The Best American Poetry 2012

by David Lehman

  JOY KATZ was born in Newark, New Jersey, two months before John F. Kennedy was shot. Her latest collection, All You Do Is Perceive, is due in 2013 from Four Way Books. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Chatham University and at the University of Pittsburgh and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and young son.

  Of “Death Is Something Entirely Else,” Katz writes: “When my son—now nearly five—was a baby, I spent all of my waking hours either feeling stoned or imagining my own death. The trance state was due partly to oxytocin, a natural hormone released during breast-feeding. I wasn’t breast-feeding; I’m an adoptive mom, so that caring-for-baby chemistry (it feels like a heroin high) was a nice bonus. As for imagining my death—I guess most new parents do. I never felt so mortal.

  “I tried for a long time to record the feeling of being with the baby in those hours when he was engaged in some activity (as in this poem: dropping sheets of printer paper onto my face) and not paying too much attention to me. This is one of those attempts. The feelings I experienced were terrifying and rapturous. Simply the act of regarding him was joy, and a cliff-edge mortality was part of that joy.”

  JAMES KIMBRELL was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1967. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Gatehouse Heaven (1998) and My Psychic (2006), both from Sarabande Books. He has won a Whiting Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently served as the Renée and John Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He taught at Westminster (Missouri) and Kenyon Colleges before moving to Tallahassee, Florida, where he is an associate professor of English at Florida State University.

  Of “How to Tie a Knot,” Kimbrell writes: “I wanted to ground this poem in a physical hunger that might give voice to a more or less spiritual desire, the desire for access to the real, whatever it might finally be. In this pursuit, a variation on a line from Robert Duncan’s gorgeous ‘In the South’ makes an appearance, but mostly what we have here are the musings of someone acting out a self-inflicted deserted island scenario in which half the day is spent trying to make sense of the conflicting desires that govern our days, while the other half is spent losing bait. Amen.”

  NOELLE KOCOT was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1969. She lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York City. She is the author of five books of poetry, 4 (Four Way Books, 2001), The Raving Fortune (Four Way Books, 2004), Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009), and The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011). She is also the author of a discography, Damon’s Room (Wave Books, 2010), and she translated some of the poems of Tristan Corbière from the French, which are collected in a book called Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). She is the widow of composer Damon Tomblin, who died in 2004, “and left me speechless. I write poems every day just to get away from the grief and sadness I experience without him being on the earth anymore. But still, I have a lot going on in my life, and am pretty happy when the day is done.”

  MAXINE KUMIN was born in Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, in 1925. Her seventeenth poetry collection, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990–2010, published by W. W. Norton, received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for 2011. A former United States Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, she lives with her husband on a farm in New Hampshire. A retired professor, she is “now content to be a writer and poet.”

  Of “Either Or,” Kumin writes: “I’ve paraphrased the late astronomer Loren Eisley, and somewhere I read the famous quotation from Socrates. These sorts of fragments tend to adhere; sometimes they lead to poems. The rest describes exactly how it is where we live.”

  SARAH LINDSAY was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1958. A Paracollege graduate of St. Olaf College, she holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her books are Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997), Mount Clutter (Grove Press, 2002), and Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She plays the cello with a regularly nonperforming group and has worked for more than twenty years as a copy editor for Pace Communications in Greensboro, where she lives with her spouse.

  Of “Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra,” Lindsay writes: “For domesticated Asian elephants, it’s hard to find gainful employment. In preserves that save their lives and give them space and water to bathe in, some have been taught to paint, and some made recordings as the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The instruments modified for elephants are mostly percussive—bells, gongs, drums—but the harmonica works well, too, and the occasional vocal ad lib. Given the apparatus, the players’ thumps and jangles and gongs are not exactly instinctive behavior, but they follow an elephant’s sense of the beat and the tone, not ours; and every ‘piece’ has an unresolved otherness like whale song.”

  AMIT MAJMUDAR was born in New York City in 1979. Having earned his MD in 2003, he works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Dublin, Ohio. His books of poetry are 0°, 0° (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2009) and Heaven and Earth (Story Line Press), which received the 2011 Donald Justice Award. His novels are Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) and The Abundance (forthcoming from Holt/Metropolitan).

  Of “The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim,” Majmudar writes: “Khwaja Mustasim is an elderly Afghan schoolteacher, Mustasim Mujahid Rahman. He currently lives in Herat, which Word’s spell-check function insists on switching to ‘Heart.’ Mustasim’s (Sufi Muslim) name happens to be an uncanny near-rearrangement of my own (Hindu) full name, Amit Himanshu Majmudar. (The extra ‘s’ is the serpent in the garden.) Mustasim likes to joke about this anagrammatical connection between us—he calls me his ‘infidel amanuensis.’ I call him my ‘dapple-dawn-drawn doppelganger.’ We are good friends, Mustasim and I.

  “Khwaja Mustasim dictated his ‘Autobiography’ to me in a form derived either from the Holy Qur’an or the Book of Taliesin. To this day I am uncertain which. I notice that he tells his life as a series of past lives, though he does not, as a Muslim, believe in rebirth—while I, as a Hindu, do. Might this ‘Autobiography’ be a kind of metaphysical joke? And if so, at whose expense?

  “I tried to pin old Mustasim down on this question, and he explained to me (in Sanskrit, no less) that a man of faith embodies his faith—and the whole history of his faith. ‘So when anyone, martyr or murderer, speaks Islam, he speaks me,’ said Mustasim. ‘I figured I should fight back like your long-lined poet Whitman: By singing myself.’”

  DAVID MASON was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1954. He is professor of English and creative writing at the Colorado College, and he serves as poet laureate of Colorado. A critic and opera librettist as well as a poet, Mason has written words for Lori Laitman’s oratorio, Vedem, which is now out on CD from Naxos, and also for her opera The Scarlet Letter, which will have its professional premiere at Opera Colorado in May 2013. Mason’s most recent books are The Scarlet Libretto (Red Hen Press, 2012), Two Minds of a Western Poet (essays; University of Michigan Press, 2011), and a memoir, News from the Village (Red Hen Press, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including Twentieth-Century American Poetry (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke; McGraw-Hill, 2003) and Contemporary American Poems for the General Administration for Press and Publication of the People’s Republic of China (GAPP), 2011, a project of the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Of “Mrs. Mason and the Poets,” Mason writes: “There’s something wonderful about being out of date, and also about reading books that are no longer current. When by chance I found Edmund Blunden’s biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley at Henderson Books in my home town of Bellingham, Washington, I immediately thought two things: I don’t know much about Shelley, and I know next to nothing about Blunden. I bought the book and devoured it. Blunden wrote with eccentric panache and the sympathetic authority of a real poet. Rather than trying to be exhaustive, he elucidated only the stuff that really interested him.

  “When I stumbled on a few details about Lady Mount
Cashell, the Irish aristocrat living in sin with a Mr. Tighe, and learned they had assumed the name Mason to protect themselves against scandal at home, I knew at once I would write something about them. I did not know I would adopt Mrs. Mason’s voice. Nor did I know I would make use of Shelley’s death by drowning in the poem, though dying young is a theme that has often arrested my attention.

  “As for the rest, it’s all imagination and empathy.”

  KERRIN MCCADDEN was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1966. She teaches English and creative writing at Montpelier High School and poetry at the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont.

  Of “Becca,” McCadden writes: “I like collisions. I like to bang things together inside a poem and use a tangle of rubber bands to hold it together. In this poem, there is a clear story, and, I believe, a clear understory, but there are also a pile of antique bird books, Kafka, geography, my standing love of etymology and fonts, Mary Oliver, and the terror and thrill of letting children go. There is something in the gathering storm of wide and disparate reading that charges me for writing. I am fond of a coming-of-age poem that leans on Kafka, of a wish for a beautiful life that leans on tattooing, of a man who creates beauty all day by inking people’s skin but does not know what a stanza is—who thinks it’s a kind of bird.

  “This poem is also an homage to a young poet whom I admire, Becca Starr. I bet she will outwrite me. Let this little paragraph be a gauntlet on the floor.”

  HONOR MOORE was born in 1945 in New York City, where she returned to live in September 2011, after years in the countryside of northwestern Connecticut. She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes (W. W. Norton, 2005), Darling (Grove Press, 2001), and Memoir (Chicory Blue Press, 1988). She has also written The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (Viking, 1996) and The Bishop’s Daughter (W. W. Norton, 2008), a memoir. She has edited Poems from the Women’s Movement (Library of America, 2009), The New Women’s Theatre (Vintage Books, 1977), and Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2004). She is on the graduate writing faculty at the New School and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Richmond (2011) and the University of Iowa (2010 and 2012).

  Moore writes: “ ‘Song’ began as many pages (yellow legal pad, handwritten in blue ink and pencil) that came late one Sunday afternoon when I allowed myself to imagine freely a night of lovemaking with the proviso that I use the physical world to render my delight and desire. I never throw away a draft, and this one, over years of revision, took no form, getting shorter and shorter as time went on. Finally, I thought, why don’t you try to make it a sonnet? And so it has ended up as an eccentrically tetrameter example of that daunting form. I hoped the title might encourage readers to take the poem on its simple, almost fairy-tale terms, entering its music, indulging its alliteration.”

  MICHAEL MORSE was born in New York City in 1966, grew up in Roslyn, New York, and attended Oberlin College and the University of Iowa. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

  Of “Void and Compensation (Facebook),” Morse writes: “A few years ago, within the span of a month, a number of my high-school classmates and I started to communicate again via Facebook. There they were, after twenty-five years of no contact, posting updates and pictures on a ‘wall.’ They were familiar yet different—some with families, some with different names, all of them magically narrowing a generation’s worth of time in two or three minutes. For anyone living in New York during 9/11, a ‘wall’ with words and photos has a haunting resonance. The poem emerged from contemplating a wall for the no-longer-missing (and their uncanny, sudden resurfacings) and remembering a wall for those still missing. I was thinking about friends no longer living, friends with whom I wish I were still in touch. In particular I miss Leo Millar, a college friend, and this poem is an elegy for him.”

  CAROL MUSKE-DUKES was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945. She is a professor at the University of Southern California and has also taught at Columbia, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two essay collections. Her most recent books are Twin Cities (Penguin, 2011) and two anthologies: Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, coedited with Bob Holman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) and The Magical Poetry Blimp Pilot’s Guide, coedited with Diana Arterian (Figueroa Press, 2011). Her other books of poetry include Sparrow (Random House, 2003), An Octave Above Thunder, New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 1997), and Red Trousseau (Viking/Penguin, 1991). Her collection of reviews and critical essays, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self, was published in the “Poets on Poetry” series of the University of Michigan Press in 1997. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, and the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. For many years she was poetry columnist for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. On November 13, 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Carol as California’s poet laureate.

  Of “Hate Mail,” Muske-Dukes writes: “I am (and have always been) an outspoken woman. Thus I’ve acquired a lot of friends and also a few enemies. Someone in the latter group began sending me anonymous ‘hate’ email not long ago. If you have ever received hate mail, you know that it is quite scary—especially if the unknown correspondent has ‘facts’ about your life, and appears to have some familiarity with your day-to-day life and your family and friends. The emails I received were somewhat threatening, but they were mostly just rantings by an odd, not-very-intelligent, very angry person who did not like me at all. (My webmaster and others tried to track the emails, but the author had disappeared into cyberspace, impossible to trace.)

  “At one point, I realized that this mail was kind of funny. The ability to reread the emails and laugh at them gave me the idea of writing a parody: writing hate mail to myself. Of course, the bizarre insulting perspective and nutzoid observations of my poem are original, are mine—but the ‘spirit’ of the disturbed correspondent inspired my ‘voice’ in the poem.

  “Goethe said, ‘A poet must know how to hate.’ I’ve always written poems of love and loss. I must say that I found it absolutely exhilarating to write a ‘hate’ poem, especially a hate poem to myself. It was cathartic, but it was also kind of inspiring—I think I may have a talent for this! I experienced the ‘freeing’ of a reckless voice, the freedom of (faux) anonymity. Perhaps I’ll crank out a couple more.”

  ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1981. He is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program. His first book of poems, Obscenely Yours, won the Kinereth Gensler Award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and hosts the White Swallow Reading Series in New York City.

  Nikolopoulos writes: “Like most of my poems, ‘Daffodil’ emerged out of a briny mixture of self-contempt and nostalgia. I was thinking of my early twenties—an unapologetic time for most of the gay men I knew—and how I wore my sex on my sleeve like a garish motel sign: Vacancy, always.

  “San Francisco, 2002: I was blond-streaked and giving it and obnoxious, like Wordsworth’s daffodils. But aren’t all such lavish displays a performance, an act of covering up? (Stale Nag Champa burns in the dormitory.) The poem’s more Gerard Manley Hopkins then—‘A little sickness in the air / From too much fragrance everywhere:’—since spring’s a prelude to death after all.

  “So I wanted to write a poem about youth that both admired and despised it at the same time. It’s a song of praise and condemnation then—both Hello, how’ve you been? and, thankfully, Good riddance.”

  MARY OLIVER was born in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights in 1935. She a
ttended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she did not receive a degree. Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963 by Dent Press in the United Kingdom. She has since published fifteen books of poetry and five books of prose. American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983) received the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992) won the National Book Award in 1992. The first part of her book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud (Da Capo Press, 2000) was selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and the second part, “Work,” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2000. Her books of prose include Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (Da Capo Press, 2004). Beacon Press published New and Selected Poems, Volume Two in 2005 as well as her first poetry CD, At Blackwater Pond, in 2006. Red Bird was published by Beacon Press in 2008. Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for more than forty years.

  Of “In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama,” Oliver writes: “The poem follows my usual path. I go out into the world and look and reflect, listen and consider. A great deal of what I find, and more and more lately, is simply action and noise. The world is changing, as it always has and always will. But something is missing in all that activity; the way we use the earth is like a victor’s use after the last battle. And yet everything is part of a mystery—the mystery—and therein, so I believe, is a holiness. So I didn’t pass the mule in haste but considered the flowers coming from its body, gave it at least a few moments of deep attention, and, with the last adjective, placed it within that mysterious (and holy) territory.”