The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

  Born in Ghana in 1962, KWAME DAWES spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. Dawes has edited anthologies and published two novels, a collection of short stories, a memoir, plays, and scholarly books. His sixteen collections of poetry include Back of Mount Peace (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and Wheels (Peepal Tree Press, 2011). In 2013 Copper Canyon Press will publish Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. A winner of an Emmy for his poetry and reporting on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, Dawes has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

  Dawes writes: “ ‘Death’ is part of a sequence of poems I have written that respond to the plays of August Wilson. These poems are collected in an evolving manuscript called ‘August: A Quintet.’ Wilson’s monumental project of charting the experience of African Americans in the twentieth century has appealed to me for its scope and grace, but especially for the wonderful Africanness of his vision and the way it engages themes that resonate with someone who sees himself fully shaped by the rewards and challenges of being a child of Africa and her Diaspora. ‘Death’ was at one stage titled ‘Death: Baron Samedi,’ alluding to the complex and fascinating Haitian deity of death and sexuality who makes a cameo in the poem. As startling as this ‘almost-persona’ poem is, it is important to understand it in the way that we understand the tools we often employ to overcome the things we most fear. Somehow, by speaking of death, one can achieve a certain mastery over its effects, which are deeply rooted in fear. In many ways this poem tells an old story about the power that we gain by arriving at the most base place of our morality and our humanity. If we can dance with death we become quite dangerous to those who seek to control us by the fear of death. And it is in this sense that I dared to speak this poem. I trust it is clear that I could never leave this poem claiming to have achieved such mastery of death.”

  CONNIE DEANOVICH was born near steel mills outside of Chicago in 1960 and was the first person in her Serbian family to go to college—Columbia College (BA) and DePaul University (MA). She began writing when she was six, was published while a student, and won a Whiting Writers’ Award in 1997. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches the occasional class, reads, writes, enjoys comedy, and attempts to live a spiritual life. Her books include Zombie Jet (Zoland Books, 1999), Watusi Titanic (Timken Publishers, 1996), and The Spotted Moon (unpublished, with excerpts published in such magazines as Hambone).

  Deanovich writes: “My poem ‘Divestiture’ encapsulates a difficult time made more painful by my own actions while ill, a time that’s best tossed on the compost for Nature, a power greater than me, to take care of. I want it also to be sheathed, however lightly, with Hope.”

  TIMOTHY DONNELLY was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1969. He is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien he is the coauthor of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012). He has received The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City.

  Donnelly writes: “I started writing ‘Apologies from the Ground Up’ while walking home from work one night. As I passed by the stoops in front of all the big Victorian brownstones in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, it occurred to me that, counter to the novelty we so often strive for and celebrate in our poetry and elsewhere, the staircase’s basic design seems to have undergone very little alteration (if any) since its invention back in the earliest days of yore. The poem’s first line, ‘The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries,’ shuffled up from the word-mush in my head, followed by ‘I’d notice it’—something of a boast, it seemed to me, in light of the length of time referred to (it half-implied some kind of superhuman longevity). Technically, I knew, this should have been ‘I’d have noticed it,’ but I liked the way the former prolonged the first line’s iambics and, moreover, I tend to welcome, when it feels right, the confusion of tenses in my poems, which often have to do, at least in part, with the past’s place in the present.

  “Thoughts of escalation and the distant past brought to mind the Tower of Babel, whose story has always fascinated me, and this in turn recalled a sort of nightmare fantasy I used to taunt myself with on the subway from time to time—namely, that all the thoughts in the train’s other passengers’ heads might suddenly become audible to me in one loud outburst. I imagined this would happen either through synchronized acts of speech or else by way of some unexpected telepathic event (I would hear them in my head). In either case, it would result in a chaos of tongues, a sort of local, personal Babel that I would have to suffer through for having been so preciously sensitive to the presence of others’ speech and thoughts and selves in the first place.

  “With the second line, a mild self-inflation had entered the poem, a more or less accidental egotism that seems to me to be a common byproduct of, if not a precondition for, the kind of voluble inner monologue the poem hopes to simulate. This egotism resurfaces in the subway Babel scenario and elsewhere, the poem’s speaker freely dropping in on Breughel, my psyche, certain facts concerning the American buffalo, etc. But he forges ahead in his own head mostly, which is related to but isn’t mine, struggling to identify with the collective even as his thinking compels him to remain distinct from it. This is the heart of the matter for me, this struggle—and how the wafture of it fans the pleasure and the shame of being too much oneself. Self-possessed but giddy with guilt over it, the speaker closes the poem with a big fat apology, but one in which he makes a fairly ridiculous and self-dramatizing spectacle of himself, even if he does get certain things, in my opinion, just right.”

  STEPHEN DUNN was born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including Different Hours (W. W. Norton), which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. His seventeenth collection, Lines of Defense, forthcoming from Norton in January 2014, will include “The Statue of Responsibility.”

  Of “The Statue of Responsibility,” Dunn writes: “For many years, I’ve had in one of my notebooks this quote from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: ‘I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.’ However, when I began the poem I had forgotten who said it. I may have even come to think that it was my idea. Only recently did I discover it in the notebook.

  “I thought the idea spoke to a fundamental American issue: Can our liberties be truly significant without a commensurate sense of responsibility? In retrospect, I’m glad that I’d forgotten it was Frankl’s idea, because I might have been too obviously indebted to it.

  “I think my poem became the invention it is because of my bad memory. As I was writing the poem, I did remember the lines that are attributed to the Pope, lines that I’ve loved that now—knowing what we know—seem irresponsible, if not obscene. The surprise and discovery of the poem was that I think the statement, ‘See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little,’ remains, for me, in spite of its misuse, important moral wisdom.”

  DAISY FRIED was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1967. She is the author of three books of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (2013), My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (2006), and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. She has received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships. She was awarded Poetry’s Editors Prize for a feature essay for “Sing, God-Awful Muse!” on reading Paradise Lost and the Nipple Nazi of Northampton. For two years she was the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphi
a with her husband and daughter.

  Of “This Need Not Be a Comment on Death,” Fried writes: “I worked on pieces of this—the film of the mother at age three, the robot bug, the birth narrative—at different times and very sporadically over a few years. Eventually I guess I decided the line breaks seemed random, or else accidentally set straight margins, and typed the poem inside those parameters just to get my mind off making certain kinds of decisions. Probably the line ‘This need not be a comment on death’ seemed like a stanza ending, and when I skipped a line the thing started to look like a fridge with a top freezer. The Paglia quote I remembered from when I reviewed her book Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems, which I mostly liked, but thought the comment about William Carlos Williams’s plum poem delightfully inane.”

  AMY GERSTLER was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. She teaches in the MFA program in writing at the University of California, Irvine. Penguin published her most recent book of poems, Dearest Creature, in 2009. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl (Penguin, 2004), Medicine (Penguin, 2000), Crown of Weeds (Penguin, 1997), Nerve Storm (Penguin, 1993), and Bitter Angel (North Point Press, 1990, reissued Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997). She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.

  Of “Womanishness,” Gerstler writes: “Contemplating my relationship, if any, to feminism was perhaps fodder for this poem. Wondering what a feminist or post-feminist lullaby could sound like may have been in the mix, too. Several smart female graduate students told me that since American women have now achieved equality with men, feminism is obsolete. I was amazed to hear this, and some of that astonishment filtered into the poem. Additionally, I am fond of the word ‘prissy,’ which I heard a lot in my childhood, and so wanted to try to build a little word-shrine around it.”

  LOUISE GLÜCK was born in New York City in 1943. Her Poems 1962–2012 was copublished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Ecco in 2012. She has won the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and served as the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2003 until 2010. Her collection of essays, Proofs and Theories (Ecco, 1995), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1993. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Yale University and Boston University.

  BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG was born in Wisconsin in 1954 but grew up in Arizona. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and is the author of seven volumes of poetry—Body Betrayer (Cleveland State University Press, l99l), In the Badlands of Desire (Cleveland State University, l993), Never Be the Horse (University of Akron Press, l999), Twentieth Century Children (Graphic Design Press, Indiana University, l999), Lie Awake Lake (Oberlin College Press, 2005), The Book of Accident (University of Akron Press, 2006), and Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems (New Issues Press, 2010)—and a collection of prose poems, Egypt from Space (Oberlin, 2013). Her work has appeared in the 1995 and 2011 editions of The Best American Poetry. She is professor of English at Arizona State University. She lives in Carefree, Arizona, “with many rabbits, quail, coyotes, javelinas, and the occasional bobcat.”

  Goldberg writes: “ ‘Henry’s Song’ was not supposed to be about Henry and writing this poem was a reminder that writing is sometimes an act of trust rather than clear purpose. The poem began from a few lines I wrote down after sitting in my friend’s backyard among the tall whispering trees, the piles of dead autumn leaves, one evening. There was a kind of loneliness—one with which, I think, most people are familiar—being outside in the dark but able to turn and see the lit kitchen window and its view inside. And I had the sense of being in an alien landscape, for the landscape familiar to me was not this one but the desert, the wide-open spaces and a clear view of the stars.

  “A couple of weeks later I came across the lines and began the poem, not knowing where I wanted to go. When I began writing about the cat I was sure I’d taken a wrong turn—a detour—and I tried several times to go somewhere else. Finally, for the sake of moving on, I kept the cat, figuring that once I got past it and the poem became clearer to me, I could cut the passage. That was the plan. But the poem had other ideas. The poem was smarter than I was. And, as it took shape, the cat came back again. This time, I just went with it. The title came last, though I resisted it, too. But the song had been Henry’s all along, carrying the music of the poem as I groped my way.”

  TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He won the 2010 National Book Award in poetry for Lighthead (Penguin). His other books are Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006), and Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002). He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a USA Zell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  Of “New Jersey Poem,” Hayes writes: “States and the states of mind those states evoke . . . I foolishly toyed with a fifty-states poem project akin to Sufjan Stevens’s fifty-state album project. But just as Stevens only got two (great) albums in, I only got to New York and this New Jersey poem before my interests shifted/drifted. I’m still writing poems about the weirdness of place. That’s what ‘New Jersey Poem’ seems to be: a poem of surreal realism, of doppelgangers and grief and recovery. But I’ve come to find titling the poems ‘Ohio Poem’ or ‘South Carolina Poem’ a shade boring. . . . Each time I look over this poem part of me hopes the Willie at its heart recognizes it as a gift to him. Part of me hopes he never recognizes any of it.”

  REBECCA HAZELTON was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1978. She is the author of Fair Copy (Ohio State University Press, 2012), winner of the 2011 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and Vow (Cleveland State University Press, 2013). She was the 2010–2011 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Creative Writing Institute and winner of the “Discovery”/Boston Review 2012 Poetry Contest. She teaches creative writing at Oklahoma State University.

  Hazelton writes: “ ‘Book of Forget’ is from a series of poems inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book and by Peter Greenaway’s movie of the same name. The poem reflects my fascination with burlesque, with vaudeville shows, and with theater and theatricality in general, the actions we perform willingly and unwillingly, and people’s assumptions about women’s talents based on their appearance. I’m fascinated by the power dynamic between performer and audience, between a woman on display and the people who watch her.”

  ELIZABETH HAZEN was born in Washington, DC, in 1978. She received a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches high school English.

  Of “Thanatosis,” Hazen writes: “In reading about the principle of ‘fight or flight,’ I came across a third defense—tonic immobility. Having long been intrigued by the idea that silence and invisibility are forms of power, I thought about what it means to play dead, and this exploration triggered memories of childhood games of hide-and-seek. A strict form seemed fitting.”

  JOHN HENNESSY was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and grew up in New Jersey. He went to Princeton University on a Cane Scholarship and received graduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas. He is the author of two collections, Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books, 2007) and Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013). He was a contributing editor of Fulcrum and is the poetry editor of The Common, a new print magazine based at Amherst College. In 2007–2008 he held the Resident Fellowship for Poetry at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst. “Green Man, Blue Pill” won the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review.

  Of “Green Man, Blue Pill,” Hennessy writes: “The term ‘Green Man’ us
ually refers to a foliate head or a face made of leaves, a sculpture most commonly found in medieval Christian cathedrals. No one knows for certain what these sculptures are or what they signify, but some claim they descend from various pagan figures of fertility or nature spirits—the horned god of the woods, the lover of a forest-dwelling goddess. The figure in cathedrals may be a symbol of rebirth representing the cycle of renewed growth each spring—a mirror to the spiritual cycle marked by the Christian celebration of Easter, Christ’s death and resurrection.

  “ ‘Green Man’ is a recent name—it comes from Lady Raglan’s 1939 article in The Folklore Journal—but the carved heads have appeared all over the world and for several millennia: in representations of the god Okeanos in Anatolia, the Roman Sylvanus, the Celtic Cernunnos, and even the Islamic tutor of the Prophets, Al-Khidr or Hizir, a Sufi figure whose name means ‘the Green One’ or ‘Green Forever.’

  “Likewise, ‘blue pill’ signifies a host of pharmaceutical and figurative pick-me-ups. Living near the woods in Amherst, Massachusetts, keeps me close to my Greens now, thank God, but I remember where I come from: Rahway, New Jersey, a couple of blocks from the brick chimneys of the Merck plant, where they kept it rising.”