DAN ALBERGOTTI was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1964. He is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). He holds an MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro and is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.
Albergotti writes: “The Police Policy Studies Council’s form ‘Weapons Discharge Report’ can be found online. When I began to read it, I imagined the killers of Michael Brown, of Tamir Rice, of Walter Scott (and of many others) sitting at precinct desks, checking boxes. I felt ill. Most of my poem of the same title is made up of language adopted, or adapted, from the PPSC form.
“I am writing this comment on the day of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States: January 20, 2017. Within hours of his swearing in, the WhiteHouse.gov page on civil rights has been removed, and one titled ‘Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community’ has been added.”
JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His most recent collection of poems is Commotion of the Birds (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016). A two-volume set of his collected translations from the French (prose and poetry) was published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek; he exhibits his collages at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He has received a Pulitzer Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, and recently the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2011) and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House (2012). He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1988, the first volume in this series.
MARY JO BANG was born in 1946 in Waynesville, Missouri, and grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She is the author of seven books of poems: Apology for Want (UPNE, 1997), winner of the Bakeless Prize; Louise in Love (Grove Press Poetry, 2001); The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (University of Georgia Press, 2001); The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Grove, 2004); Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Bride of E (Graywolf, 2009), and The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf, 2015). Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf in 2012. She teaches English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
Of “Admission,” Bang writes: “The title of the poem gestures to Walter Gropius’s ‘Bauhaus Manifesto and Program’ (1919), which states, under the section ‘Admission,’ that: ‘Any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted [to the program], as far as space permits.’ It equally gestures to the fact that because Gropius believed women could think only in two dimensions, unlike men, whom he believed could think in three, women were initially admitted only to the weaving workshop. The poem also has in mind a 1926 black-and-white photograph, Walter and Ilse Gropius’s Dressing Room, taken by Lucia Moholy. Moholy took most of the iconic photographs of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and of the products produced in the workshops. The story of Gropius’s later use of her images in books without attributing them to her, and her legal efforts to have the negatives returned to her, is the subject of an article she published in 1983 in The British Journal of Photography, 130 (7.1), pp. 6–8, 18. For three months in the spring of 2015, during a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, I spent many hours at the Bauhaus-Archiv, reading Moholy’s letters and journals and looking at her photographs.
“The poem contains an echo of two Botticelli paintings: Birth of Venus (where a nude Venus stands on a half shell) and Primavera (also known as Allegory of Spring). In Primavera, a fully dressed Madonna-like Venus stands slightly off center, framed by an arch, beneath a blindfolded cupid; stage right, Mars pokes at a raincloud with a staff and the Three Graces, each wrapped in diaphanous fabric, meet in the middle of a shared dance step and interlace fingers; stage left, Chloris matures before our eyes into a full-grown Flora, despite a blue-green Zephyrus’s best efforts to hold her back.”
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 Prez Prize from TriQuarterly Books. “On a Shaker Admonition” is included in his recently completed collection, Secret History. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena, he was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Stanford University before putting down roots in the environs of Boston. He is the poetry editor of The Atlantic and currently teaches in the Harvard Writing Program.
Of “On a Shaker Admonition,” Barber writes: “I’ve long had a penchant for winkling poems out of all manner of marginalia and ephemera, oftentimes in an effort to breathe a flicker of new life into long-gone or far-flung lexicons and vernaculars. I’ve been known to say, only half in jest at best, that this one or that one was ‘ripped from the footnotes.’ This is certainly the way ‘On a Shaker Admonition’ came about. In the Dover revised edition of Edward Deming Andrews’s landmark 1953 book, The People Called Shakers, the main appendix contains the complete text of Millennial Laws of 1821 drawn up by the Shaker settlement in New Lebanon, New York. As Andrews explains, ‘The socalled Millennial Laws of the Shakers, never printed nor even widely circulated in written form, implemented the doctrines of the order, and thus, in effect, greatly illuminate not only its government but the intimate habits and customs of the people.’ To which I might add, they make for yeasty reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in erstwhile utopias and other lost worlds. The ‘admonition’ that gave rise to the poem is found in Part III: Concerning Temporal Economy, Section V: Orders concerning Locks & Keys (Andrews, p. 283, Dover ed. 1963).”
DAN BEACHY-QUICK was born in Chicago in 1973, and currently directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He is a poet and essayist, whose most recent books include gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015), a chapbook of poetry, Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs (Omnidawn, 2015), and a study of John Keats, A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work (Iowa University Press, Muse Series, 2013). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, the Monfort Professorship at CSU, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Beachy-Quick writes: “For the past few years, I’ve been writing poems that take their initial impulse to fill a page by thinking toward a poet whose work has been important to me—a set of dedications that are also expressions of gratitude. ‘Apophatic’ hopes to think of and feel toward Peter Gizzi, whose selected poems, In Defense of Nothing, opens up that strange ground (in its title alone, and then poem by poem) in which what exists must recognize itself first by positing what doesn’t—something depends so much on nothing. This sense of knowledge obtained through negation, or realization gained only through absence, feels to me one of the cruxes of poetic experience. In the poem, the hidden figure of that work is Oedipus, foot made lame as a baby by the ankle being pierced with a tether, who, before the horror of his deeds was revealed to him, was renowned for that abundant intelligence that answered the Sphinx’s riddle with the answer he himself embodied: ‘a man.’ But Oedipus is also that figure who comes to see that knowing the answer answers very little. And when he sees that awful fact fully, he blinds himself. I’ve come to think of his blindness as the manifestation of the nothingness that weaves and wends its way through the world entire, some fundamental requirement stitched through existence that keeps life uncertain, unstable, troubled by source, doubtful of its own nature. Dreary things to say, I know. But the apophatic also points always toward its opposite, and so that nothing also whispers to us of realization, illumination, understanding, and love, and maybe even points us the way there.”
BRUCE BOND was born in 1954 in Pasadena, California. He is the author of sixteen books, including Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press, 2015), The Other Sky (Etruscan Press, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press, 2016), and Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016). Three of his books are forthcoming: Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press). He is regents professor at University of North Texas.
Bond writes: “ ‘Homage to a Painter of Small Things’ explores the work of the painter Matthew Cornell, how, beyond the virtuosity, he brings to his precision a sense of yearning and warmth, of worlds in transition, on the verge of a connection to something we do not understand. Sure, there is the solitude of a Hopper there, but with greater sublimity, as reflected in the quality of emerging light, the tender proximity of private spaces, and the ache of small things seen precisely, made transcendent less by romantic distortion than by an honoring of the given mystery of things. Matthew once said that he, in his painting, is ever looking for the home he never had. He the kid who lived in a different town each year or two. And yes, there is something so singular about being that boy, and something broadly human in Matthew’s search for him in the child he never was. Long ago, the future was enormous. Still is.”
JOHN BREHM was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1955 and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of two books of poems from University of Wisconsin Press, Sea of Faith (2004) and Help Is on the Way (2012); the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy; and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Brehm lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches for the Literary Arts and Mountain Writers Series. He also teaches for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.
Brehm writes: “I began ‘Intrigue in the Trees’ not long after the Four-Mile Canyon fire just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Severe drought conditions coupled with high winds, high heat, and low humidity whipped the fire right to the edge of the neighborhood where I was living at the time. The fire was my second experience of an extreme weather event—I’d been caught in a flash flood in Guadalajara several years before—and it occurred to me that perhaps we had worn out our welcome on the planet, that the earth, in increasingly violent acts of self-protection, was trying to get rid of us. I’d also been reading about animal intelligence, particularly in crows, and thinking about the arrogance of assuming that only we possess consciousness—an instance of just the sort of human exceptionalism that has helped create our current crisis. (Even trees, we now know, are capable of communicating with each other—to warn of insect attacks, for instance.) And I was feeling our indebtedness to animals for all the ways they help us understand ourselves—the many creaturely metaphors that serve as mirrors for our behavior and inner states. Such were my preoccupations at the time. Seeing crows gathering ominously in a tree while walking to the Laughing Goat Coffee House catalyzed these concerns into a poem.”
JERICHO BROWN has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Of “Bullet Points,” Brown writes: “Fear of unwarranted and unexplainable murder by police is as individual and personal as it is political. Please Google: Sandra Bland of Texas, Jesus Huerta of North Carolina, and Victor White III of Louisiana.”
As a poet with an MFA in fiction, NICKOLE BROWN has a strong leaning toward hybrid work, an interest reflected in her two books. Fanny Says, published by BOA Editions in 2015, is a biography-in-poems about her bawdy, tough-as-new-rope grandmother, and Sister, her debut collection published by Red Hen Press in 2007, is a novel-in-poems. Though much of her childhood was spent in Deerfield Beach, Florida, Nickole was born in Louisville and considers herself a Kentucky native. She studied at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, was an editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson, and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. For ten years, Nickole worked at the independent literary press Sarabande Books, and she was a publicity consultant for Arktoi Books and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, and for four years was an assistant professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has also been on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State, the Sewanee Young Writers Conference, the Writing Workshops in Greece, and the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press and lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina.
Of “The Dead,” Brown writes: “As early as second grade, I wanted to know my family’s ancestry. I came home with the word ‘ancestor’ rolling around in my mouth after hearing friends bragging about all the green and exotic lands from which their families came. I was excited, I had to know, so I came home to my grandmother and begged, Fanny, please, can’t you tell me where we’re from? Right quick, she squinted her right eye like she was sighting a rifle and said, Child, don’t you worry your pretty little head ’bout that. We weren’t nothing but a bunch of chicken thieves. What I thought she meant by this was trash, as in white. Because always, she’d joke: Girl, you was born trash, and you’ll die trash. We’d laugh, and so she’d say it again: Yep, you trash alright. That’s how you were born, that’s how you’ll die. But now that I’m grown and have heard the old stories, I realize behind her jokes was a long line of people she’d just as soon we forget altogether, and along with them, their deep history of poverty, ignorance, and ache. No one ever spoke of the dead in her house, and she certainly didn’t keep old photos. We dealt with tragedy in my family by putting it behind us—Blow up, blow out, blow over, Fanny would say, by which she meant, Get over it, forget the past. So when my beloved cousin died tragically and too young, I saw the depths of her willed amnesia—as always, she was fussing at me for wearing black clothing, and when I told her why I was dressed the way I was—that I was on my way to his funeral—she genuinely seemed to have forgotten. This perhaps is why I have the opposite problem—like a lot of writers, I don’t want to forget one single scrap. My wife calls me ‘a real nostalgia machine’ . . . ridiculously, I try to keep time still by stitching even small moments to the page, and more than once, I dare the dead to come, to sit up beside me and speak again, whispering their names.”
CYRUS CASSELLS was born in 1957 in Delaware. He is a professor of English at Texas State University; this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of his teaching career, which began in Boston. He has published four books with Copper Canyon Press: Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), Beautiful Signor (1997), More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004), and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). His first book, The Mud Actor, was a 1982 National Poetry Series winner, published by Henry Holt and then reprinted in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporary Series. His sixth volume, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, is forthcoming in the spring of 2018 from Southern Illinois University Press. Cassells has won a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants.
Of “Elegy with a Gold Cradle,” Cassells writes: “For my part, crafting an elegy often entails a delayed revelation, an attempt to convey what was unexpressed or even unsayable while the lost one was alive. It took nearly a decade for me to write this poem describing what it felt like to scatter my mother’s ashes on Maui, a place she’d never been but dreamt of going all of her life: One phenomenon I recall, in the days following my mother’s death from leukemia, was the powerful sense of our earliest bond: finding the antique cradle seemed a profound emblem of a sudden, inspiriting return to my origins as her son.”
ISAAC CATES was born to Texan parents in Würzburg, Germany, in 1971. He teaches in the English department at the University of Vermont. Some of his comics appeared online last year in Okey-Panky. He writes scholarly criticism about both comics and poetry. He also edits and publishes an all-ages comics anthology called Cartozia Tales.
Of “Fidelity and the Dead Singer,” Cates writes: “I was never very close friends with the poet Michael Donaghy—we were friendly acquaintances—but I heard him read his amazing poems enough times that when I reopen his books now, if I strain, I can almost hear some of them in his voice. He died unexpectedly of a sudden brain hemorrhage, aged only fifty, leaving a silent void where a poet should still have been. It hit me surprisingly hard, as have the losses of other poets I was closer to, like Rachel Wetzsteon, Craig Arnold, and Brett Foster. I wish I could hear them, like ghostly voices, instead of only reading their words. But the words are something.
“And about that catalog of records: they’re a little bit of fiction. My mother’s collection of 45s didn’t actually include any Roy Head and the Traits, though it could have. And I never owned any Howlin’ Wolf on vinyl. I did have a copy of the Beatles’ compilation LP Hey Jude (which has now vanished into Past Masters), though in my callow vinyl youth I overplayed Reel Music even more. It’s funny to think what a narrow demographic played their parents’ Beatles LPs and heard that needle hiss. Now the silence around the songs doesn’t have that personal quality.”
ALLISON COBB is the author of Born Two (Chax Press, 2004), Green-Wood (Factory School, 2010), Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series, 2015), and After We All Died (Ahsahta Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was born in 1971 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were made. She performs her poems as part of a collaboration called Suspended Moment with visual artist Yukiyo Kawano, a third-generation atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series.
Cobb writes: “ ‘I Forgive You’ is the opening poem of my book After We All Died. I wrote the book because I kept hearing friends and colleagues talk about the Anthropocene—how the current extinction and climate crises foreshadow coming catastrophes, and the potential end of the human species. I thought, what if the end has already happened, as many climate scientists suggest? What would it be like to write from the point of view of living after the end? The book, and this poem, were the result.”
LEONARD COHEN, the Jewish-Canadian singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, and painter, died in 2016. Born in the Westmount area of Montreal in 1934, brought up as an orthodox Jew, Cohen was educated at McGill University, where he studied with Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. A member of the “Montreal School of Poets,” he published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, at the age of twenty-two. In the mid-1960s, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a recording career and was discovered by renowned producer and scout John Hammond. Over a nearly fifty-year solo career, Cohen recorded fourteen albums, writing some of the most revered songs in popular music, including “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Bird on the Wire,” and “I’m Your Man.” Judy Collins’s cover of “Suzanne” was a huge hit. Cohen continued to observe the Sabbath even when on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War.
Cohen’s music was marked by his distinctive baritone voice and a melancholy tempered by wit, candor, and invention. In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Bob Dylan said that Cohen’s “gift of genius is his connection to the music of the spheres,” while Australian songwriter Nick Cave wrote that Cohen was “the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate.” Cohen’s thirteen books of poems include Flowers for Hitler, Book of Mercy, and Book of Longing. He wrote two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and was inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With humor and lyricism, his work explored the uncertainties of faith, religion, sexuality, and politics, and has had a profound influence on generations of musicians and writers. “People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant,” he observed. “But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.”
David Remnick concludes his 2016 profile of Cohen by quoting the writer. “I know there’s a spiritual aspect to everybody’s life, whether they want to cop to it or not,” Cohen said. “It’s there, you can feel it in people—there’s some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot penetrate but which influences their mood and activity. So that’s operating. That activity at certain points of your day or night insists on a certain kind of response. Sometimes it’s just like: ‘You are losing too much weight, Leonard. You’re dying, but you don’t have to coöperate enthusiastically with the process.’ Force yourself to have a sandwich.
“What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice. “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’ That’s a tremendous blessing, really.”
MICHAEL COLLIER was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953. His two most recent collections of poetry are An Individual History (W. W. Norton, 2012) and My Bishop and Other Poems. He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Of “A Wild Tom Turkey,” Collier writes: “Part of the year I live in the country on a three-mile-long paved town road that connects two much longer state roads. Other than the manure spreaders, silage and hay trucks, livestock trailers, tractors, harvesters, pickups of all sizes and makes, a neighbor loading his flatbed with his backhoe and Bobcat, and the back-and-forth traffic of what passes for morning and evening rush hour, it’s a mostly quiet place, agriculturally bucolic. When it’s quiet, and sometimes when it’s not, I can hear creatures that live in the woods and fields around me. Most of the time when I hear them they seem to be in distress of one kind or another. Mating is a very common distress, so is being hunted and killed or trapped. A hummingbird once got caught behind plastic sheeting I had stapled over a partially broken garage window. The high pitch of its panicking voice, combined with an even more rapid than usual oscillation of its wings as well as the creepy distortion of its form behind the plastic, frightened me into an initial paralysis, until I freed the bird by ripping away the sheeting. A fox one evening last summer after the sun had gone down stood in the grass between our vegetable garden and the house and at consistent intervals cried and screamed with the heat of a wheel bearing burning up. I saw it from an upstairs window and wondered not only why it was making that sound but also what it was watching because its head was turned in a backward-looking, fixed glance. There are, of course, coyotes, near and far, that sound like cowards trying to scare each other. In an example of interspecies cooperation, an opossum sleeps on a crate in the garage next to where our adopted cat sleeps on a padded box. The sound the opossum makes is the drag of its hairless tail, like a heavy cable, over the floor as it slinks away when I appear. What else? On one occasion a cow, escaped from a neighbor’s dairy farm, stood in the driveway, swinging its head back and forth in acknowledgment of its predicament, or maybe like the swishing of its tail, just trying to swoosh away the flies on its ears. Now and then, it lifted its head and let out a mournful bellow that echoed across the valley. Birds, lots of birds screeching, singing, hammering, but not so many in distress, except when a robin chick fell out of its nest, tucked in a house eave, and was immediately surrounded by a mob of squawking adults. I had no idea there were so many robins living so close that would respond to such an emergency. And then there are the wild turkeys but that’s what ‘A Wild Tom Turkey’ is about, so I’ll leave it there.”
BILLY COLLINS was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016), Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011), Ballistics (Random House, 2008), The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006), Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001), Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Questions About Angels (William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003) and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House, 2005). He is a former distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York) and a distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College. A frequent contributor and former guest editor of The Best American Poetry series (2006), he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He also edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds illustrated by David Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Of “The Present,” Collins writes: “As is the case with time itself, we choose to picture the present in many ways. How do you pin down something that is both apparent (we are always in it) and elusive (where did it go?). We may think of it as a relentless series of nanoseconds, which are zipping by far too rapidly to be grasped. But that’s not the way we actually experience the existence of the present. Experiments in human attention show that we feel the present as a moment lasting about 2.5 seconds, which is—come to think of it—about as long as it takes to read a line in a poem. And that’s not a bad way to think of a poem: as a series of ‘presents,’ one after another tumbling down the page. My poem, which is simply a meditation on its title, pokes a little fun at the common advice to ‘live in the present’ as if it were a room where you could pull up a chair and have a look around. What the poem suggests is that there’s no here here.”
CARL DENNIS was born in St. Louis in 1939. He lives in Buffalo, where for many years he taught in the English department of the State University of New York. Among his most recent books, all published by Penguin, are New and Selected Poems 1974–2004 (2004), Callings (2010), and Another Reason (2014). “Two Lives” is scheduled to appear in a new book, Night School, that Penguin will be publishing in spring 2018.
Dennis writes: “In ‘Two Lives’ I wanted to give flesh to the notion that the life we live is only one of many we might have lived had any single fact of our history been altered. It seemed to me that the best way to make this notion worth considering seriously was to imagine the ghostly alternative abutting on the actual, so that the two seem like part of a single story, one in which the unlived life has a chance to enlarge the lived one. The poem is based on the faith that the more fully we can imagine other lives for ourselves the more fully we can inhabit the life we have.”
CLAUDIA EMERSON (1957–2014) was born and raised in Chatham, Virginia. She received a BA in English from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She received fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her third collection of poems, Late Wife, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and in 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia. Emerson was poetry editor for The Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for Shenandoah. She taught at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, the University of Mary Washington, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, The Opposite House, and Impossible Bottle.
DAVID FEINSTEIN was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1982. He is the author of the chapbooks Woods Porn: The Adventures of Little Walter (No Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2014) and Tarantula (Factory Hollow Press, 2016). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches writing and is a member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theatre.
Of “Kaddish,” Feinstein writes: “The Mourner’s Kaddish is a hymn of praise and remembrance recited near the end of the Jewish prayer service. I have a weird relationship with the Hebrew language; because I only learned it in order to recite certain prayers (including the Kaddish) I can pronounce most words without having any idea what they mean. Mumbling in synagogue as a kid was probably one of my earliest encounters with the mysteries of language—of sensing that words were objects originating from beyond to temporarily inhabit the body. I think poems are in search of a similarly strange and elusive purity of sound; they are forever ‘en route,’ in the words of Paul Celan, ‘heading towards something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps an approachable reality.’
“The poem ‘Kaddish’ is dedicated to all people of the book, for whom the book is holy and never complete, and who have prayed their names be inscribed in the book of life. It is to my grandparents Ida Feinstein, Sabina and Sam Kowlowitz, and to all the beloved both named and unnamed, who I want to live and die with and who will never die, in that constant song that is not a song at all but is solely our singing.”
CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blue Hour, and has edited two volumes of poetry: Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness and, with Duncan Wu, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Mahmoud Darwish, and Robert Desnos, and her own work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She has received many fellowships and awards, including the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture (Stockholm) and, recently, the Windham Campbell Prize in Literature from Yale University. She is university professor at Georgetown University, where she serves as director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Her forthcoming works include a book of poetry, In the Lateness of the World, and a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True.
Forché writes: “For the past seven summers, I have lived on two islands in the Aegean: Serifos in the Cyclades and Thasos, near the island of Lesvos, the landing place for many refugees attempting to reach Europe. ‘The Boatman’ is a poem written in the aftermath of those summers, but it is a record of conversations with one particular refugee from Homs, Syria, who is now driving a taxi in a city in the upper Midwest of the United States. This is his story, which he asked me to tell, and somehow it came to the page intact.”
VIEVEE FRANCIS was born in San Angelo, Texas, in 1963. She is the author of Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Smartish Pace, The Common, Waxwing, The Best American Poetry (2010 and 2014), and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry. She recently received the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. An associate editor for Callaloo, she is on the faculty of the Pacific University low-residency MFA program and is an associate professor of English (creative writing) at Dartmouth College.
Of “Given to These Proclivities, By God,” Francis writes: “In an oh so conventional world, a world insistent upon its rightness, where goodness becomes a skinny stretch of blinding road that few may walk without falling or failing, what is a poet with no inclination toward toeing the straight and narrow to do? So fine. If a sinner is what I’m called, then a sinner I’ll be. Now what? Whatever it is I am I got there honestly. I’m here honestly. This is a facetious ditty meant to push back against uninterrogated ideas of personal ‘uplift’ and ‘ascension.’ Mad woman. Bad woman. Woman refusing to follow patriarchal orders or cultural constraints. I’ve been given my walking papers and I still trip up. Poor puss. I don’t write poems that assume the hero wins, hope, or even survival. Instead, I am asking why can’t we admit failure or the loss of hope or the inevitability of death, and by considering it perhaps we will indeed find a way to handle such realities. Further, who’s to say what ‘failure’ is? I resent the positivism that passes for insight, the fear of anything that upsets the convenience and comfort of the social order. While on a trail in western North Carolina I saw a wall of early rhododendrons and my first thought was how lovely it would be to feel that cascade against my naked skin. I am given to the sensual world. To its delights as much as the world would have me meet its damage. I’ve fallen, to put it in pedestrian terms. I trip. I skip and attempt a quicker pace then down I go. The stairwell. Any given slope. My ankles are weak. My ability to resist stretching my limits, forcing my weight against a closed door, moving past the boundaries, even weaker. So I will fall again, God help me. And perhaps at some point I’ll stop frustrating those giving me the side-eye (or a push) and stay down. Let the ancient roots of some mountain grapevine wrap round me like a blanket or rest upon me like an incubus.”
AMY GERSTLER was born in 1956 in San Diego, California. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent books of poems are Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015) and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009). She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.
Of “Dead Butterfly,” Gerstler writes: “When I found an intact but lifeless orange and black butterfly lying on the floor of my office, I wondered whether this was a ‘good sign’ or a ‘bad’ one. That’s a pretty selfish and reductive reaction, I admit. Surely, being dead was far from an excellent development for the poor butterfly. And periodically I have to remind myself that not everything is a portent, and that many events are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. I tried to do some research, but as there are several kinds of similar-looking butterflies, and I’m a terrible lepidopterist, I couldn’t figure out whether this one was a true monarch or not. I started thinking about the butterfly as royalty, anyway, due to the word ‘monarch.’ Hoping to try to write about it, I kept the butterfly for almost a month, until I began to feel a bit morbid, and guilty, for not taking its leaflike body outside to rejoin nature. And I feared by that point that it was going to turn to dust any minute, anyway. I hadn’t planned for my dead father to enter the poem, but he did, after a few drafts. Maybe that happened when I remembered that according to Japanese tradition, butterflies may ‘carry the souls of the dead or represent the souls of the dead. . . .’ Or so I read long ago in a book, and more recently, on the Internet. The poem was also inspired by my deep admiration for Henri Cole’s poem ‘Dead Wren.’ ”
REGINALD GIBBONS was born in Houston in 1947, attended public schools, then Princeton University (BA in Spanish and Portuguese) and Stanford University (MA in English and creative writing; PhD in comparative literature). He was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, and is now Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His many works include ten books of poems, most recently Last Lake (University of Chicago Press, 2016); a critical book, How Poems Think (Chicago, 2015); the novel Sweetbitter (Broken Man Press, 1994); translations (Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments [Princeton University Press, 2008]; Sophocles, Antigone [with Charles Segal, Oxford University Press, 2003]; Euripides, Bakkhai [with Charles Segal, Oxford, 2001]; Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda [Sheep Meadow, 1999]; and other volumes); a collection of short fiction, An Orchard in the Street (BOA Editions, 2017), and other books. With Ilya Kutik, he is completing a volume of translations of poems by Boris Pasternak. His book Creatures of a Day was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, and he has fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Center for Hellenic Studies. He is a longtime volunteer for the Guild Literary Complex and the American Writers Museum (both in Chicago).
Gibbons writes: “ ‘Canasta’ came out of my growing understanding of emotional losses over time—in this poem, not my own losses, but those of Sophie, my maternal grandmother. She was a young woman when she emigrated to the United States in 1900 with her husband and the first of her eight children, who had been born earlier that year. By the time I, a small boy, began to know her, her losses had already accumulated devastatingly: the murdered world of her extended family and her cultural sphere in Poland; her lost opportunities in America to be the person she must have thought she would become, when during her gold-medal student days in her gymnasium in Lodz she had imagined her future; the five years of absence from four of her children when their father took them away with him to the Far East and Australia to tour as child musicians with him; later, the deaths of three of her children in their twenties (two of illness, the third in World War II); and more.
“Yet in her minor way, she made a life buoyed at least somewhat by her intellect, her knowledge of languages, the pleasures of music, and evidently by her pursuit of religious novelty. I don’t know how many religions she tried or joined; she and her husband (to me a fascinating but forbidding grandfather whom I was not allowed to know very well) seemed to have completely disavowed Judaism, and I don’t think I heard them or any of their children, certainly not my mother, ever even say the word ‘Jewish.’
“From my childhood and youth I have images that bring Sophie to mind, yet without my knowing very fully what they might stand for or why these particular images are still with me. In the context of Sophie’s catastrophes—historical, cultural, spiritual, and familial—I want to think of her independence, too, through all the years (I was not yet born) when she and her husband lived separately in nearby small frame houses in the old Houston neighborhood called The Heights. Writing this poem, I felt the impulse to put among my words a repeated sound like a slow beating of a small drum, which seemed to help me create what is simply an acknowledgment, however imperfect, of Sophie—helped me suggest her efforts to live with some lightness despite the heaviness of a past that was experienced by so many as an eradication not only of what was, but also of what could then never come to be.”
MARGARET GIBSON was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1944. She is the author of eleven books of poems, all from LSU Press, most recently Broken Cup (2014), whose title poem won a Pushcart Prize for 2016. Broken Cup was a finalist for the 2016 Poets’ Prize. Awards include the Lamont Selection for Long Walks in the Afternoon (1982), the Melville Kane Award for Memories of the Future (1986), and the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry for One Body (2007). The Vigil was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 1993. LSU will publish a new volume of poems, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, in 2018. She has written a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). Gibson is professor emerita, University of Connecticut, and lives in Preston, Connecticut. For more information, visit her website and Facebook page: www.margaretgibsonpoetry.com and www.facebook.com/MargaretGibsonPoetry.
Gibson writes: “As I was writing poems for what has become Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, a series of individual poems, each entitled ‘Passage,’ began to emerge, each poem finding its place at intervals throughout the longer work. In the first of these, the speaker is standing in a dark room, sensing an open door, and beyond that door also darkness. Generally speaking, the series of poems moves toward or into the light. All short, most with long lines, the poems seem to put the speaker at a threshold one might easily miss, the length of passage often being as short as a single breath or the flicker of an image. But all are transformational or hold that possibility. The ‘Passage’ selected for The Best American Poetry 2017 is the final passage of that series and also the last poem in the book. I have no idea why it surfaced and declared itself. While I love hanging laundry in summer on a line outside, I haven’t done that for some years, as the line has seized up and won’t move and has turned green. Well, we’re all getting on out here in the woods. But once I had the opening image of pinning the cotton sheet, I remembered smoothing the sheet, and from that came the swift passage toward . . . what might have happened, but didn’t. Whatever did happen, however, is remembered as a recurring joy that embraces everything. And so it continues.”
ARACELIS GIRMAY was born in Santa Ana, California, in 1977. She is the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005), as well as the poetry collections Teeth (Curbstone Books, 2007), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), and The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016). Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program.
JEFFREY HARRISON was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1957. He has published five books of poetry: The Singing Underneath (E. P. Dutton, 1988), selected by James Merrill for The National Poetry Series; Signs of Arrival (Copper Beech Press, 1996); Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001); Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006); and Into Daylight (Tupelo Press, 2014), the winner of the Dorset Prize. A volume of selected poems, The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2006 by the Waywiser Press in the United Kingdom. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in eastern Massachusetts.
Of “Higher Education,” Harrison writes: “Since the poem is straightforwardly autobiographical, there’s not much to explain. My father really did list those three colleges as off-limits, and I really did go to Columbia anyway, where I was lucky to be able to study with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro while also taking the courses that comprise the college’s core curriculum, which the poem obliquely mentions.
“As is often the case with me, I wrote the first few lines without knowing where they were going to lead, and the poem went through many versions before it found its shape and current ending. It became clear fairly early that the poem was not so much about college education as about the learning that goes on, or does not go on, between fathers and sons. But facts still underpin the poem, and one of them was sitting in plain sight but came into the poem surprisingly late in the game: that my own son had recently graduated from my father’s alma mater, Kenyon. Getting that in led to the imagined, temporary reconciliation at the end of the poem.”
TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He is the author of How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015). His other books are Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He received a 2010 National Book Award and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.
Hayes writes: “If ‘Ars Poetica with Bacon’ was a painting, its focal point might stir somewhere in the vicinity of ‘we have no wounds to speak of / beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.’ ”
W. J. HERBERT was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, second prize in the 2015 Morton Marr Poetry Competition. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art and a master’s in flute performance. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Of “Mounting the Dove Box,” Herbert writes: “The poem conflates two longings. The first, that fledglings born in our arbor would come back to build a nest. Our older daughter had left for college and the younger would soon follow and, for several years, I chose a new spot each spring for the unused box. The last was high up under the eaves and I couldn’t see inside, but sometimes I’d watch, hoping a dove would fly in with a twig in her beak. All this was long ago. We sold our house. But before leaving, I climbed a ladder to take down the box and found a bundle of half-stitched twigs, dry weeds, and pine needles deep inside. The second longing is to go back to the last days of my father’s life and act with more compassion.”
TONY HOAGLAND’s sixth book of poems, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, will be issued by Graywolf Press in 2018. He teaches at the University of Houston, and is working on a craft book about poetry, called Five Powers, Forty Lessons. He has also published two collections of essays about poetry, both from Graywolf, Real Sofistakashun and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays.
Hoagland writes: “ ‘Cause of Death: Fox News’ originated in a ‘joke’ I spontaneously made at a dinner one night soon after my father had died. I claimed that when I went to the morgue, the autopsy report on my dad’s body said, ‘Cause of Death, Fox News.’ As jokes often are, it was truer than the literal facts. In his last decade, my father had become increasingly more conservative, paranoid, and vitriolic. Whenever I visited him and his third wife in their ranch house, at the end of a six-mile-long dirt road in rural Colorado, the voices of Fox News commentators raged from the living room TV, spewing their choleric version of the world.
“At first this seemed like a kind of sport or entertainment for them. My father and his wife relished the wild stories of welfare mothers and urban crime; the dire predictions about impending economic collapse; the contemptible intellectual follies of Ivy League apologists. They also delighted in giving offense to visiting liberals. Gradually, though, they seemed to believe their own paranoid, furious narratives about the decline of the country. Their garage filled up with bales of bottled water, canned beans, and toilet paper; a survivalist’s checklist.
“Most striking to me was the way in which my father’s vision of an embattled nation seemed like a metaphor for his personal decline, his own diminished male power; his body itself with its increasingly weakened borders, a body being invaded and taken advantage of by ‘opportunistic’ outsiders, immigrant viruses, and alien life-forms.
“The psyche is surely a mad genius in its ability to generate the story it needs. Commentators like Bill O’Reilly, authoritarian and bullying, are the id-monsters of the inner patriarchy, the unconscious costumed as superego, spreading fear like a transmittable disease, one that is readily transmuted into a contagion of rage.
“For much of his life, I wish to say for the record, my father was a hardworking doctor in a poor part of southern Louisiana; his skilled hands and medical expertise did a great deal of good, and, as far as I know, he never turned a patient away for lack of payment. Our family freezer was often full of shrimp and wild game dropped off by grateful patients.
“But sometimes things go wrong; the story, as they say, ‘goes south.’ In his retirement, my father drastically mismanaged his savings by gambling on the stock market, and he died broke, his credit cards cut to pieces by his wife; his computer access to the stock market blocked. He was a man dismayed and baffled by his misfortunes.
“ ‘Cause of Death: Fox News’ is, I suppose, a polemical poem, and probably guilty of the oversimplifications that accompany certainty. When we tell a story, consciously or unconsciously, we usually tell it to our own advantage. I hope that in this poem, the speaker’s certainties are redeemed, at least in part, by tones of human sympathy, and also perhaps by inflections of dark humor. Trustworthy or not, such a poem is a sort of time capsule, the snapshot of a moment in our social (and personal) history, which will do for the time being, until the story needs to be reopened, unpacked, and freshly scrutinized, from a different angle in the ever-changing light.”
JOHN HODGEN lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Grace (winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), In My Father’s House (winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University Bluestem Press, 1993), and Bread Without Sorrow (winner of the 2002 Balcones Poetry Prize, Lynx House Press/Eastern Washington University Press, 2001). He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for poetry, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in poetry. He has also received the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Foley Prize from America Magazine, and the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for the best poems published in Beloit Poetry Journal.
Of “Hamlet Texts Guildenstern about Playing upon the Pipe,” Hodgen writes: “Hard sometimes seeing students shuffling soundlessly across the quad, out of the cradle endlessly texting, passing each other like lost friendships in the night. Easy, however, seeing them holding their phones like bouquets of glow worms or handfuls of fireflies up to their faces, how they are transformed, blazed with delight, someone’s lighted little words having languaged them, religioned them, with (what else?) love, something shining, wholly theirs, at the tips of their fingers, shimmering, gleaming, true.
“Easy as well within the nutshell of the classroom amidst those hefty tomes, those other texts, analyzing, contextualizing, for those selfsame students to raise their temporarily empty hands to say that Romeo and Juliet would’ve lived if they had had cell phones back in the day. And Hamlet would’ve run off with Ophelia, met her in Room 2B, or not, Snapchatting, Instagramming, Tumblring, MadThumbs, Finger Swiping, Tinder Is the Night, Tweeting like nightingales or larks. And they’d be right, Hamlet, that fuzzy gray cloud over his head, his typing awareness indicator, his TIA, wiggling, telling Gldnstrn/Rsncrntz, we nd 2 tlk, jst tll the truth, SAD, SAD, SAD.”
DAVID BRENDAN HOPES was born in 1950 in Akron, Ohio. He practices poetry, fiction writing, playwriting, and painting in Asheville, North Carolina, where he has been professor of English at UNCA for thirty-four years. He has had books published by Dodd Mead (back in the day), Scribner’s, Milkweed Editions, and Pecan Grove Press.
Hopes writes: “ ‘Certain Things’ arose from one of those moments when you realize you are doing EXACTLY the thing that used to irritate you about your father. Not only is it a moment of realization, but a moment of compassion, when you forgive your parent much, guessing for the first time why he did what he did in the way he did it.”
MAJOR JACKSON was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1968. His latest book is Roll Deep (W. W. Norton, 2015). He is the editor of Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He has been included in multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry. The recipient of a Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received awards and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives with his wife, the poet Didi Jackson, and their children in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.
Of “The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail,” Jackson writes: “Having lived primarily for the past two decades in regions of the United States best described as either rural, pastoral, or mountainous, I treasure my trips to large cities (mostly New York City) for what they remind me of my youth, the aliveness and excitement of humanity choreographed together in some concert not of our design, and for the palpable sense of simultaneity, that everything is happening all at once. Thanks to Walter Benjamin, much has been written about the flâneur as an emblematic figure of modernity. Because of the crush and immediacy of life around us, the challenge of living in cities is learning to discern what is truly remarkable about existence, is learning to stay awake, and thus, to remain human. This poem is composed of some observations and bits of conversations I have transcribed and recorded in journals over the past five years, chiefly as a means of slowing down and savoring the pleasures of life in a metropolis.”
JOHN JAMES was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1987 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of Chthonic (CutBank, 2015), winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Contest. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, where he held multiple fellowships and received an Academy of American Poets Prize. He is completing an MA in English at Georgetown University, where he serves as graduate associate to the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and directs the summer school’s creative writing institute. Also a scholar, he researches William Blake and ecological Romanticism. He lives in Washington, DC, with his partner and daughter.
James writes: “I wrote ‘History (n.)’ in about an hour. My daughter was maybe one and a half and my mother was downstairs keeping an eye on her. I was working under a serious time constraint, and because of that, I had to write quickly, putting my inhibitions aside and giving myself over to associative leaps I wouldn’t normally make. I composed the poem on my computer, as a single prose block consisting of sixteen lines in Perpetua font, a numeric limitation I placed on myself in order to fill a space with language, without much regard for what the language itself actually said. (I decided to worry about that later.) Strictures are good for me; I often need something to write against in order to write at all. It’s in part a fidelity to the numeric nature of metrical form, even though I—and practically all of my contemporaries—write primarily in free verse. I see myself within that poetic lineage. I grabbed a few books I knew to be relevant to the ideas on which I was meditating—tomes by Hegel, Haruki Murakami, Anne Carson, and others—and started excerpting text that for various reasons seemed interesting to me, using it to fill out the prose block when I got stumped. That’s what the italicization is about. It’s all excerpted text. Once I was finished—and this might have been the next day—I cut what felt like excess language from the poem and began to put it into lines. I was experimenting at the time with spacing and alignment, as well as with the short, fragmented sections that comprise the poem. Actually, I wrote a series of similar poems, which comprise the final section of my book manuscript, The Milk Hours. Once I was finished with that process, the poem was done. I cut one line—the last one—when The Kenyon Review took the poem, but that was all. The line just seemed a little too heavy handed. My partner, who is usually my best critic, actually made fun of it. And then it ended up here. Somehow I think it was the time constraint that allowed me to write the poem. Being forced to make those associative leaps opened me up to a mode of perception that I don’t always inhabit. All of the pieces, from the Plato epigram to the Calbuco volcano, somehow melded together, and I had a decent poem on my hands. Surprisingly, even alarmingly, it didn’t take much effort at all.”
RODNEY JONES was born in Hartselle, Alabama, in 1950. His new volume, Village Prodigies (Mariner Books, 2017), doubles as a poetry book and an experimental novel. His other books include Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985–2005 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), and Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New Orleans and teaches in the MFA low-residency program at Warren Wilson College.
Of “Homecoming,” Jones writes: “I was thinking in 2006, when I first wrote several drafts of this piece, that I would shape them into a poem later, so I noted what mattered and put them down mostly in fragments. Mostly nouns. When I came back to it seven years later, I wrote ‘Here are some verbs.’ Then I took the point of view, which had been autobiographical, and gave it to an imaginary character who had lived there as a boy, made a few alterations, and it became the last section, CX of Village Prodigies.”
FADY JOUDAH was born in Austin, Texas, to Palestinian parents. He has three poetry collections and four volumes of poetry in translation from the Arabic, and has received a Yale Series award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among other honors for his work. He is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston.
Of “Progress Notes,” Joudah writes: “This poem is one of a handful that took me years to complete. I think in terms of the body, the corporeal journey in life as we, partners of the body (and partly owned by it), historicize its corpus. This poem is one formulation of that haunting.”
MEG KEARNEY’s newest collection of poems for adults, Home by Now (Four Way Books, 2009), won the 2010 PEN New England Laurence L. & Thomas Winship Award. The title poem of Home by Now appears in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places anthology (Viking, 2011). Meg’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions in 2001 and is still in print. She has written three interconnected novels-in-verse for teens, all from Persea Books: The Secret of Me (2005), The Girl in the Mirror (2012), and When You Never Said Goodbye (2017). Her short story “Chalk” appears in Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories (Persea, 2011). Meg’s picture book, Trouper (Scholastic, 2013), illustrated by E. B. Lewis, was awarded the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the State of Missouri’s Show Me Readers Award. Meg is the founding director of the Solstice low-residency MFA in creative writing program of Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. For more than eleven years, she was the associate director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards. A native New Yorker, she now lives in New Hampshire. For more information: www.megkearney.com.
Of “Grackle,” Kearney writes: “I am working on a manuscript of poems inspired by 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells. Using the description and story of each bird as a prompt, I’ve written well over one hundred poems so far, and have thrown out more than half. One of these days, I hope to have enough ‘keepers’ to form a book.”
JOHN KOETHE was born in San Diego in 1945. He received an AB from Princeton and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He has published ten books of poetry (as well as books on Wittgenstein and philosophical skepticism) and has received the Lenore Marshall, Kingsley Tufts, and Frank O’Hara awards. His most recent book is The Swimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). FSG will publish a volume of new and selected poems, Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, in 2018. He is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and lives in Milwaukee.
Of “The Age of Anxiety,” Koethe writes: “I don’t remember what made me think of the title of Auden’s longest poem, but when I did I thought of construing it to refer not to a public social or historical epoch but rather to a time in one’s own personal life. The poem is simply an elaboration of that thought and so writing it was pretty straightforward. I usually take a long time—often weeks—to finish a poem, but since this one was so straightforward I finished it in a few days.”
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), The Chameleon Couch, The Emperor of Water Clocks, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. He has received the William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. They include Slipknot, Wakonda’s Dream, Nine Bridges Back, Saturnalia, Testimony, The Mercy Suite, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (with Chad Garcia). In 2016 he was announced as New York’s eleventh state poet. He teaches at New York University. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.
DANUSHA LAMÉRIS was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971, but has spent most of her life in the Bohemian enclaves of California: Mill Valley, Berkeley, and, for the past twenty-seven years, Santa Cruz. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches private writing workshops.
Laméris writes: “Every poem, in its making, opens a world, and I have learned many things since writing ‘The Watch.’ For example, in some cultures, you never give someone a watch. Why remind them they are going to die? The same way, at least in my personal cosmology, you never give a person you love a knife, because of the severance it implies. Perhaps every gift has a psychic cost.
“In the process of writing the poem, I realized the similarities between the work of the poet and the watchmaker. Both occupy arenas of smallness, detail, and well-defined constraints. Marriage is like this, too. My husband still wears this watch most days, and so now I am reminded of his mortality both by the actual watch, and its semblable on the page.
“Recently, after a reading, the guy sitting next to me asked if I knew that there’s a name for an extra feature on the face of the watch—say it shows the phases of the moon, or tells the date. Apparently, it’s called a ‘complication.’ ”
DORIANNE LAUX was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. Her most recent books of poems are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon, recipient of the Oregon Book Award, both from W. W. Norton. Laux is also the author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke. In 2014 the singer/songwriter Joan Osborne adapted her poem “The Shipfitter’s Wife” and set it to music on her newest release, Love and Hate. Laux teaches poetry at the MFA program at North Carolina State University and is a founding faculty member at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.
Laux writes: “ ‘Lapse’ is a ‘Golden Shovel,’ a form Terrance Hayes invented in which one takes a line from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and uses each word in the line, in order, as the new poem’s end words. The poem originally appeared in Plume and was later reprinted in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, published in 2017 with the University of Arkansas Press.”
PHILIP LEVINE (1928–2015) was born into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants and worked in Detroit auto factories from the age of fourteen. Described by Edward Hirsch as “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” Levine was the celebrated author of more than twenty poetry collections and a legendary teacher who influenced countless young poets from California State University, Fresno, on the West Coast to NYU and Columbia on the East. He was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, he wrote about his experiences as a factory worker and about such of his mentors as Berryman and Yvor Winters. About Berryman he commented, “He was a guy who didn’t want you writing like him. He considered himself, and rightly so, as a rather eccentric poet, and he urged me away from that kind of eccentricity.” Levine told his Paris Review interviewer that he used to memorize poems “when I worked in factories and recited them to myself. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.” Levine’s final two books, The Last Shift, a collection of poems, and My Lost Poets, a prose book, were published posthumously in 2016.
AMIT MAJMUDAR (b. 1979) is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, twin sons, and daughter. His poetry has appeared in previous editions of this anthology (2007, 2012) as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012. His first poetry collection, 0°, 0°, was published by Northwestern in 2009. His second poetry collection, Heaven and Earth, won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. His third collection, Dothead, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2016. Ohio’s first poet laureate, he blogs for The Kenyon Review and has written two novels, Partitions in 2009 and The Abundance in 2011, both published by Holt/Metropolitan in the United States and Oneworld in the United Kingdom. His forthcoming book is a verse translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita entitled Godsong (Knopf, 2018).
Of “Kill List,” Majmudar writes: “The earliest Sumerian cuneiform tablets were thought to be scripture or poetry when they were first discovered. Deciphered, they proved to be a merchant’s ledger.
“If I take off my glasses and look at a poem, the blurred vision releases those lines into pure potential. Any list can blur into a potential poem.
“The epic poem of the twentieth century may well be those lists of names that totalitarian regimes consigned to the Gulag or to the death camps—poems whose every line was a life. You can recite the names of those dead by candlelight and make a litany.
“In our era of large-scale data collection, hacked consumer databases, and government watchlists, Anonymous (American, circa AD 2000) is producing many Gilgameshes’ worth of list poems. These comprise our own national epic. Every line of it is a life.
“A kill list, by contrast, is often shorter and more concentrated. It is a lyric poem. Every line of it is a death.”
JAMAAL MAY was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He now lives in Hamtramck, a 2.2-square-mile city inside of Detroit’s borders. His two books of poetry, Hum (Alice James Books, 2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016), received awards from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, respectively. He codirects OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah and teaches at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
May writes: “ ‘Things That Break’ is an example of the space between things I tend to reach for. Like Sei Sho¯nagon’s The Pillow Book, the listing lends a participatory aspect to the poem, as the mind instinctively tries to tie everything back to breaking (hopefully). In doing so, the reader becomes a coconspirator in the experience. Rather than stay with the list poem mode, the syntax shifts to trouble the comparisons and add more shades of meaning. By the end, I use what’s been built already to create a moment where the child holds a steady form, paradoxically indicating a break.”
JUDSON MITCHAM was born in June of 1948 in Monroe, Georgia. His books of poetry include Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (University of Missouri Press, 1991), This April Day (Anhinga Press, 2003), and A Little Salvation (University of Georgia Press, 2007). His novels are The Sweet Everlasting (Georgia, 1996) and Sabbath Creek (Georgia, 2004), both winners of the Townsend Prize for fiction. He holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Georgia and taught psychology for thirty years at Fort Valley State University. He has also taught creative writing at Mercer University, Emory University, and Georgia College & State University. In 2013 Mitcham was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. He is the current poet laureate of Georgia.
Of “White,” Mitcham writes: “The massacre described in the poem’s first section is the Moore’s Ford lynching, which occurred on July 25, 1946, just outside Monroe, Georgia, my hometown. The names of the murdered are Roger Malcolm, Dorothy Malcolm, George W. Dorsey, and Mae Murray Dorsey. The story made headlines in The New York Times and resulted in what was the largest FBI investigation in history at that time. Laura Wexler’s book, Fire in a Canebrake, is a detailed examination of the case. As the poem says, I grew up in that town but never heard a word about what had happened until I was middle-aged. I have yet to find anyone of my generation who knew about it while young, a fact that leaves me in ‘dumb sputtering astonishment at the ignorance of our lives.’ ”
JOHN MURILLO was born 1971 in Upland, California. He is an assistant professor of creative writing and African American literary arts at Hampshire College. His first collection of poems, Up Jump the Boogie, was published by Cypher Books in 2010.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is currently Visiting Writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University. She is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the essay collection Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. “To Marlon Brando in Hell” will be included in her next book of poems, The Gathering Storm.
Oates writes: “ ‘To Marlon Brando in Hell’ grew out of a fascination with the cinematic images of my long-ago childhood and girlhood. Marlon Brando, but also Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, each iconic figures of twentieth-century America whom we can perceive, at a distance of decades, as unique, fated, doomed. How the ardor of youth is transformed by degrees to something like torpor—the suffocation of the spirit. How, in Brando’s case in particular, an unfathomable talent (for acting) was transformed into self-loathing and self-destruction. The admiring observer—(the poet)—is stunned to realize how contemptuous the bearer of great talent might be for his own talent—how careless of his talent, as of his life.
“Yes, the stanza about the fifteen-year-old girl is autobiographical. Of course! This is the springboard for the poem.”
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco, California, in 1942. Her most recent collection of poems, Odes, was published by Knopf in 2016; other books include The Dead and the Living, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap, 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.
Of “Ode to the Glans,” Olds writes: “Once Neruda’s Odes to Common Things had fallen into my hands, in December 2008 (I remember it falling literally, from a high shelf, in the back of a dark, dusty old bookstore, far off my beaten path), I read it with passionate admiration, dazzled by the concepts, the plainness of speech, and the unfettered, animizing imagination—everything so alive. I did not think of trying my hand at it. Its originality seemed absolute. (The Spanish facing the English [in Ferris Cook’s translation] was part of the richness of the experience.) And a few weeks later, it came to me that there were everyday objects, common things, which I had never thanked or sung.
“Well, that’s not true. It wasn’t an idea. The beginning of a description of an ordinary object just came into my mind—or rather my mind thought of some things a familiar object was like—my mind started playing with simile. A tampon was like ‘Inside-out clothing; / queen’s robe; / white-jacketed worker who clears the table / prepared for the feast which goes uneaten.’ The poem began to carry some of the pride of a girl becoming a woman, with a woman’s reproductive powers, and some of the gratitude for the helpfulness of the tampon like a friend comforting and protecting one.
“As I was writing the first draft, I did not notice, much, that the poem was coming out not in my usual 4/4 time of the church-hymn line, but each image had its own space. I liked that. Later I thought that was part of the praise, and part of the plainness, the commonness. And when I see the poem now, I see it did not address its subject, the object of its attention, until fifteen of the twenty-five lines had been written—I think the poem suddenly turned itself from a description into a direct address.
“That was ‘Ode to the Tampon,’ the first in what turned out to be a series. Once I began to see the outline of a series, I thought I might eventually put what I thought were the best of the odes in a book as one section of a book—not a whole book, lest I reveal my obsessionalness.
“ ‘Ode to the Glans’ was one of the last poems I wrote which ended up in Odes. Looking at it today, I noticed for the first time the familiar friendly tone of its opening, the speaker surprised she had forgotten this character (the glans), this dramatis persona. By then I was deep in the premise of serenading not one beloved’s body, or its attributes, but some kind of aggregate or representative of some common things, and common parts of people. Somehow it felt to me liberating, affectionate, comfortable, and body-politic in a humorous and respectful enough way.
“I failed, in many other poems (not included in the book), with the tone—not my strong point, to know how close one can go to the body, to the matter, and still honor the spirit.”
MATTHEW OLZMANN was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1976. He is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanines (2013) and Contradictions in the Design (2016), both from Alice James Books. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a lecturer at Dartmouth College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Of “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz,” Olzmann writes: “This poem is from a book-length series of epistolary poems. It was originally published on January 5th, and on that day, the president gave a speech on gun violence. A month or so earlier, on the day I sent the poem out for publication, the place where I was working at that time went on lockdown because a man with a rifle was spotted on campus. Is there ever a time when this isn’t an issue? A time when we’re not either reflecting upon a previous tragedy or bracing for a new one? Is this supposed to be normal? Despite the polemics of the subject matter, I think of this less as an ‘anti-gun’ poem, and more of an ‘anti-ridiculous-debates-where-nothing-gets-done-about-guns’ poem. In early drafts, I thought of it exclusively as an elegy. Later, I started thinking of it as being more about a certain refusal to act in the face of an obvious catastrophe.”
GREGORY ORR was born in Albany, New York, in 1947. Since 1975, he has taught at the University of Virginia, where he founded its MFA program in writing in 1982. He has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent of which is River Inside the River (W. W. Norton, 2013). He is also the author of A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, which W. W. Norton will publish in 2017. These poems are from a recently completed collection, What Cup? His current project is a stage adaptation of his memoir, The Blessing. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Of “Three Dark Proverb Sonnets,” Orr writes: “The aphoristic has always appealed to me. And it’s occurred to me (and others) that a proverb could be thought of as a one-line folk lyric, or at least as an ultimately compressed lyric of anonymous origin. The form of the proverb also gave me permission to heighten the sound-play, to indulge in rhyme and off-rhyme and even puns. Making them up became a kind of game that went on in my head/on the page for about two or three months, the fall of 2013. By the time my fascination with the proverb form subsided I had a good number of them. Having celebrated the dense autonomy of the aphoristic, I came up against a wish to have them gain some scope as well. Obviously, given the nugget-nature of the form, I wasn’t going to be able to construct much in the way of narrative unity, but I wanted more than just individual proverbs—I felt they could gather force if I clustered them either by tone or theme or both. I think that’s when I decided some of them (these three for example) could be ‘sonnets.’ My definition of sonnet is quite loose I suppose; possibly even tongue-in-cheek.
“As for the content. I felt somewhat that I had been emphatically affirmative in some recent work and got to thinking about that. One of my favorite texts is Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—and part of the pleasure in it is the way the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ are a bracing antidote to the one-sided, ‘angelic’ view of the world. I thought also of William James’s put-down of Whitman—that he was almost ‘pathologically healthy-minded’ and essentially lacked a ‘vision of evil’ to reality-check his insistent celebrations. I’ve never lacked a dark or sardonic side and so I decided to let it loose in this form: ‘dark proverbs.’ ”
CARL PHILLIPS was born in Everett, Washington, in 1959. His new book of poems, Wild Is the Wind, will come out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018. Previous books include Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), Silverchest (FSG, 2013), and a book of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014). Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Of “Rockabye,” Phillips writes: “Sometimes one of the hardest things to admit to in a relationship is vulnerability—in my own experience this has seemed especially so between men. Also brokenness, be it physical or psychological. But what if we not only admit to, but embrace the fact of brokenness? And if we end up arriving together at a place we set out for, does it matter that our road was a broken one, that our minds and bodies that we used, to get there, were likewise broken? For me, there’s hope in thinking of vulnerability as its own kind of strength, in embracing the so-called flaws we all travel with, and in not thinking of the distance between two people as an uncrossable divide. I suppose the poem came out of all that.”
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS was born in New York City in 1974. He received a bachelor of arts in English from Swarthmore College and a doctorate in English from Brown University. His first book of poems, The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the GLCA New Writers Award. His next book, Heaven (FSG, 2015), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and divides his time between New York City and Barcelona.
Of “Halo,” Phillips writes: “The peculiar power of poetry, its particular panache, rises out of its inherent ability to blur the boundaries between the sacred and the divine, absence and presence, indeed between a thing and nothing at all. ‘Halo’ is a poem that thrives in the space of that divide. As someone who does much writing in my head, I’m fascinated by how a poem is a material object and a diaphanous idea simultaneously; that its beauty is one that flickers between these states. A bit of Baudelaire’s ‘Perte d’auréole’ swims somewhere in the seams of it but ‘Halo’ is its own strange thing: a light on the mind’s horizon.”
ROBERT PINSKY was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. His recent book of poems is At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His awards include the Italian Premio Capri, the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago, the Korean Manhae award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry for his translation The Inferno of Dante (FSG, 1994). The videos from his Favorite Poem Project can be viewed at www.favoritepoem.org. He was guest editor of The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition (2013).
Of “Names,” Pinsky writes: “The nominal token of my name confronts me with the past, for good or ill and plenty of both. The delusory, often pathological, occasionally beautiful associations of culture, the chimerical, crucial, often enough murderous baloney of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’ They are there in how you designate me and how I designate you.
“We come into the world, for a moment or two, innocent of all that, but soon enough it begins determining us. For example: if you call that certain moment ‘christening’ you associate yourself with an American majority, thereby making yourself at that moment more secure than Mohamed, Vijay, or Menachem.
“Anyone’s name: an essential, minimal particle of culture. A meaning. Some readers will not recognize the aggressive history and meaning of the question ‘What kind of name is that?’ Some readers will not recognize ‘Byron De La Beckwith’ or ‘Ikey Moe.’ That possible darkness, too—the unknowing itself—is part of my meaning.”
STANLEY PLUMLY is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland. His most recent book is The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is finishing a book on Constable and Turner and the sublime landscape. “Poliomyelitis” appeared in Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016).
Of “Poliomyelitis,” Plumly writes: “Polio was a part of the childhoods of anyone born right around or after the Second World War. I had many classmates who suffered various stages of the disease. My poem ‘The Iron Lung’—from the late nineteen seventies—is my first attempt to identify with the consequences of polio, which, in those days, normally amounted to paralysis or death. Infantile paralysis was (is) its common name.”
PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000, and Vintage Books, 2002); a hybrid-genre memoir entitled Intimate (Tupelo Press, 2012); and several 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 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), which won the UNT Rilke Prize. Her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, is out from Copper Canyon Press, and her latest book of nonfiction, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of the Vietnam War, won the AWP Nonfiction Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. She is the editor and founder of the web history archive project, Mapping Salt Lake City (www.mappingslc.org).
Of “Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi,” Rekdal writes: “For a period of six months I lived in Hanoi, next door to the Vietnam Military History Museum, which is where I came across this sculpture. I wrote this poem in dozens of wildly different versions over the course of three years but nothing, for me, could ever formally approach the monumentality of this monument. The sculpture is an artwork of both propaganda and history, as all war monuments are, and yet something about these reassembled planes felt, the more I observed them, restless, enlarging. These planes are not representational figures made of stone and marble, as they might be in a more sanitized monument that line a capital’s landscaped mall. They are planes. They are the real planes real men died in, from which real men killed other people. For me, the artwork is a sliver of war’s terrible sublime, and perhaps it is the enormity of sensations that this piece arouses in me that first made me suspect the sculptor had been duped by his creation or, better yet, had helped it slip the control of the politicians who commissioned it, who wanted to tell only one story about the war, rather than the story the artist seemed to recognize. This was a sculpture that, accidentally or not, elegizes the deaths of Vietnam’s enemies as much as it celebrates Hanoi’s victors. During my time in Hanoi, I visited this sculpture frequently, taking notes, thinking that someday I would write a poem that could encapsulate what I felt while looking at it, or that perhaps I would come to this courtyard one day and sit by it and look at it and simply feel less. For a time, I even visited the museum daily, believing that repeated exposure would numb these sensations that arose in the planes’ presence, assure me that I had at last pinpointed the final sentiment behind the monument; that, by articulating it for myself, I might encapsulate some idea central to understanding the war. But I never did. I never wrote a satisfactory poem about that sculpture. I just stopped.”
MICHAEL RYAN has published five books of poems, an autobiography, a memoir, a novel, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. Four of the books were New York Times Notable Books of the year. The autobiography was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and the memoir was excerpted in The New Yorker. His poetry has won the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is director of the MFA program in poetry at the University of California, Irvine.
Of “The Mercy Home,” Ryan writes: “As Joseph Williams wrote in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, ‘The writer knows least about his work because he knows most about it.’ This is particularly true when the writer is writing autobiographically.
“The writer’s material is essential, but what really matters to me is what he or she makes of it. The writing I love most is finally about the reader, not just the writer. This makes autobiographical writing even more challenging. It’s where the art comes in.
“I try to do something different in every poem. I try even harder when drawn to habitual subjects like how people bear the unbearable.
“ ‘The Mercy Home,’ all 132 lines of it, rhymes—or half-rhymes—on a terminal ‘-r’ sound. What rhyme does in verse (and doesn’t do) is still very poorly understood. In this poem I hope it creates an incantation that underlies and overrides the narrative and exposition, and helps the poem’s rendering of the unbearable and providing it a shape in language.
“Writing and reading are both ways people bear the unbearable.
“The self-address as ‘you’ can be an effective self-critical, self-punishing voice in writing. Everyone I know has that voice inside them.
“I hope that, for all its insistence on the brutal facts, ‘The Mercy Home’ resolves in an act of peace through the imagination that does not underestimate the magnitude of human grief.”
DAVID ST. JOHN was born in Fresno, California, in 1949. His collections of poetry include, most recently, The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (Ecco, 2017). He is the editor of two posthumous collections of poetry by Larry Levis: The Selected Levis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf, 2016). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is university professor and chair of English at the University of Southern California.
Of “Emanations,” St. John writes: “This poem is an homage to the Big Sur coast of California and to two of its presiding artistic spirits, Robinson Jeffers and Edward Weston, as well as to two other remarkable figures of that landscape, Charis Wilson and the painter Pat St. John Moran, my aunt. The threads of narrative moving through the poem are meant to string historical and personal vignettes into a precarious mobile, each piece reflecting a restless light upon the other.”
SHEROD SANTOS’s most recent book of poems is The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2010). A new collection of prose/poetry pieces, The Square Inch Hours, was published in 2017. In 2006, he was presented with the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Humanities for his book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry. He has also received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Chicago, where he works in an outreach program for the homeless.
Of “I Went for a Walk in Winter,” Santos writes: “ ‘Time is an accident.’ That statement, by Maimonides, seems like an apt summary of my poem. I ran across it years ago, and while it interested me then, it interests me far more now, for if age has taught me anything, it’s that time is less a succession of moments than an accumulation of perceptions that present themselves largely by happenstance; in the case of this poem, during a late-night walk through the streets of Chicago in the middle of a snowstorm. How and what we think about our perceptions is, of course, another matter, another ‘time,’ so to speak, though that wasn’t my primary concern. My concern was simply to record my random observations as fully and accurately as possible as they appeared and disappeared in the ever-amassing drifts of snow.”
TAIJE SILVERMAN was born in San Francisco, California, in 1974. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Houses Are Fields was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009 and her poem “Grief” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2016.
Of “Where to Put It,” Silverman writes: “I don’t know how to explain where this poem came from—whether to preempt an explanation with reassurance that I hope nothing and least of all my sobs will hurt the baby inside me who is now five and likes to say, ‘Mamma, pretend I’m in your belly,’ and then burrow into my sweater while he looks up at me and meows. Or whether to state the obvious and belligerent truth that we can feel and live both the thing and its opposite, and that there must in some interior and immaterial castle be room for such contradiction. I hated being pregnant. I felt my body had been hijacked by an indifferent alien tribe and that my self had, against all previous suspicion, proved to be inseparable from my body. At the insistence of doctors, friends, and strangers, I quit taking the antidepressant that has long kept me buoyant (and has since shown to have no negative impact on pregnancy) until my brain without it unraveled into versions of self-loathing that now seem about as real as the X-Men. All the spaces in this poem existed and were contemporaneous, but still they needed imagining. And each one, once imagined, engendered the next. Like the self that is terribly loyal to the body but only moves toward it asymptotically, all the spaces did—do—lead toward but not into each other through hallways where we live. I felt, as I wrote the poem, a longing to experience witness differently. I kept picturing its last line, even as I wrote the first one.”
CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. The Lunatic, his new volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose, were published in 2015 by Ecco Press. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992.
DANEZ SMITH (Their Mother, 1989) is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Danez is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees (Penmanship Books, 2013) and black movie (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the Button Poetry Prize. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez’s work has been featured widely including on BuzzFeed, Blavity, PBS NewsHour, and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They are a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, three-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion, and a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective.
MAGGIE SMITH was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977. She is the author of Weep Up (Tupelo Press, forthcoming); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize and the IPPY Gold Medal in Poetry; Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones,” originally published in Waxwing, went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. PRI (Public Radio International) called it “the official poem of 2016.” The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Smith works as a freelance writer and editor.
Smith writes: “I wrote ‘Good Bones’ about raising my children in a world that’s as full of injustice and violence as it is beauty and wonder. I’m still in awe of how far the poem has traveled, and how it’s resonated with people around the world.”
R. T. SMITH was born in Washington, DC, in 1947 and was raised and educated in Georgia and North Carolina. For many years he served as alumni writer-in-residence at Auburn University. He is the author of six books of stories and fourteen collections of poetry, including Library of Virginia Poetry Book Award winners Messenger (Louisiana State University Press, 2001) and Outlaw Style (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), as well as Brightwood (LSU, 2003), The Hollow Log Lounge (University of Illinois Press, 2003), and The Red Wolf (Louisiana Literature Press, 2013). He received the Virginia Governor’s Award for Achievement in the Arts in 2008 and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize in 2013. Smith edits Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he is writer-in-residence. He lives on Timber Ridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia.
Of “Maricón,” Smith writes: “Because it has haunted me for half a century, I wanted to tell the story of that tragic title fight in 1962 between Emile Griffith and Benny ‘Kid’ Peret, followed by the death of the latter, which underscored the dark irony of calling pugilism ‘the sweet science.’ When it occurred, only a few fans but most boxing insiders knew that the handsome Casanova Griffith was bisexual. Only many years after the bout did I learn that Peret had taunted Griffith with the term maricón at the weigh-in and during the fight. I made notes and talked to people for years but was completely stifled in my attempts to begin the poem. I found some traction only after Griffith died and I understood that his story was, for me, spliced together with the story of my own intense interest in and ambivalence about boxing. I started watching boxing on TV for the first time in decades, and watched the YouTube video of the fight. Then the literary tinder began to kindle. It seemed a self-brutalizing process I may have needed to endure, but I’m not watching boxing matches now.”
Born in 1968, A. E. STALLINGS grew up in Decatur, Georgia; studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and Oxford, England; and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. Her most recent collection is Olives (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her new translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days is recently out from Penguin Classics.
Of “Shattered,” Stallings writes: “This isn’t the first poem I’ve written about breaking a glass or sweeping. So I suppose that attests first of all to an innate clumsiness. Also, when you have kids, the fact that you have suddenly strewn the kitchen with cutting edges and children are running around barefoot fills you with that glamour-jagged horror of hypervigilance that seems to be a kind of attention to the moment shared by parents and poets. I have long been fascinated by the moment of the mistake, the action or word that changes what comes after (and thus what comes before) and cannot be undone or unsaid. Disasters on the domestic scale have always put me in a more cosmic philosophical mood.
“My lines are usually metrical, but I enjoy experimenting with syllabics (and particularly haiku-shaped syllabic stanzas) while including rhymes, the way the count pushes extreme enjambments and line breaks that ignore word-boundaries, and how the arithmetic turns up end rhymes in spots unanticipated by the ear. Maybe there is something apotropaic too in the writing of such a poem, an effort to ward off injury from the wounding sharpness of the world. At least in a poem, I can make a clean sweep.”
PAMELA SUTTON was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1960. She holds an MS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. She taught creative writing and critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 2008, where she was nominated by her students for the Charles Ludwig Teacher-of-the-Year Award. She worked as associate editor for The American Poetry Review from 1989 to 1993 and was a consulting editor until the death of APR’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Berg. Sutton currently lives on Marco Island, Florida, where she is finishing a novel, writing a third book of poetry, and looking for a university teaching position. Her first book of poems, Pocket Gospel, was published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2012. Her second, Burning My Birth Certificate, won the Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, and is forthcoming from Ashland Press.
Of “Afraid to Pray,” Sutton writes: “This poem attacked me like a pack of wolves. The Novel version is better.”
CHASE TWICHELL was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950. She has published seven books of poetry, the most recent of which is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming in 2018. After teaching for many years, she left academia in 1999 to start Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of poetry. Ausable was acquired by Copper Canyon in 2009. From 2014 to 2016 she served as chair of the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards at Claremont Graduate University. She is currently on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She lives with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York.
Of “Sad Song,” Twichell writes: “A couple of years ago, my first boyfriend found me on Facebook, and we’ve been back in touch ever since. I was in love—we’d been friends since childhood—but we were far too young, and he soon left to go adventuring in Thailand, and I to college. I waited for him for an absurdly long time, but he never came back, which froze my emotion in the glacier of time. Fifty years later, here it is again, poking out, half-thawed, a baby mastodon!”
JAMES VALVIS was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1969. After some college and a stint of homelessness, he enlisted in the United States Army and served during Desert Storm, though he did not see combat. He began writing poetry for publication while in the army and has since published hundreds of poems and scores of short stories in such journals as Ploughshares, Rattle, Tampa Review, The Louisville Review, and The Sun. He won the Chiron Review Poetry Contest. His poetry books are How to Say Goodbye (Aortic Books, 2011) and What Exactly Is a Valvis? (NightBallet Press, 2013). He lives in Issaquah, Washington, with his wife and daughter.
Valvis writes: “Let me first thank Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for including ‘Something’ in this year’s anthology, and the editors at The Sun for originally publishing the poem. I maintain great editors are more rare and less appreciated than great writers, and so I thank them and all who have supported my work.
“The events depicted in ‘Something’ happened six months before I wrote the poem. As a young man, I used to suffer from severe panic disorder, symptoms of which included sweating, shortness of breath, a sense of unreality, and rapid heartbeat. Often, for seemingly no reason, while riding on a train, while reading in the library, while waiting in a grocery store line, the symptoms arrived and I thought I was dying. I’ve largely beaten back this awful condition, but there remain times when the stress is severe enough I psychologically shut down. I knew guys in the army who claimed during firefights they would inexplicably sit on the battlefield and start weeping. Or they’d start daydreaming and looking up at the stars as tracer rounds flew overhead. Each recorded a buzzing, a punch-drunk sensation where the blow is emotional rather than physical. Something like this happened to me in that doctor’s office, and I wanted to record the feeling as accurately as possible and to bring the reader into this moment.
“A flat narrative wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t illustrate the humming, droning sound one hears, which shuts off linguistic clarity and understanding—at a time when understanding is most needed. The repetition of ‘something’ is meant to be that ‘dumb hum.’ The word ‘some’ even rhymes with hum, and the word ‘thing’ rhymes with ping, like a heart monitor ping.
“If you pushed me I might credit Raymond Carver with some influence and perhaps give a nod to Poe’s ‘The Bells,’ but here I start to question too much hindsight analysis. For me, a poem happens mostly in the moment of composition and, in this regard, this poem was no different than any of my others. I will say that after I finished drafting ‘Something’ I knew I’d written a good poem. If there’s any better feeling than that, I surely don’t know what it is.
“One final note. Because people have asked, I should say the health concerns turned out to be, as my wife said, borrowed trouble. I’m fine; I had and have no cancer. I’m very lucky. May God provide His mercy and compassion to those not as fortunate.”
EMILY VAN KLEY’s book, The Cold & The Rust Smell, won the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and is forthcoming from Persea Books. Raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she now lives in Olympia, Washington, where she also teaches and performs aerial acrobatics.
Van Kley writes: “ ‘Dear Skull’ was written in response to images of decorated skeletons kept as holy relics in the early Catholic world, as shared with me by the poet Jessica Walsh. My life had been recently shaken by the sudden loss of a dear friend, and I was intrigued by the relative permanence of these human remains, their continued significance—even participation—in the world of meaning, despite having been separated from selfhood, that quality so perplexingly erased (?) transformed (?) interrupted (?) by death.”
WENDY VIDELOCK lives in a small agricultural town on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. This is her second appearance in The Best American Poetry. Her books include Nevertheless (Able Muse Press, 2011), The Dark Gnu (Able Muse, 2013), Slingshots and Love Plums (Able Muse, 2015), and What’s That Supposed to Mean (EXOT Books, 2009).
Of “Deconstruction,” Videlock writes: “We have made our home on the edge of the Rockies, on the fringe of an arroyo in the high deserts of western Colorado. From here, nestled against the mesa, we are given an endless parade of wildlife and dramatically changing skies and weather. This is no country for unstudied birds, or ignorant ones. The poem in question arrived, as it were, in one fell swoop, and is told from the point of view, it seems, of a loquacious old crow.”
LUCY WAINGER was born in New York City in 1997. She attended Stuyvesant High School and studies creative writing at Emory University.
Wainger writes: “The first draft of ‘Scheherazade.’ was a found haiku, culled from my third-period English class notes at the end of sophomore year. I rewrote it as a prose poem during third-period English my junior year, and again during third-period Acrylic Painting my senior year. After that it no longer felt like ‘my’ poem, which is how I knew it was finished.”
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS was born in 1970 in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Detroit as Barn (Lost Horse Press, 2014). Her third book, Troubled Tongues, was chosen by Marilyn Nelson for the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize. A graduate of New York University (BA) and Cornell University (MFA), she is professor of English and associate vice president for strategic initiatives at Bates College. She has been on the faculty at Reed College and Columbia College Chicago. In 2012 she was appointed an Oregon Arts Commissioner, and currently serves on the boards of the Maine Humanities Council and the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Fund.
Of “Double Helix,” Williams writes: “I’ve become interested in the ways in which what we do to each other and how we are with each other are repeated and reflected across time and distance. After I read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, I shared the book with a colleague and it became clear to me that his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my father’s experience as a black man born in 1907 in Alabama were similar in seminal and instructive ways. I wanted to explore the personal choices both of these men made in their lives that made it possible for their children to feel deep affinity toward one another. I was also interested in finding a way—through form—to reflect the transmutation of meaning, what I imagine a double helix structure might look like in words, and to ultimately suggest that no matter those complications and differences, we humans are a single thing, of a single experience, complicated though it may be. This poem was one of two commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series exhibit. My enduring gratitude to Leah Dickerman, the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, for her vision and leadership, and to Elizabeth Alexander for inviting me to participate in the project.”
CHRISTIAN WIMAN was born in West Texas in 1966. He is the author of five books of poetry, most recently a selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), and two books of prose, Ambition and Survival (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and My Bright Abyss (FSG, 2013). From 2003 to 2013 he was the editor of Poetry. He now lives in New Haven and teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Wiman writes: “ ‘Prelude’ no longer has that title, though it remains a prelude to what follows, which is the book of poems I’m working on, which is propelled by, and punctuated with, other untitled fragments, all of which seem to be facets of some ultimate form that will, any day now, I feel quite sure, bring me everlasting peace.”
MONICA YOUN is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), and Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003). The daughter of Korean immigrants, she was born in 1971 and raised in Houston, Texas. A former lawyer, she teaches poetry at Princeton University and in the Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College MFA programs.
Youn writes: “In ‘Greenacre,’ I wanted the reader to occupy the estranged perspective of growing up Asian American in the South, where racial dynamics historically have functioned along a black/white binary. So the positionality of the speaker in the poem—both as not-black and as not-white—is crucial, racial identity as the coincidence of two competing negations, each coming into play at a different point. The central image—the two pale figures in the lake—acts as a fulcrum point for desire and revulsion, rejection and complicity, witness and culpability. And stylistically, this poem was quite a departure for me, veering close to narrative autobiography as I tried to trace the boundary between memory and the transformative imagination.”
C. DALE YOUNG was born in 1969 and grew up in the Caribbean and South Florida. He was educated at Boston College (BS 1991) and the University of Florida (MFA 1993, MD 1997). He is the author of the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001), The Second Person, Torn, and The Halo (Four Way Books, 2007, 2011, 2016) and a collection of linked short stories, The Affliction, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2018. He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he lives in San Francisco with his spouse, biologist and classical music composer Jacob Bertrand.
Of “Precatio simplex,” Young writes: “I spend the vast majority of my time working as a radiation oncologist, a physician who treats cancer patients with radiation therapy. Early in 2016, my aunt, for whom this poem is written, began the very rapid decline seen with many who have pancreatic cancer. Her pain was intense and severe. Despite caring for patients with cancer every day, I was not prepared for the feelings of helplessness I felt when faced with my aunt in this way. I found myself walking along the beach near my home one day talking to myself, verbalizing my awful desire that she pass because it seemed better than the pain she could not manage. And then I felt immediate guilt. I’m a doctor, a cancer doctor, who works every day to help people survive and live, and here I was asking God to take my aunt. A few days later, she died. Roughly one month after her funeral, I discovered a voice-mail message my aunt left on my phone. I don’t know how I missed it, but I had. When I heard her voice on my phone, I burst into tears. All of it came back to me: her decline; her pain; the awfulness of it. The poem came within hours of my outburst.”
DEAN YOUNG was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He has published eleven books of poetry and a book of prose about poetry, The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf Press, 2010).
Of “Infinitives,” Young writes: “Me and a million other poets will feel the loss of Tomazˇ Sˇalamun for the rest of our lives. There is for me an indisputable truth to his work, a truth that can only be accessed through the sort of volatile, unsubjugated imagination that seems in very short supply in our myopic contemporary picture. That’s the work I want to try to do.”
KEVIN YOUNG is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, Young is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011); and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Young’s next nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, will be out from Graywolf in November 2017.
Young writes: “ ‘Money Road’ traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood, Mississippi, for an oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright, barkeep, activist, waiter, and local legend. Turns out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why—not least of which because Emmett Till was lynched a few miles away in Money, with its cotton gins and train tracks, in 1955. Driving to Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accompanying what became the pilgrimage recorded in the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.
“I am writing this just days after the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled / or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of reprisal—should not be believed. I think in some small way it’s because we cannot believe the whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly, reasons.”
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER was born in Washington, DC, in 1967. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), and American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002). He is cotranslator, with historian Radu Ioanid, of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (Coffee House Press, 2008). Zapruder’s most recent book is Why Poetry (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017). An associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-large at Wave Books, and from 2016 to 2017 served in the annually rotating position of editor of the poetry column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.
Zapruder writes: “I wrote ‘Poem for Vows’ on the occasion of the wedding of two friends, the composer Gabriel Kahane and Emma Tepfer. I was unable to attend so wanted to send along something that naturally conveyed my genuine feelings of happiness for them, along with my equally genuine (and, from personal experience, ever-growing) sense of the mysteries of marriage. It’s such a strange and ancient thing to say, at a certain point in time, that ‘I bring to you my entire past: not just my own, but whatever came before that made me. And also, I bring to you my future, everything that cannot yet be known.’ As I worked on the poem, I was surprised that I started writing about my imagined version of climate scientists trying to figure out how to save our planet. I saw them looking at miniature storms. And then as I wrote the last lines, I discovered I believe that the deep act of faith two people bring to a union might, in some elusive yet essential way, be related to what we will need in order to rescue our species from its path toward destruction.”