The Best American Poetry 2012

by David Lehman

  BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970. Her most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She is also the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). She is poetry editor-at-large at Tin House magazine and teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children.

  Shaughnessy writes: “ ‘Artless’ is about failing to turn painful experience into art and wondering if the art about that failure can produce a kind of new treatment for the hurt it can’t erase, perhaps by writing over it, stanza by stanza, making room for other things, and lessening the power of the hurt. Thus the mantra-math of repeating ‘-less’ ‘-less’ ‘-less.’

  “I was wondering what exactly allows such intense pain and such vast hope to coexist in the same small life, sometimes in the same moment. And why is there so little to hold on to through all the wounding and grieving and rejoicing and loving and gratitude? What is the center and what the periphery? What is the meat and what the gristle? If I understand the heart as both our locus and our pump, this doubleness is a cruel trick: having a ‘crux’ means the rest of what constitutes us is appendage or garbage or baggage. And yet this central self, the heart, is also capable of standing apart, regarding, and performing itself and our emotions, our lives. Performing love.

  “This thought crushes me.

  “And so what about this possibility of art? If there is no unified self to ‘be’ fully self and heart at once always, why not embrace a poeticizing of our experience, why not be used by art? Push our lived life through the art and let what is extruded be beautiful?

  “Because being used makes us feel empty.

  “If the two meanings of ‘heart’ are ‘center’ and ‘part,’ the word ‘art’ also frames a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials but also with inner resources; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from ‘life.’ It is life’s counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.

  “The word ‘artless’ is tricky. The correct if old-fashioned meaning is innocence, free of guile or artifice. It is a word that means purity, but sounds like it means inelegant, clumsy, or unbeautiful: something that fails to be art.

  “One would think art could help manage life by transforming it into something beautiful and useful. But regular life has no such costume to slip into, no set to disappear into.

  “I’m artless, because real pain is not imaginary. I suffer it purely and without artifice. And yet I dress it up and give it speech and qualities as if it is an imaginary friend. I know my pure, true ‘artless’ self less and less and less with every stanza I write, trying to make this pain beautiful.”

  PETER JAY SHIPPY was born in Niagara Falls in 1961 and was raised on his family’s apple farm. He was educated at Northwestern University, Emerson College, and the University of Iowa. He is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press, 2003), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), and How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007). He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his wife, Charlotte, and their daughters, Beatrix and Stella.

  Of “Our Posthumous Lives,” Shippy writes: “As everyone knows, poets have a moral obligation to be 37 percent truthful. This elegy weighs in, faithfully, at 39 percent. It sports a white sheet, but underneath is the honest-to-goodness ghost of my dear friend, sorely missed.”

  TRACY K. SMITH was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972 and was raised in Fairfield, California. She attended Harvard and Columbia Universities and was a Wallace Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), and The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003). Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

  Smith writes: “In ‘Everything That Ever Was,’ I was interested in exploring some of the darker implications of elegy. What if there was an afterlife not just for the loved ones we have lost, but also for the events and relationships we are happy now to be rid of? What would it mean if the past continued to live on, aware of us but separated from our realm by the same thing that separates us from our beloved dead? The poem imagines a scenario in which the past tries to make contact with the present in the same ways a ghost or spirit of the deceased might reach out to the living.”

  BRUCE SNIDER was born in Columbia City, Indiana, in 1971. He is the author of two books, Paradise, Indiana (Pleaides Press/Louisiana State University Press, 2012) and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.

  Of “The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle,” Snider writes: “When I was in my early teens, a classmate’s older brother returned home quite ill from studying dance in New York City and died (of what, no one would say). A rumor went around school that he’d come home with a trunk full of women’s clothes. I have no idea if this was true, but the strangeness of that rumor and the silence accompanying his death spooked me in ways I couldn’t articulate at the time. I suppose that this poem—one of several I’ve been writing about the lives of gay men in rural America—is my way of filling that silence.”

  MARK STRAND was born in 1934 in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

  Of “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter,” Strand writes: “Years ago I wanted to write a poem in which my father, though long dead, writes to me from an undisclosed location, admitting that he has been in hiding but is still alive. I could never figure out what he would say in such a letter. As I was writing Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), I suddenly remembered the poem about my father. I wrote ‘The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter’ in one quick sitting.”

  LARISSA SZPORLUK was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1967. She is an associate professor of creative writing and English at Bowling Green State University and is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, Traffic with Macbeth, was published by Tupelo Press in 2011. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2003. She is a mother of three.

  Of “Sunflower,” Szporluk writes: “This poem was written in the spring of 2009 when my newborn, Sebastian, was quite ill. Because I was mostly in the hospital during that time, the poem began in my head and never made it to paper until it was completely done. And it wasn’t done until I realized that I wasn’t in the poem at all, nor was Sebastian; I had just accessed some kind of dark little mystery play that was taking place somewhere and the poem just knew to end when the sunflower’s honesty was being questioned.”

  DANIEL TOBIN was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1958. He is the author of six books of poems: Where the World Is Made (Middlebury College Press, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), and The Net (forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014). He is also the author of the critical studies Awake in America: On Irish American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University Press of Kentucky, 1999). He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in Hand, Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Pimone Triplett). He is currently Interim Dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College.

  Of “The Turnpike,” Tobin writes: “One of the first poets whose w
ork I fell in love with was John Donne. For all of his immense imaginative ingenuity and formal mastery there is something shamelessly intense about the poems—they are demanding intellectually and emotionally, physically and metaphysically, and immoderately so. Line after line of a Donne poem coveys the feeling that he is intent on outrunning the proverbial ‘dissociation of sensibility’ Eliot saw settling into Western culture after him, pedal to the metal across hairpin turns of rhythm, syntax, and conceit.

  “Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’ which ‘The Turnpike’ purposely echoes, rides on its own extended metaphor, though more as a pending salutation than as a valediction. Among other things the poem updates Donne’s physical metaphysics with its own metaphysical physics. Call it transportation as superposition, a doubling and redoubling of reality into parallel possibilities, though the poem refuses to drive wholly away from the palpable. Where does it arrive? Not at Donne’s twin compasses come round again, but at a spark of perpetual motion, and below that the universal engine’s catalytic stillness, inexhaustible: call it love’s pure fuel.”

  NATASHA TRETHEWEY was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She is the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010) and three collections of poetry, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Native Guard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. At Emory University she is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. Her new book, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.

  Trethewey writes: “The poem, ‘Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851,’ is primarily about language, and it arises from a consideration of the darker legacy of Enlightenment thinking—the taxonomy and codification of ideas of race and difference (and white supremacy). The anatomist’s lecture in the poem echoes my own sense of having been not only an object of curiosity (What are you? the constant question posed by strangers) but also a person subjected to being parsed in the American lexicon, by the nomenclature of miscegenation.”

  SUSAN WHEELER was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1955. She grew up mostly in Minnesota and has lived in or near New York since 1985. She is on the faculty of Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poetry collections include Bag ‘o’ Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1993), Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998), Source Codes (Salt Publishing, 2001), Ledger (University of Iowa Press, 2005), Assorted Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012). She is also the author of a novel, Record Palace (Graywolf Press, 2005).

  Of “The Split,” Wheeler writes: “Each major loss resonates, like overtones on a string, with deaths a person has known.”

  FRANZ WRIGHT notes that he “was born in Vienna in the spring of 1953. My father had a Fulbright, and he and my mother—newlywed high-school sweethearts from Martins Ferry, Ohio—couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, a fact I find staggering. I suppose people born in the late twenties and thirties of the twentieth century became full-blown adults by the time they reached puberty, in keeping with historical events.

  “I live in Waltham, Massachusetts—my wife and I have lived here for the past eleven or twelve years—and cannot say I have an occupation, although I led the graduate poetry workshop at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, spring 2004, and served as poet-in-residence at Brandeis University, here in Waltham, for a time, and was associated with the Center for Grieving Children & Teenagers, in Arlington, for a number of years. I have been publishing with Knopf since 2001.” Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Kindertotenwald, a book of prose poems, appeared in September 2011. Two new collections are in the works.

  Of “The Lesson,” Wright notes: “All I can say about my prose poem is that it is based on a true story, the terribly painful life of an eighth-grade friend of mine in Walnut Creek, California. She was a tough girl and she made it, God knows how. She told me about this event only years later, and I have not retained all the details. We’re still friends.”

  DAVID YEZZI was born in Albany, New York, in 1966. His books of poems are The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly Books, 2003) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008). He is the editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009). A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, he is executive editor of The New Criterion, and he teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Western State College of Colorado. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah, and their three children.

  Of “Minding Rites,” Yezzi writes: “The rabbi in the poem is based on my friend Phil Miller, with whom I used to work. On Fridays, a few of us would gather in Phil’s office to read and discuss passages from the Bible, always an enlivening hour given his perception and warmth. Phil is a model family man, who dotes on his wife and children. The anecdote about the flowers is basically true, though the breakup at the end is more a weighing of the possibility. The poem, like an anxious talisman, keeps me mindful of my failings and is a reminder that poems are not flowers—which is to say, I need to make a stop on my way home.”

  DEAN YOUNG was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, where he holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry. His most recent book is Fall Higher, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2011. His selected poems, Bender, will be published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.

  Of “Restoration Ode,” Young writes: “A lot of poets sometimes feel their poems have clairvoyant moments and can predict the course of events. No matter what Auden says, I believe poems can make things happen. In ‘Restoration Ode’ I set out to make something happen through a kind of spell. But as with all hocus-pocus, what happens doesn’t usually happen in the way you’d think.”

  KEVIN YOUNG was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1970. His books of poetry include Most Way Home (William Morrow, 1995), Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), For the Confederate Dead (which won the 2007 Quill Award for poetry), and Dear Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), which won a 2009 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in poetry. His most recent book is Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Young has edited The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, an anthology of contemporary elegies (Bloomsbury USA, 2010), as well as the collections Jazz Poems (2006) and Blues Poems (2003) from Everyman’s Library, a selected edition of John Berryman’s poems for the Library of America’s American Poets Project, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (HarperCollins, 2000). His book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the 2010 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and is curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011.

  MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED

  The American Poetry Review, eds. Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Elizabeth Scanlon. 1700 Sansom Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19103.

  The Antioch Review, poetry ed. Judith Hall. PO Box 148, Yellow Springs, OH 45387.

  Barrow Street, eds. Lorna Knowles Blake, Patricia Carlin, Peter Covino, Melissa Hotchkiss, and Lois Hirshkowitz (1998–2006). PO Box 1831, New York, NY 10156.

  Beloit Poetry Journal, eds. John Rosenwald and Lee Sharkey. PO Box 151, Farmington, ME 04938.

  Boston Review, poetry eds. Timothy Donnelly and Benjamin Paloff. 35 Medford Street, Suite 302, Somerville, MA 02143.

  The Cincinnati Review, poetry ed. Don Bogen. PO Box 210069, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069.

  Colorado Review, poetry eds. Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Matthew Cooperman. 9105 Campus Delivery, Department of English, Colorado State University, For
t Collins, CO 80523-9105.

  The Common, poetry ed. John Hennessy. Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002.

  Conduit, ed. William Waltz. 510 Eighth Avenue NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413.

  Five Points, eds. David Bottoms and Megan Sexton. PO Box 3999, Atlanta, GA 30302-3999.

  The Gettysburg Review, ed. Peter Stitt. Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325-1491.

  Granta, ed. John Freeman. 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR England.

  Green Mountains Review, poetry ed. Elizabeth Powell. 337 College Hill, Johnson, VT 05656.

  Gulf Coast, poetry eds. Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, Janine Joseph, and Karyna McGlynn. Department of English, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-3013.

  Harvard Review, poetry ed. Major Jackson. Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

  The Hudson Review, ed. Paula Deitz. 684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021.

  The Kenyon Review, poetry ed. David Baker. www.kenyonreview.org.

  Lambda Literary Review, poetry eds. David Groff and Jameson Fitzpatrick. www.lambdaliterary.org

  The Literary Review, poetry eds. Renée Ashley and David Daniel. Fairleigh Dickinson University, 285 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940.

  Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, editor-in-chief Laura McCullough. www.meadmagazine.org

  Memorious, editor-in-chief Rebecca Morgan Frank. www.memorious.org.

  The Nation, poetry ed. Jordan Davis. 33 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003-2307.

  New American Writing, eds. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. 369 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941.

  New England Review, poetry ed. C. Dale Young. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753.