As early as I can remember my father recited poetry to me, not simply for the pure pleasure of it but also, I think now, to prepare me for the inevitable losses to come, for the ways of the world I would inhabit, and to provide a means for making sense of it. Like Robert Frost, he believed in the necessity of a thorough and early grasp of the figurative nature of language. “What I am pointing out,” Frost wrote,
is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.
Both my parents knew that I would need an “education by poetry” to be safe in the world I’d entered. In 1966, when I was born, their interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi and as many as twenty other states in the nation, rendering me illegitimate in the eyes of the law, persona non grata. On the way to the segregated ward at the hospital my mother could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets: private citizens, lawmakers, and Klansmen—often one and the same—hoisting them in Gulfport and small towns all across Mississippi. The twenty-sixth of April that year marked the hundredth anniversary of Mississippi’s celebration of Confederate Memorial Day—a holiday glorifying the Lost Cause, the old South, and white supremacy—and much of the fervor was also a display in opposition to recent advancements in the Civil Rights Movement: the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
My mother had come of age in Mississippi during the turbulent 1960s, turning twenty-one in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the Watts Riots, and years of racially motivated murders in the state. Unlike my father, who’d grown up a white boy in rural Nova Scotia—free-ranging, hunting and fishing in the woods—my mother had come into being a black girl in the Deep South, a world circumscribed by Jim Crow laws. If my father believed in the idea of living dangerously—the adventurer’s way—the necessity of taking risks, my mother had witnessed the necessity of dissembling, the art of making of one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile deference. In the summer of 1955, when she was eleven years old, she’d seen what could happen to a black child in Mississippi who had not behaved as expected, stepping outside the confines of racial proscription: Emmett Till’s battered remains, his unrecognizable face in my grandmother’s copy of Jet magazine. And in the years to follow she’d watched Mississippi ignite with racial violence as the Civil Rights Movement reached its zenith.
Having grown up steeped in the metaphors that comprised the mind of the South—the white South—she could not miss the paradox of my birth on Confederate Memorial Day: a child of “miscegenation,” a word that entered the American lexicon during the Civil War in a pamphlet. It had been conceived as a hoax by a couple of journalists to drum up opposition to Lincoln’s reelection through the threat of amalgamation and mongrelization. Sequestered on the “colored” floor, my mother knew the country was changing, but slowly.
Over the years, as my parents and I went out together, encountering people disdainful of and often hostile to their union, to our family, they grasped even more the necessity of my education in metaphor, though they began to diverge in what exactly I might need to know.
I don’t recall when I first noticed that divergence, but a moment stands out to me from a trip we took to Mexico a couple of years before their marriage ended. We’d been traveling along a seemingly endless stretch of blacktop as the sun began to set, hanging low and heavy in the sky. “How’d you like to have that ball to play with?” my father asked, pointing to it. “Don’t be silly,” said my mother. “You know she’d burn her hands.” Even then I knew something had passed between them, some difference in how they perceived the metaphors by which I would need to be guided: for my father, all was possibility; for my mother, danger from which I’d need to be protected.
Only one souvenir of that trip remains: a photograph. In it I am alone, there are mountains in the distance behind me, and I am sitting on a mule. It had been my father’s idea to place me there, a linguistic joke within a visual metaphor: the sight gag of a mixed-race child riding her namesake, animal origin of the word “mulatto.” In the photograph I see my father’s need to show me the power of metaphor, how imagery and figurative language can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things; that we might harness, as with the yoke of form, both delight and the conveyance of meaning; that language is a kind of play with something vital at stake. My mother knew, as another figurative level of the photograph suggests, that I would have to journey toward an understanding of myself, my place in the world, with the invisible burdens of history, borne on the back of metaphor, the language that sought to name and thus constrain me. I would be both bound to and propelled by it. She knew that if I could not parse the metaphorical thinking of the time and place into which I’d entered, I could be defeated by it. “You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”
Growing up in the Deep South, I witnessed everywhere around me the metaphors meant to maintain a collective narrative about its people and history—defining social place and hierarchy through a matrix of selective memory, willed forgetting, and racial determinism. With the defeat of the Confederacy, wrote Robert Penn Warren, “the Solid South was born”—a “City of the Soul” rendered guiltless by the forces of history. “By the Great Alibi,” he continues, “the South explains, condones, and transmutes everything . . . any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition. . . . By the Great Alibi the Southerner makes his Big Medicine. He turns defeat into victory, defects into virtues. . . . And the most painful and costly consequences of the Great Alibi are found, of course, in connection with race.”
The role of metaphor is not only to describe our experience of reality; metaphor also shapes how we perceive reality. Because the Deep South of my childhood was a society based on the myths of innate racial difference, a hierarchy based on notions of white supremacy, the language used to articulate that thinking was rooted in the unique experience of white southerners. Thus, in the century following the war, the South—in the white mind of the South—became deeply entrenched in the idea of a noble and romantic past. It was moonlight and magnolias, chivalry and paternalism. The blacks living within her borders, when they were good, were “children” to be guided, looked after, protected from their own folly, “mules of the earth,” “darkies” with the “light of service” in their hearts. When they stepped out of line they were “bad niggers” from whom white women—“carriers of the pure bloodline”—needed to be protected; they were “animals” to be husbanded into a prison system modeled on the plantation system—or worse, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” On the monumental landscape, in textbooks, they were un-storied but for the stories told about them. In my twelfth-grade history book they were “singing and happy in the quarters,” “better off under a master’s care.” According to my teacher, they were “passive recipients of white benevolence” who’d “never fought for their own freedom”—even as nearly 200,000 fought in the Civil War. And when they seemed exceptional in the mind of the South, they were magical: You’re smart for a black girl, pretty for a black girl, articulate—not like the rest of them . . .
I recall the myriad ways poetry helped me to contend with the reality of the world I faced then, and the thinking of the people in it: how Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” gave historical context to the dissembling I saw from older black men in our neighborhood—many of them my uncles, deacons in the church—when they were confronted and harassed by police; how Langston Hughes’s “I, too, sing America” imagined a future that was just, in which everyone—regardless of race—would be offered a seat at the table; how W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” showed me that I was not alone in feeling the seeming indifference of the whole world to my grief when I lost my mother and that loss, instead of isolating us, can make us part of a community in the world of a poem, a shared experience; and how Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” from which my father often recited, prepared me not only for our geographic separation after the divorce, but also for the joy of recollection, the happy memories of familial bonds and ties to place—even in the face of sorrow:
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!
It was in this spirit that I read and selected poems for The Best American Poetry 2017. It should be noted that, in many ways, any anthology could serve as an autobiography of the mind of the anthologist, and certainly this was true for me. Looking back on it now, I see clearly my preoccupations. I have been in a state of bereavement almost all of my adult life—ever since the spring I turned nineteen when my mother was killed. Over the years there have been periods of intense grief, immediately following more losses, and then other periods in which the feeling of grief was less intense but nonetheless present as an integral part of who I am. Not long ago, I felt the sharpness of it again: I lost my father, the poet Eric Trethewey, near the end of 2014. The whole year following, as I was reading poems for a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine and watching terrible events unfold in the news, I wanted to call him so that we might speak as we always had, that I might find comfort in his wise words, his voice on the other end of the line. I wanted to engage in the ongoing conversations we’d had my entire life about poetry and justice, and about loss—of which novelist Pat Conroy wrote, “There is no teacher more discriminating and transforming.”
And then came 2016, into which the headlines of the previous two years began to bleed and overlap: images of mass shootings, scenes of refugees fleeing the devastation and violence of their homelands, videos of police using deadly force on unarmed citizens, acts of terror internationally and at home. There seemed to be no respite. Too, there were more losses of poets I’d loved and admired. It was my fiftieth year—a child of interracial marriage—and I was poised to celebrate the anniversary of advances in civil rights gained by Loving v. Virginia while, at the same moment, the presidential election season gave rise to increasingly visible and mainstream forms of white nationalism and separatism, uncivil discourse, and outright lies repeated and spun to look like facts. It was a hard year in which the enduring rhythms of poetry provided a singular kind of respite. In particular, I found solace in the ways in which contemporary poets were turning their piercing gazes on the many facets of our historical moment and showing us with urgency the necessity of a proper poetical education in metaphor in order to contend with the tumultuous times we now face—both individually and collectively. We need the truth of poetry, and its beauty, now more than ever.
The range of subject matter and form in these seventy-five poems is vast, moving from Albergotti to Zapruder. Albergotti’s poem that opens the book employs and elevates the seemingly found language, institutional in nature, of the documents police officers must complete after using deadly force; Zapruder’s poem lifts the vernacular to the uses of the sacred and ceremonious, offering a blessing for lifelong happiness at a wedding. Judson Mitcham’s “White” examines racial privilege and deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference and hierarchy: the bedrocks of ongoing and often oblivious forms of white supremacy. Kevin Young’s “Money Road” is a timely intersection with a troubling history—the murder of Emmett Till—during the same year that Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused the fourteen-year-old Till of impropriety, finally speaks the truth. She confesses that she lied about the encounter that led to his murder at the hands of her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J. W. Milam. With its litany of losses, Nickole Brown’s “The Dead” becomes a collective lamentation for all our dead, while Sharon Olds’s “Ode to the Glans,” with its singular focus, becomes a collective celebration. Like all of these poems, the late Claudia Emerson’s “Spontaneous Remission” embodies the salutary achievements of poetry: the creation of a poem as an act of faith, generative in the face of death and destruction, hopeful in the face of despair, and the experience of reading a poem—at once pleasing and troubling and enlightening, a respite.
Throughout this difficult year I did not have my father to talk with, but I had the poems we’d shared, ones I’d turned to in the past, and a whole new set of poems—the ones in this anthology—to bring context and clarity and a renewed sense of joy through the pleasures and transformative powers of language. I am reminded, too, by all of the poems gathered here, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words: “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” Though this year I was often consumed by grief and overwhelmed by the sadness of our national and international tragedies, all of these poems spoke to me as records of the best and happiest moments in American poetry. Were my father here we might spend an evening reading them out loud and, perhaps, recite to each other these lines from Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Dedication,” which speak to the necessary call to witness found in these pages, a charge to contend with our historical moment—the need for truth—through the elegant envelope of form that a poem is:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.