The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

  In the United States, as Codrescu noted, it is hard for a poem to get noticed, even if it does its best to give offense—but, of course, that may be an underrated virtue rather than a lamentable fact. The case of Ajami’s “Tunisian Jasmine” is one extreme example of the power of poetry to disturb a tyrant’s sleep. Where the freedom to speak your mind is not a novelty, the poet may have an agenda other than a political one but no less dangerous. We have galloped from analog to digital models of the universe. Some poets will continue to find inventive ways to adapt to the new paradigm; others may feel that their writing constitutes an act of nonviolent resistance—a vote for Gutenberg, the book, the old seemingly obsolete technologies of communication. V. S. Pritchett, in the introduction to an anthology of stories, wrote in 1980, “In a mass society we have the sense of being anonymous: therefore we look for the silent moment in which singularity breaks through, when emotions change, without warning, and reveal themselves.” That such a breakthrough is more likely to happen in a freely written poem rather than one that has been commissioned and vetted by committee for a ceremonial purpose should not come as a surprise.

  • • •

  Denise Duhamel, who chose the poems for The Best American Poetry 2013, has appeared in the series seven times since Louise Glück and A. R. Ammons picked poems of hers in back-to-back volumes in 1993 and 1994. It would have been eight times if the editor hadn’t declined to include herself: her “Ode to the Other Woman’s Ass” in Ecotone (and reprinted on The Best American Poetry blog) has the traits—humor, warmth, passion, intelligence, and genuineness—that make her poems irresistible. “Exuberance is beauty,” wrote William Blake. “Energy is eternal delight.” Denise has as much natural exuberance as anyone practicing the art, with a seemingly unlimited amount of renewable energy. I have known and worked with Denise for many years. When a production of her play How the Sky Fell ran for four performances in an Off-Off-Broadway theater in 1997, I was in the cast. Over the years she and I have spent more than a few afternoons collaborating on a play, poems, or other projects. I knew we’d have fun working together, and I suspected that she would have a large appetite for the many kinds of poetry being written at the moment. But I was not prepared for her intensity of focus. No sooner did she receive a magazine than its contents were devoured and considered for an ever-growing list of poems that elicited Denise’s enthusiasm. It is always difficult making cuts, but Denise’s professionalism ruled the day. In the making of one of these books the production schedule requires more than one deadline. Never before in the twenty-six years of this series did I work with an editor who managed to beat every deadline along the way.

  Among the poets we lost in 2012 was Adrienne Rich, who edited the 1996 volume in the series—a radical book by any standard. Adrienne included poems by high school students, prisoners in correctional facilities, outsiders of many stripes. She wanted to represent the full range of poetry written in North America while maintaining vigilance against “self-reference and solipsism.” She wanted “poems that didn’t simply reproduce familiar versions of ‘difference’ and ‘identity.’ ” On the contrary, she wrote, “I was looking for poems that could rouse me from fatigue, stir me from grief, poetry that was redemptive in the sense of offering a kind of deliverance or rescue of the imagination, and poetry that awoke delight—lip-to-lip, spark-to-spark, pleasure in recognition, pleasure in strangeness.” Rich’s volume ranks among the most controversial in the history of the series. Harold Bloom took such offense that when, in 1998, he edited a retrospective collection celebrating our tenth year, he omitted any poem from The Best American Poetry 1996 and devoted his entire introduction to an attack on that book in particular and on the literary aesthetics that inform it. Any editor would have been hurt by such an assault. Adrienne took it in stride. “I look at it as a weird tribute,” she said. Adrienne’s poem “Endpapers,” which appeared in Granta and was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2013, concludes with these lines:

  The signature to a life requires

  the search for a method

  rejection of posturing

  trust in the witnesses

  a vial of invisible ink

  a sheet of paper held steady

  after the end-stroke

  above a deciphering flame

  I have a couple of friends who left Saigon on the day the last Americans cleared out in April 1975. One of them clipped the New York Times obituary of Nguyen Chi Thien, who died in October 2012 at the age of seventy-three. “He was a very great Vietnamese poet,” my friend said. Thien, a U.S. citizen since 2004, had lived in Santa Ana, California, since coming here. His poems, collected in Flowers from Hell (1996), are available in English, French, Spanish, German, Czech, Korean, and Chinese—but not in Vietnam. “My poetry’s not mere poetry, no, / but it’s the sound of sobbing from a life, / the din of doors in a dark jail, / the wheeze of two poor wasted lungs, / the thud of earth tossed to bury dreams, / the clash of teeth all chattering from cold,” he wrote. The “Solzhenitsyn of Vietnam,” as he came to be known, did not evacuate Saigon in 1975. He stayed and cast a fearless eye on the injustices of the Communist regime. Three times Thien was arrested. He did a long stretch in Hoa Lo Prison, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” Of his six years there he had to spend three in solitary confinement. He had access to no books. Worse, he lacked a writing implement and the paper on which to write. He suffered from tuberculosis and was prone to respiratory illnesses. The conditions for even the healthiest prisoner were inhumane. The hunger was constant, the summer sun unforgiving, the winter cold almost unendurable. There were times when the guards chained Thien naked in his cold cell. Nevertheless he wrote. He marked the days with poems, seven hundred of them in all; he composed them, worked on them entirely in his head, and then committed them to memory so effectively that when the time came he was able to write them out for publication—to the wide acclaim they deserved even apart from the miracle of their composition. Not until 1995 was Thien permitted to leave Vietnam. By then the evidence of his heroism was irrefutable. It was his poetry that kept him going, poetry that sustained and nourished him. In a prison camp in 1976 he wrote, “I have only poetry in my bosom, / And two paper-thin lungs / To fight the enemy, I cannot be a coward. / And to win him over, I must live a thousand autumns!”

  * * *

  1. In “Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City,” later retitled “The Revolt of Islam,” Shelley’s longest poem, an epic of twelve cantos in Spenserian stanzas.

  2. In a chorus in “Hellas,” often printed separately and identified by its first line, “The world’s great age begins anew.”

  3. In “Epipsychidion.”

  4. Petri’s post appeared on the Washington Post’s blog on January 22, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/01/22/is-poetry-dead/

  5. John Deming’s “open letter” appeared in Coldfront on Tuesday, January 22, 2013. http://coldfrontmag.com/news/open-letter-to-alexandra-petri

  6. “Qatari Poet Sentenced to Life in Prison for Writing,” npr.org, December 4, 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/04/166519644/qatari-poet-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-writing

  Denise Duhamel was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961. Her books of poetry include Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), and The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series for Poetry. She has collaborated with numerous poets, composers, and visual artists, and is coeditor (with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad) of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry nine times in all, beginning with Louise Glück’s selection of her poem “Feminism” for the 1993 volume. Her books published abroad include Afortunada de mí (translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David González) by Ba
rtleby Editores in Madrid in 2008 and Barbieland (translated into German by Ron Winkler) by SuKulTuR Press in Berlin in 2005. A professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater. An Off-Off-Broadway production of a theater piece, How the Sky Fell (based on her chapbook of the same name), ran in 1997; American Doll (based on her book Kinky) has been produced from 1993 onward at various venues in New York City and Washington, D.C., and several colleges including Iowa State University, Penn State University, Alfred University, and Lycoming College. She has been awarded residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide, Italy), Fundación Valparaíso (Almeria, Spain), and Le Château de Lavigny, Maison d’écrivains (Lausanne, Switzerland). She lives in Hollywood, Florida.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Denise Duhamel

  If you are reading this, you are not dead. The world has not ended in 2012 as some had predicted, using the Mayan calendar as their guide. You are somewhere holding a book or reading these words on a screen.

  “If you are reading this, you are not dead,” writes Megan Amram in her Tumblr post “Anniversary” on September 11, 2011. So I begin my introduction to The Best American Poetry 2013, borrowing her sentence and her sentiment. In her manifesto decidedly for “epiphany” and in opposition to a “chic backlash against passion,” Amram argues “that closing your mind to sincerity and praise and appreciation might be the first step in squandering the fucking awesome human condition you possess.”

  I hope you find the poems you are about to read very much alive and “fucking awesome.” Because of the alphabet or because of divine fate (the title of Kim Addonizio’s poem suggests both), the first three poems in this volume contain the word “fuck.” Two of the first three poems also contain the word “mayonnaise.” Go figure.

  Like the twenty-five guest editors who preceded me, I was asked to come up with the “best” seventy-five poems from the hundreds of literary magazines published the previous year. I read with enthusiasm, and this mandatory reading was a pleasure. I felt a kinship with the editors of the magazines, whose hard work brought poets to readers, me being one of them. The task may have strained my eyes to the point where I am now a certified wearer of reading glasses, but it also made me very much present and engaged. In his lecture at Ohio University’s Spring Literary Festival in 2012, Richard Rodriguez (echoing the syntax of St. Augustine’s “Those who sing pray twice”) said, “Those who write live twice.” I would add that those who read also live twice.

  The poets included in this volume create with unabashed energy and verve, and doubles abound. For the first time in the series, a collaborative poem appears. In “It Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a Narcissist,” Angela Veronica Wong and Amy Lawless blend their voices into a flawlessly sassy narrative about the push and pull of romance. Twins appear in both Louise Glück’s and Sherman Alexie’s poems. Included are two poets with the last name Collins—Billy and Martha—whose poems serve as counterpoints to each other. Billy Collins’s poem “Foundling” ends with an abandoned infant catching “a large, pristine snowflake much like any other” on his tongue. The snowflake dissolves into the next poem, “[white paper 24],” Martha Collins’s discomforting and sonically fascinating poem about race. In “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV,” Stacey Waite writes about the rigidity of gender expectations (a double in itself), and in an earlier poem, Sally Wen Mao’s “XX,” the speaker’s mother is “half-asleep in her gender.” Two poets, Traci Brimhall and Elizabeth Hazen, invoke the benevolent spirit Thanatos, the Greek personification of death. There are two poems about the aftermath of suicide, one by Lauren Jensen and another by Maureen Seaton. The cops who are “all so young” in Mary Ruefle’s prose poem “Little Golf Pencil” seem to stroll into the next prose poem, Seaton’s “Chelsea/Suicide,” where they “come to her window and tap, telling her it wasn’t safe for a woman alone in the middle of the day in a car near the river in a world like this one.”

  Elsewhere also the alphabet provides lucky happenstance. The two most direct and celebratory love poems (Dorianne Laux’s “Song” and Amy Lemmon’s “I take your T-shirt to bed again . . .”) are side by side. Later, a trio of poems about mortality are linked by authors’ last names. D. Nurkse’s “Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes” serves as a preparation for death, the metaphor rooted in childhood with a father who “carried [him] from the car up the tacked carpet / to the white bed.” Immediately following is Ed Ochester’s “New Year,” in which the speaker gets “a phone call from [his] mother / who died in April.” Paisley Rekdal’s “Birthday Poem” starts with the sobering line “It’s important to remember that you will die”—which makes the birthday that much more poignant, reminding readers of their aliveness.

  —

  Some previous guest editors of The Best American Poetry found the word “best” problematic, and others wrestled with the slippery definitions of “poetry.” I found I struggled most with the word “American.” I understood the basic concept—I was to choose work written by poets living in or from America, most likely from magazines published in the United States, though I was able to consider American poets published abroad. How was I able to get in as much of America as possible? How was I to make America relevant to the rest of the world, should anyone beyond these borders show interest in these poems?

  When Philip Roth won the Booker International Prize in 2010, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, complained that “the U.S. is too isolated” and we “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” In The Huffington Post, Anis Shivani characterizes Roth’s work as “literary tricks hiding behind layers and layers of self-protecting irony, which means—what to the reader in some other country?” Although Shivani pointed the finger of blame at Roth, others have directed their discontent at contemporary American poets.

  When Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) won the1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy in its citation praised her for writing “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” So when does irony open up a text to a reader rather than shut her out? I kept this question in mind as I read this past year and hope that the poems I’ve collected here—poems about heartbreak, birth, aging, death, learning, history, sex, myth, family, friendship, the interior life—speak not only to America but to a larger audience. While David Hernandez’s “All-American” is as American as you can imagine, the poet is not waving the Stars and Stripes, but rather waiving the Stars and Stripes, refraining from expected slogans to examine in an inclusive way who we are:

  No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down

  the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise,

  but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers.

  Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully

  steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.

  In “The Statue of Responsibility,” Stephen Dunn presents a first-person American speaker, aware of and unsettled by his role in the world, visiting the insides of a theoretical monument “regularly, taking the elevator up / to its chest area where I’d feel something / was asked of me.” Looking outward, Lawrence Joseph’s “Syria” is almost unbearable in its detail, yet this witness goes where neither “the Red Crescent / nor journalists are permitted entry.” Mark Jarman’s “George W. Bush” is an unnervingly complex look at our former president.

  Other poets in this volume confront America’s legacy of war and its consequences. Sherman Alexie’s 101-line list poem “Pachyderm” interweaves members of a family that includes a paraplegic father who served in Vietnam and one of his sons who was killed by an IED in Iraq. Alexie chooses the remaining son to hold much of the grief in this poem and remarks on their childhood game of playing war: “They never once pretended to be killed by an Improvised Explosive Device.” In Jean Valentine’s poem “194
5,” a menacing father “comes in at the kitchen door, waving like a pistol / a living branch in his hand.” Victoria Kelly imagines an alternate reality for families in “When the Men Go Off to War,” in which women

  float off,

  the houses tucked neatly inside our purses, and the children

  tumbling gleefully after us,

  and beneath us the base has disappeared

  Anna Maria Hong’s “A Parable” examines the complacency of the members of her allegorical Class E who are given “the opportunity to bless / the day’s carnage.”

  These poets bring so much subtlety, nuance, and resourcefulness to their work that readers never feel as though we are being held hostage to an agenda. As Robert Frost wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” There are many ways to enter and connect to these poems in which we, as readers, can sense poets making decisions on the page, rather than having mapped out a strategy beforehand. Sharon Olds has referred to the poem that “may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.” Each poem’s purposefulness is its unique reasoning and the sounds it makes, the spirit in which it reaches into the world.

  Poetry mustn’t try to compete with the sound bites of politics or the breezy vapidity of pop culture. Rather it should serve as an antidote for them. (An exception might be made for Elinor Lipman, who tweeted an entertaining, quirky political poem each day from June 27, 2011, until the election in November 2012, for a total of more than five hundred poems.) Poetry brings with it freshness and delight, a sweeping-out of the mind. In the nineteenth century, long before television and Facebook and our many other distractions, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, “It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” In 1963, delivering a speech in honor of the late Robert Frost, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy noted, “When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” The poems collected here are personal and cultural expressions of thinking and being, full of images not selling anything tangible, language seducing only the reader’s intellect and emotion, utterances free of commodity.