleak feelings about the failings of the twenty-first century, I tried to embrace them, and fashion them into a story that culminates in humankind finding its way to a compassionate existence.”
GARY SNYDER was born in San Francisco in 1930 and attended elementary schools in Seattle and Portland. He received his BA from Reed College in 1951 and studied East Asian languages at UC Berkeley between 1953 and 1956; during this period he also worked in the logging industry, and for the US Forest Service as a fire lookout. For many years he studied Buddhism in Japan. From 1986 to 2002 he taught at UC Davis, where he is now professor emeritus of English. He has received the Bollingen Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974). His most recent collection of poems is This Present Moment (Counterpoint, 2015).
Of “Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany,” Snyder writes: “One early autumn in 2011 or so, I was visiting with Giuseppe Moretti, who’s active with the Italian Bioregional Movement and who lives and works a historic farm quite near the Po River. I also spent some days at Etain Addey’s sprawling farm project nearby. I couldn’t help but see the parallels between this part of Italy (which surely had been a mixed forest of drought-adapted bushes and trees in preagricultural times) and earlier California. The numerous large fireproof stone and plaster farmhouses—many vacant—are instructive. And I thought about how the American West Coast over the next millennium will probably go through a similar process, but the houses won’t last that long. I’m not sure which I’d favor.”
A. E. STALLINGS, born in 1968, studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and has lived in Athens, Greece, since 1999. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, she has recently published a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days with Penguin Classics. Like, a new volume of poems, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Of “Pencil,” Stallings writes: “Writing about this poem on a computer (not with a pencil, although the poem was drafted in pencil), I’m given to wonder whether the central metaphor will be easily understood in a decade or so. I have poems about landline telephones that perhaps now need explanations to be grasped by the very young! But I think the pencil, like print itself, is here to stay, it is so simple and elegant a technology. I am somewhat haunted by school and office supplies, perhaps because these are deep, powerful memories, stirred up by a stint of school teaching and then again by my own children’s school-going. Getting out of one’s seat to sharpen a pencil was sometimes the only moment of pure escape into daydreaming in those faraway classrooms, and maybe the nursery-rhyme ballad swing to this (as well as that it is almost a riddle with the answer in the title) comes from childhood.
“Among other office/school supply poems that come to mind are Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘12 O’clock News’ and Cavafy’s early poem on an inkwell. But probably back, back in my mind the poem that makes this one possible is one by Roethke. I worked briefly in London in 1990 as a ‘tea girl’ at the Institute of Classical Studies, then in Gordon Square, and when I didn’t walk, took the Tube from Warren Street Station. My roommate and I lived around the corner from Fitzroy Square, once home to Virginia Woolf. I dreamed of being a writer. Among the advertisements on the Tube was the series of Poems on the Underground. At least two of those poems ended up laying down formative strata in my young poet brain: Robert Graves’s ‘Love without Hope’ and Theodore Roethke’s ‘Dolor,’ which begins ‘I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.’ I have often regretted that I didn’t just up and steal one of those posters. Maybe I am still trying.”
Born in Cambridge, England, of American parents in 1933, ANNE STEVENSON was brought up and educated in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Graduating from the University of Michigan in 1954 with a major Hopwood Award, she later published two collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, including an epistolary novel in verse called Correspondences (1974)—the first of ten collections to appear from Oxford University Press between 1974 and 1996. In 1998, after OUP stopped publishing new poetry, she moved with her family to Durham in the northeast of England and brought out two more collections with Bloodaxe Books in Newcastle before publishing in 2006 a more or less up-to-date Poems 1955–2005. She observes: “It was probably this hefty volume and its reviews that prompted the Poetry Foundation of America to remember that I was still an American and to present me with the Neglected Masters Award in 2007.” This honor was confirmed in 2008 by a Selected Poems in the American Poets Project series, sponsored by the Library of America, and a Life Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation. Since then, Bloodaxe Books has published two more collections, Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012).
Of “How Poems Arrive,” Stevenson writes: “At eighty-five, I am still writing poems, but fewer as I become older, slower, crazier, and more fastidious. My latest Bloodaxe publication is a book of lectures delivered in the past five or six years called About Poems: and how poems are not about. The title and to some extent all the lectures in this book dwell on and demonstrate how word-sounds and bodily rhythms (heartbeat and breathing) recorded in the accents of a language are essential to poetry. Although I didn’t write ‘How Poems Arrive’ with the purpose of using it as a preface to my arguments, when it was written I realized that my conscious and unconscious mind had been working in tandem to find a resonant form of words that would explain something of the mystery of how poems (real poems, gut poems) force themselves into being. Of course, poems are written for many reasons and for a variety of purposes. But if you are really and helplessly a poet, I’m sure lines often arrive, as it were, readymade, without your knowing why or how. It is incumbent on you to take them on, write them down, and then worry yourself, maybe half consciously or half asleep, until you find a form that will help you bring them to the surface. In the case of ‘How Poems Arrive’ it was deciding to write the poem in terza rima that helped my conscious brain to listen to what the poem was saying.”
ADRIENNE SU is the author of four books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), Having None of It (Manic D, 2009), and Living Quarters (Manic D, 2015). Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967, she studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Virginia and has held fellowships from The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Links to poems and prose are available at adriennesu.ink.
Of “Substitutions,” Su writes: “I have long surrounded myself with two genres of books, poetry, and cookbooks, interests I usually consider separate and at odds. Over time, however, the language of cooking instruction has expanded my approach to poetry. The imperative voice evokes intimacy, a guiding hand, and possibly the voice of a late grandmother, while legitimizing second-person narration. That the shorthand of recipe writing—‘soft peaks,’ ‘a lively simmer,’ ‘pliable dough’—parallels the pointers writers give each other in revision—‘trust the reader,’ ‘starts in the middle,’ ‘ending too pat’—helps validate home cooking as an art form and makes it, in some small way, less of a violation of writing time. Meanwhile, I read cookbooks in part for pleasure, but also to inhabit the matrilineal history that otherwise seems to be missing. Unlike canonized literature, cookbooks are a genre in which the reader can go back in time and not find that the default pronoun has become an unquestioned ‘he.’ Although the cook in ‘Substitutions’ is male, he shares with most female cooks of the past the anonymity of the local or domestic artist.
“The description of the Sichuan noodle dish dan dan mian in Fuchsia Dunlop’s meticulously researched Land of Plenty brought about this poem by making me hungry, less for noodles than for the adventure of imagining noodles. Trying to give coherent shape to what I pictured became a chance to link rhymed couplets to a form that might otherwise be seen as purely functional, the ingredient-substitution list. The process also revealed a need to explore one of the ghost dishes that seemed to dwell in and around my childhood, both of my parents having immigrated, long before I was born, from China to the American South, where Asian Americans were so few that the term ‘Asian American’ had not reached us. Most days, my family’s kitchen table appeared quite assimilated. Yet behind our deviled eggs hovered the specter of tea eggs; behind our morning oatmeal lay the comfort of congee; behind our weeknight spaghetti and meat sauce lurked a street vendor’s noodles, cooked to order just about anywhere, day or night, in a place that lived mostly in memory.”
NATASHA TRETHEWEY was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014) and is the author of four collections of poetry: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). In 2010 she published a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press). Monument, a volume of new and selected poems, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. She has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English.
Of “Shooting Wild,” Trethewey writes: “I have been working on this poem for twenty years. I began writing it in 1997, twelve years after my mother’s death, in an attempt to explore why the sound of her voice was the part of my memory of her that I began to lose first. Once, a few years after she was gone, I found an old cassette recording of her speaking. I put the tape in the cassette player and she came back to me, vividly, for a few moments. Then the tape snagged and no matter how many times I took it out, unraveled and rewound it, it would no longer play. It caught again and again on the reels until it snapped.”
AGNIESZKA TWOREK was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1975. She came to the United States with her family when she was eighteen. She received a BA in romance languages and literature from the University of Chicago and a PhD in French from Yale. She lives in Vermont.
Of “Grief Runs Untamed,” Tworek writes: “I witnessed tanks and military trucks driving down the street behind my apartment building after martial law was declared in Poland when I was a child. This image has haunted me for years, reminding me that freedom and peace are fragile, and that war may be lurking around every corner. I have realized that it is important to look out the window of one’s own life, to see what is beyond it, to observe what is happening in the larger world, to be a witness. I was fortunate to be accepted as an immigrant in the United States in 1993, yet I am aware that many displaced people around the world today are not welcome anywhere. My poem ‘Grief Runs Untamed’ attempts to chronicle the plight of such people, who have been brutally uprooted from their lives in so many places because of wars, drought, tyranny, gang violence, and religious and ethnic persecution. I wrote it as an elegy for the countless lives lost, for people who may never reach safety, and for those forced into exile and makeshift existences, who may never feel at home anywhere.
“Initially, I included the phrase ‘grief runs untamed’ in one of the lines of the poem; grief in that earlier version was confined to the abandoned houses. However, in the present version, the grief is much larger: the refugees and the world are its captives. It is boundless, and so it became the title of my poem.”
G. C. WALDREP (b. 1968 in South Boston, Virginia) is the author most recently of a lyric collection, feast gently (Tupelo, 2018); a long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015); and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). With Ilya Kaminsky, he is coeditor of Homage to Paul Celan (Marick Press, 2011); he and Joshua Corey are editors of The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as editor at large for The Kenyon Review.
Of “Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,” Waldrep writes: “I drafted this poem on 22 November 2013 in Marfa, Texas—I owe a great debt to the Lannan Foundation, which enabled me to live and write there for six taut weeks. At the time, I was battling neurological issues that were perhaps Parkinsonian, perhaps not—not, in the end, though I would not know that with any certainty until mid-2015. (Keith Waldrop: ‘I had not realized how dark it is, inside the body.’) I was also rereading Darwish and Reverdy, in translation, while struggling with the emotional and spiritual fallout of a failed courtship. All or none of these conditions may be relevant to the poem, which surprised me, as the gift-poems always do. It arrived verbatim in the form in which it was later published, less two excised stanzas. It was the first of seven poems that day—a red-letter day, a very good day, we all hope for such days.”
WANG PING was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa (Coffee House Press, 2008), Foreign Devil (Coffee House, 1996), Of Flesh & Spirit (Coffee House, 1998), Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (Anchor, 2002), The Last Communist Virgin (Coffee House, 2007), and Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (2017 AWP Nonfiction Award, University of Georgia Press, 2018). She has received the Eugene Kayden Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, and the McKnight Fellowship for nonfiction. She was awarded the Distinct Immigrant Award in 2014 and was named Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015. A photographer and installation artist, she has had multimedia installations (Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges and We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers at Macalester College, Soap Factory Gallery, All My Relatives Gallery, Great River Museums, Bologna Art Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Arts, and festivals in China, India, Peru, Venezuela, Nepal, and Canada). She is a professor of English at Macalester College and is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project.
Of “Lao Jia,” Wang Ping writes: “I was born and grew up in Shanghai, and have been living in USA since 1986. My official Chinese residence is still registered as Shandong, Weihai, my lao jia, my old home, my identity.
“Every Chinese belongs to lao jia, the land of our ancestors, our name, spirit, roots, no matter where we go, how far we wander.
“I left home at fourteen, to work as a farmer in a fishing village on the island of East China Sea, in pursuit of my college dream. I never went back home.
“Three years later, I left the village to study English at Hangzhou Language School. I never went back to the island.
“I left Hangzhou for Beijing University. My college dream came true at twenty-two.
“I left China in 1986, and never went back.
“My ex-boyfriend screamed repeatedly: ‘Go back where you came from!!!’ Still, I never went back.
“I got farther and farther away, carrying Weihai, my lao jia, my old home, in my dreams and thoughts.
“When I was fifty, I took my sons to visit my old home on the shore of the Yellow Sea, for the first time.
“Factories and luxury buildings take over the place my father talked about every day. The wheat fields are gone. The village is gone. The sand beach is gone. My grandma’s grave, somehow, remains in the yam fields. I sit down in front of her stone, and everything floods back and up: memories, sorrow, joy, her voice and stories, my father’s longing. . . .
“I look at my sons. They are eating steamed bread, for the first time in their life, but they devour it as if it were their daily meal since birth, as if they were slurping Cheerios and milk. This is the bread my father craved all his life while living on the island of the East China Sea as a navy officer.
“My sons are tied to the ancestral land, even though they were born in NYC and Midwest prairie, even though they love pizza, play hockey and baseball, and speak little Chinese.
“We all belong to lao jia, old home, old land, that is part of us.
“We carry home 家 in our chests, as we wander, from continent to continent, from sea to sea.”
JAMES MATTHEW WILSON was born in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1975, and now lives in Pennsylvania, where he is associate professor of religion and literature in the department of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (Catholic University of America Press, 2017), and a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things (Wiseblood Books, 2014). A two-time winner of the Lionel Basney Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, he was awarded the 2017 Hiett Prize by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, which recognizes younger scholars who are making significant contributions to the shaping of contemporary culture.
Of “On a Palm,” Wilson writes: “Years ago, I used to walk my oldest daughter to school every morning, and we would pass by the local psychic and palm reader’s shop. With its shabby exterior and big black sign out front, it seemed such an entrancing symbol of an age that has lost the bearings of genuine religious belief and has fallen, in consequence, into the decay of hokey superstitions. It is of course consoling to know that human nature does not change and that the mind cannot help but seek out a knowledge that transcends our everyday uses, even if it must do so in embarrassing ways. But there is also something a bit contemptible in the frequent settling for claptrap—claptrap pressed, moreover, into doing poor service for our psychological needs, when we should rather be offering ourselves in service to the truth itself. One day, not so long ago, I was driving past that shop and saw it had gone out of business. I set out to write a poem that portrayed just such a snarl of contempt, and I was delighted to see that it could find expression alongside candid acknowledgment of and sympathy for how badly our souls want to be known, cherished, taken into hand and held.”
RYAN WILSON was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1982, and raised in nearby Macon. He holds degrees from the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University, and Boston University. The Stranger World, his first book (Measure Press, 2017), won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He is the editor of Literary Matters (www.literarymatters.org) and the office manager of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW). He teaches at the Catholic University of America, where he is completing his doctorate. He and his wife, Kelly, live in Parkville, Maryland.
Wilson writes: “ ‘Face It’ was written in West Virginia at a mountaintop cabin belonging to my great friend, Ernest Suarez. During a break near dusk, I stepped out onto the porch, from which one can see more than fifty miles on a clear day. I was tantalized by a hawk hovering in a western gap, how it seemed to approach and to recede at once on the wind, never near enough for me to identify its species, or even its genus.
“The season, the bird, and perhaps my own uncertainties about the future recalled to mind Robert Penn Warren’s poem, ‘Heart of Autumn,’ a meditation on transformation that brilliantly transforms Horace’s Ode ii.20, itself a poem of transformation.
“The form of ‘Face It’ is the bref double, a French predecessor of the sonnet that has rarely been brought into English. Writing ‘Face It,’ I knew of no English-language examples. I chose the form because it seems to be both a sonnet and not a sonnet, inhabiting a kind of formal liminal state that I hoped would parallel my poem’s concerns with identity and transformation, being and becoming, selfhood and otherness.
“The choice of form derived from my study of Horace. In Ode ii.20, Horace refers to himself as a biformis vates, a ‘two-form poet,’ and he does so in part because he is bringing the Alcaic meter, a Greek form, into Latin-language poetry, and in part because the poem recounts the poet’s own transformation into a swan. The transformation in content matches the transformation of the form. While lacking Horace’s self-assurance, I hoped to create an analogous ‘two-form’ effect with my bref double, which, like the other poems in The Stranger World, seeks to promote what the ancient Greeks called ξενία (xenia), ‘hospitality to the stranger,’ whether that stranger be another individual or one’s self.”
CHRISTIAN WIMAN was born in West Texas in 1966. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and Joy: 100 Poems (Yale University Press, 2017). He teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
Of “Assembly,” Wiman writes: “What is the point of poetry when the world is going to hell? I asked that question in an essay several years ago, but it has become even more urgent to me recently, now that the demons have taken off their masks and every day’s news is a storm of slime and vileness. It surprises me, then, to find that my hope for poetry has actually increased—or perhaps simply hardened—right along with my rage. This is a poem of despair, but I hope its despair is prophetic rather than futile, furious and galvanizing rather than recessive and resigned. Faith in language is faith enough in times like these.”