The Best American Poetry 2013

by David Lehman

  “ ‘When the Men Go Off to War’ is about elevating the loneliness and tedium of the everyday to something magical. It is about the desire to take part in something meaningful, the way we imagined our husbands were halfway across the world taking part in something meaningful, even though the ‘adventure’ is always shadowed by the realities of war, and the possibility that someone won’t come home again. The writer James Salter once said of his experiences as a pilot during the Korean War, ‘It had been a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life,’ and I think we will look back on these days and miss them. Because one day they won’t be there anymore—the base full of people we knew once, and the constant roar of the jets overhead and the parties and all those loud or lonely nights—and even though we will know it wasn’t the best time of our lives, we will miss it.”

  DAVID KIRBY was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1944. He is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His books include The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press), which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Black History Nonfiction Books of 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement called it “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s latest poetry collection is The Biscuit Joint, and there’s more on www.davidkirby.com.

  Of “Pink Is the Navy Blue of India,” Kirby writes: “Visitors to a recent exhibition of erotic Japanese woodblock prints at the Honolulu Museum of Art were greeted by a text noting that, while sex ‘provokes within us intensely diverse emotional reactions, few subjects are as universally understood and as instrumental in forming our identities as adult human beings.’ Okay, two out of three ain’t bad: yes, sex punches different buttons in everybody, and no doubt it determines who we are as adults. But ‘universally understood’? Well, not by me. Sex, or at least good sex, usually starts with some talking and joking around, and soon clothes are flying everywhere, and then the next thing you know, something’s happening that you can’t really control or want to. And then you’re staring at the ceiling, thinking something along the lines of ‘Wow. How’d that happen?’

  “Probably the last thing you’re thinking is, ‘Well, I’m certainly a human being now!’ But sex is at the heart of everything that’s best about humanity: relationships, marriage, families, and the way we treat these subjects in art, music, and literature. So while it was nice of the porno salesman at the flea market to say ‘get you a bunch,’ I’m pretty sure I’ll learn more how people operate from works like Tristan and Isolde.

  “Not long ago, the transcendent American poet Barbara Hamby, who is also my wife, took a group of young teens to see The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a film in which the son of the commandant of a German concentration camp befriends and tries to rescue a Jewish boy on the other side of the wire, though the attempt fails and both boys die in a gas chamber. From what Barbara told me, not only had her group of youngsters never seen such a movie, they didn’t even know such movies existed. They had been raised on Disney, the Tolkien trilogy, and the Harry Potter films, ones in which small and powerless individuals triumph over forces of evil that whole armies of adults are unable to defeat. That’s a lovely thought, but there’s a lot more to life and art than schoolkids trouncing wizards.

  “And speaking of movies, sooner or later those youngsters will get their first gander at pornography, if they haven’t already. I hope what they see doesn’t make them think that’s the way people treat each other in their bedrooms. And I hope it isn’t too long before they step into a classroom where some kindly professor will lead them through the great works of the canon, the ones that withhold rather than surrender, that conceal rather than reveal, that keep the mystery alive.”

  NOELLE KOCOT (born 1969) is the author of six books of poetry, two from Four Way Books and four from Wave Books, the most recent being Soul in Space (2013). Wave has also published a book of her translations of some poems by the French poet Tristan Corbière (Poet by Default, 2011). She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. Her poems appeared in the 2001 and 2012 editions of The Best American Poetry. She lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York.

  Of “Aphids,” Kocot writes: “I wrote this poem while I was still pretty functionally insane and afflicted. I am no longer that way—I have made my descent into the human. I wish everybody in this book, and everyone having anything to do with it, much love and luck and joy.”

  JOHN KOETHE was born in San Diego in 1945. A Princeton graduate, he received his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), which received the Frank O’Hara Award; Falling Water (HarperCollins, 1997), which received the Kingsley Tufts Award; and Ninety-fifth Street (HarperCollins, 2009), which received the Lenore Marshall Prize. “Eggheads” is contained in his most recent book of poems, ROTC Kills (HarperCollins, 2012). He is also the author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), and Poetry at One Remove: Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He was the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, and in 2010 was the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), and lives in Milwaukee.

  Koethe writes: “I began writing ‘Eggheads’ after listening to an interview with Dave Brubeck on NPR in which Terry Gross used the word, which I hadn’t heard in a long time. It made me start remembering the political climate in which the word first appeared, and I thought of the poem as a companion piece to the title poem of my most recent book, ROTC Kills, which is also a memory poem with political overtones, though focused on the late ’60s and early ’70s, while ‘Eggheads’ is focused on the ’50s and early ’60s. I have some elaborate theoretical views about poetry that ought to make political poems impossible; nevertheless, I’ve written about two dozen of them. So much for theory.”

  DOROTHEA LASKY was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1978. She is the author of AWE, Black Life, and Thunderbird, all from Wave Books. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and Washington University, she teaches poetry at New York University, where she directs the Writers in Florence program, and in the MFA program at Columbia University. She has held visiting positions at Wesleyan University and Bennington College. She writes the “Astrological Advice” column for The Poetry Project Newsletter and curates the poetry reading series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn.

  Lasky writes: “ ‘Poem for Anne Sexting’ is a love poem to Angelo Nikolopoulos’s Anne Sexting persona, whom I saw one night from across a crowded room in all her angelic glory. I was endlessly captivated. Part Cleopatra, part glamour girl from 1912, and of course, part Anne Sexton, Anne Sexting will surely be a muse to more poets in 2013 and beyond.”

  DORIANNE LAUX was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She was raised in San Diego, California, and has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oregon, and Alaska. In 2008 she moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches and directs the program in creative writing at North Carolina State University. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Book of Men (2011) and Facts about the Moon (2005) from W. W. Norton, as well as Awake (1990), What We Carry (1994), and Smoke (2000) from BOA Editions.

  Laux writes: “ ‘Song’ was written long after the event described, inspired when my husband confessed that he had fallen from the ladder while cleaning the gutters. I kept envisioning what that fall was like, and of course, what my life would have been like without him. The poem was an outgrowth of those dark imaginings. And though this is obviously a praise poem, the dark
ness of its inception is there in the first lines and picked up again and again in the ‘weak, brief sun,’ the decay and muck, the ‘burning, hurtful stuff,’ the scarred arms, the use of the word ‘falls,’ the statements about joy and time and mortality. Death permeates the poem, which wasn’t apparent to me until I was asked to write this paragraph. I had seen it as an ode to my husband and our life together, though it’s clear to me now that it’s also, as Robert Frost says, ‘a momentary stay against confusion,’ against falling.”

  AMY LAWLESS was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1977. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. She is the author of two poetry collections, Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books, 2008) and My Dead (Octopus Books, 2013). She was named a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry in 2011.

  Of “It Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a Narcissist,” which she wrote in collaboration with Angela Veronica Wong, Lawless writes: “We are human beings figuring out how human beings are human beings. How we are vulnerable, lonely, humiliated, desired, how we hurt and act [cont. Angela Veronica Wong]”

  AMY LEMMON was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1963 and moved to New York City in 1996. She is the author of two poetry collections, Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009), and coauthor, with Denise Duhamel, of ABBA: The Poems (Coconut Books, 2010) and Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2011). Amy holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She lives with her two children in Astoria, Queens.

  Of “I take your T-shirt to bed again . . .” Lemmon writes: “As Proust famously asserted, smell is the sense that most powerfully prods the sentimental memory. Neuroscience tells us this is due to the proximity of the olfactory nerve to both the amygdala (the almond-shaped center of primal emotion) and the hippocampus (the horseshoe-shaped area where memories are formed, sorted, and stored for later recall). One whiff can transport you to a specific time and place, and an object smelling of someone can serve to remind you of being with them—for good or ill.

  “The T-shirt and the lover are long gone, but if I try hard enough I can recall the scent. What would happen were I to come across that particular smell again is anyone’s guess. At the very least, I still have the poem.”

  THOMAS LUX was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946. He published two books in 2012: Child Made of Sand (poetry, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and From the Southland (nonfiction, Marick Press). He is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Of “Outline for My Memoir,” Lux writes: “Many of my friends were writing and publishing memoirs. I said to my mother one day, ‘Ma, I can’t write a memoir because my childhood was too normal and sane.’ So she said, ‘You could write about that time your horse got stuck in the mud.’ That’s how this poem started.”

  ANTHONY MADRID was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1968, and works as a private tutor in Chicago. His first book, titled I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, was published by Canarium Books in 2012.

  Of “Once upon a Time,” Madrid writes: “Of all the pieces in the present collection, this one surely has the lowest ambitions. It existed, floor to ceiling, for a long time before I even wrote it down. I believed, during that period, that the poem had no future, and that the only people who would ever hear it would be the persons whose idiosyncrasies are encoded within it. The whole thing is code. Code and more code. I sent it to Poetry as a joke. And now it’s in this thing, and people are going to think this is how I write.”

  SALLY WEN MAO was born in Wuhan, China, in 1987 and grew up in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she is currently a lecturer in creative writing and Asian American narratives. Her first book of poetry, Mad Honey Symposium (forthcoming from Alice James Books in May 2014), is the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a finalist for the 2012 Tupelo First/Second Book Award. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, 826 Valencia, and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.

  Mao writes: “ ‘XX’ was the first poem I wrote at Cornell. The week I moved to Ithaca, I remembered craving fruit, dreaming about fruit. Durian, rambutan, persimmons, mango, longan, blackberries, nectarines—the fat, delicious fruit flew, raving, like pigeons or flying saucers in the axes of my nightmares. It was the first time in a while I felt homeless, out of my element—and this is paradoxical, considering it’s Ithaca, the home of Odysseus. ‘XX’ attempts to evoke feral, unwanted craving that is the condition of being a girl about to feel the unspeakable. The terror of molting, the terror of the chrysalis cracking, the terror of seeds germinating: ‘XX’ attempts to be a metamorphic diary. The speaker grapples with how those moments of womanhood—of sex and bliss and nakedness—are replaced always with demons and memories. The skin peels off and the inside is tender. I’m thinking duende. I’m thinking death. I’m thinking about what it means to want too much, and how this wanting is often unwelcome—you try to shut it out, you try to snuff it with your knife, stuff it in a suitcase, but it oozes. It’s everywhere. It’s a part of you.”

  JEN MCCLANAGHAN was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1973. She was educated at Antioch College, Columbia University, and Florida State University. She is an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in East Texas, where she lives with her husband and their son. Her first collection of poems, River Legs, was chosen by Nikky Finney for Kore Press’s first-book award. It will be published in 2014.

  Of “My Lie,” McClanaghan writes: “I was at the doctor’s office for my annual exam. I was a smoker then and at the age—thirty-five, I think—when a doctor won’t prescribe birth control because of the health risks. In the waiting room, I read how The Hague was dragging its feet about issuing an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir. When the nurse took me back, she asked if I smoked and I lied, telling her I did not. In the poem I am thinking about my lie as a small crime compared to the atrocities of Bashir, but I’m thinking about what I’ve done with my life, wondering if my poetry is too private, too concerned with myself and not the world, and wouldn’t that be the real crime?”

  CAMPBELL MCGRATH was born in Chicago in 1962. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago, Florida Poems, Seven Notebooks, and most recently In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012). He has received the Kingsley Tufts Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He has lived for the past twenty years with his family in Miami. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

  McGrath writes: “The poem here entitled ‘January 17’ first saw publication in the literary journal Fugue, under the title ‘Krome Avenue’; it later appeared in my book Seven Notebooks, published in 2008, by the Ecco Press. It was republished last year by PEN America, in a special issue of the magazine on the theme of ‘maps,’ which captures perfectly the impulse of the poem: to map the shifting boundary of the city of Miami as it invades and overwhelms its agricultural outskirts; to map the dynamic and overlapping cultures and populations that compose South Florida; to map the consciousness of the narrator as it ambles from image to thought, landscape to meditation. The original title of this poem denoted a physical location, while its current title provides a chronological coordinate: taken together they chart an existential whole, since it is the nature of the human experience that our lives are inextricably interwoven with both time and space. Best of all titles for this shape-shifting poem may be the one that appears in the table of contents of Seven Notebooks: ‘January 17 (Krome Avenue).’

  “Maps are models of the world; they represent rather than explain. It is up to us, the readers of maps, to interp
ret, decipher, understand. ‘January 17’ is a poetic map of a cultural borderland in a time of transition, an attempt at lyrical documentation. Here is the world, it proposes, here are its flowers, here are its human conquerors and their complex occupations and manifestations. Since prose accommodates a breadth of information that the lyric line struggles to contain, the poem’s formal structure includes dense prose blocks, sculpturally deconstructed prose strophes, and short-lined couplets. Its evolving syntactical texture modulates the poem’s shifts between sensory images and abstract ideas, between reverie and reportage. Everything changes, Heraclitus teaches; you cannot step into the same river twice. Which is not to say that you cannot plunge into the river as you find it, and luxuriate in its transient, all-encompassing flow.”

  JESSE MILLNER was born in Blackstone, Virginia, in 1953. He has published two poetry collections, The Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow (Kitsune Books, 2009) and Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation (Kitsune, 2012). He lives in Fort Myers, Florida, and teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University.

  Millner writes: “I wrote ‘In Praise of Small Gods’ on my back porch. I usually get up early and write in that time when it is barely light out and everything is dark and mysterious. I drink coffee and watch the world assemble beneath the fading stars and the shapes of things becoming slash pine, firebush, and birdbath. Because it’s so early, I’m still returning from dreams, so the unconscious makes surprising associations and that strange world pushes up against the tangible one of steam rising from my cup, the soft fur of my dog against my bare right foot, the wah-wah-wah-ing of narrow-mouthed toads in the drainage ditch. The poem praises a world that still vividly asserts itself, even in this despoiled Eden that is Florida in the twenty-first century. Each morning the dog and I try to bear witness.”