The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

  ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her recent publications include Red Doc (Alfred A. Knopf) and Nay Rather (Sylph Editions).

  Carson writes: “ ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated 6 Ways’ was an exercise in translation undertaken just to see where it would go. It was certainly the hardest thing I did all year.”

  JOSEPH CERAVOLO (1934–1988) was born in Astoria, Queens, and lived in New Jersey. He studied with Kenneth Koch at The New School. He was the author of six books of poetry and won the first Frank O’Hara Award. He earned his living as a civil engineer. The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo, edited by Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press. “This haunting tome is a masterpiece, a complex concerto of poems moving on a visionary trajectory” (Anne Waldman).

  HENRI COLE was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry and received the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Award. A new collection, Nothing to Declare, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Boston.

  Of “City Horse,” Cole writes: “I was trying to write a poem (about a dead horse) that was many things: vocal, autobiographical (but mythic-seeming), dramatic (within the framework of a single sentence), and with a headlong galloping full of romantic ambition, sadness, and white heat. I don’t think I succeeded, but the striving was enough.”

  MICHAEL EARL CRAIG was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1970. He earned degrees from the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of Talkativeness (Wave Books, 2014), Thin Kimono (Wave, 2010), Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006), Can You Relax in My House (Fence, 2002), and the chapbook Jombang Jet (Factory Hollow Press, 2011). He is a certified journeyman farrier and shoes horses for a living near Livingston, Montana.

  Of “The Helmet,” Craig writes: “As I understand it the female emu lays her eggs and leaves. The male then sits on them for two months, not eating this whole time, just sitting and losing weight. He keeps getting up to fuss over the eggs, rotating a bit before sitting back down in order to distribute the warmth more evenly, and if you try messing with the eggs this male emu might try to kill you. I’m telling you this because some poems are like eggs I have to sit on. Sometimes I sit on them too long maybe—revision after revision, nit-picking, obsessing. But this poem came quickly and I bet it had something to do with whatever I’d been writing right before it. This sometimes happens to me—a poem is a reaction to its immediate predecessor. A friend suggested I describe the helmet: what kind of helmet is this? But I think that’s for the reader to decide. The word helmet is a powerful one. The whole concept, really. A shell to protect the head.”

  PHILIP DACEY is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Gimme Five, which won the 2012 Blue Light Press Book Award; Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems (Rain Mountain Press, 2010); and Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009). Born in 1939 in St. Louis, Dacey has written collections about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City. He has received a Discovery Award from the New York YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center and various fellowships (a Fulbright to Yugoslavia, a Woodrow Wilson to Stanford, and two in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts). With David Jauss, he coedited Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper & Row, 1986). After an eight-year postretirement adventure in New York City, he returned in 2012 to Minnesota—where he taught for thirty-five years at Southwest Minnesota State University—to live in the Lake District of Minneapolis with his partner, Alixa Doom.

  Dacey writes: “When I moved in 2004 from Minnesota to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I did not know the Juilliard School was in my neighborhood. I soon became a Juilliard junkie, attending recitals and concerts almost daily, sometimes more than once a day. Juilliard is one elite school where admission depends solely on the student’s dedication and ability and not on parental status or influence; a president’s son would not get in if he botched the audition piece. In summers, when Juilliard closed, I went into Juilliard-withdrawal. ‘Juilliard Cento Sonnet’ is meant to provide an inside look at music performance, at all the work and fine-tuning that goes on behind what may look effortless. I find that the technical, professional talk of musicians can be richly resonant, arguably itself a kind of poetry.”

  OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS was born in 1963, in Detroit. As a child she was enlisted to recite poems, by heart and in Ukrainian, to small patriotic crowds, and she has had divided feelings about poetry and its practice since. Her latest collection, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, is out in 2014 from Copper Canyon Press. Her work has appeared in five earlier volumes of The Best American Poetry (1995, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2011), sometimes under D for Davis and sometimes under K for Kalytiak. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, practices some law, and raises her kids.

  Of “It Is to Have or Nothing,” Kalytiak Davis writes: “I don’t really like this poem, which brings up all sorts of problematic ideas and emotions. It has some really good stuff in it, but doesn’t really heighten and cohere. Giving myself some benefit of that doubt, much like the relationship / breakup it delineates. I guess the most interesting thing about the poem (other than any possible naming of / updated proclaiming to the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X) is all the other poems that really happen/ed in and around it: that they are actually part of the dirt! The title is a Wallace Stevens line—I had forgotten from which poem, but am glad it’s ‘Poetry Is a Destructive Force,’ which I found in my ‘chats’ from that time; the first French words are from Rilke’s ninth—which was reread out loud with a friend also during that time (the notion of speech over procreation?); the Coleridge, well, really, just for its title-in-lapness, which, yes (!), really happened; and, finally, repeatedly: ‘Purple Bathing Suit,’ which really was Sent. That really good poem, taken out of the context of Meadowlands, is often (automatically, autobiographically) mis-gendered: the man confusingly wearing, at least in my ugly mind, a disgusting little purple Speedo. As I now know: it was in fact a maillot, and it was hers/mine, and I did not look as good in it as I had thought.”

  Born in Ghana in 1962 and raised in Jamaica, KWAME DAWES is a poet, novelist, playwright, anthologist, musician, and critic. He is the author of more than thirty-five books, including eighteen books of poetry, and numerous anthologies. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a faculty member of the Pacific MFA program in Oregon and a faculty member of Cave Canem. Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems appeared with Copper Canyon Press in 2013.

  Of “News from Harlem,” Dawes writes: “Sometimes reading a play by August Wilson can be a transporting experience. You feel you have entered a different world, a different era, and place so intensely captured that you feel as if you are there. And so here I am reading King Hedley II, and I see the name Marcus Garvey, and I think, of course, there is Garvey, and then I imagine that in the midst of the day-to-day details of trying to make ends meet for these characters, there must have been the news, in the twenties, of this man preaching some kind of revolution, and I thought, of course, sometimes we want to be a part of that big Voice, we want to slip ourselves into history as a way to affirm our existence. Garvey must have given so many people this magical gift. The poem is in praise of such dangerous and sweetly affirming magic. Garvey has always been the pioneering of West Indian Americanness, for me. Garvey’s life has been both an example and a lesson in how quickly xenophobia can canker embrace. This, too, is another kind of America.”

  JOEL DIAS-PORTER (aka DJ Renegade) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1962, and was raised there. He is a former professional DJ. He was the 1998 and ’99 Haiku Slam Champion. In 1995, he received the Furious Flower “Emerging Poet Award.” He appeared in the feature film Slam Nation. A Cave Canem fellow and the father of a young son, he has a CD of jazz
and poetry entitled LibationSong.

  Of “Elegy Indigo,” Dias-Porter writes: “This poem includes a line from the song ‘Open Heart’ by Sekou Sundiata, a line that as much as I loved the song, I couldn’t understand. It played over and over in my head, a haunting refrain. When Sekou suddenly passed it finally hit me in a kind of Zen flash, the line was a corollary of the old proverb ‘You don’t miss your water until the well runs dry.’ ”

  NATALIE DIAZ was born in Needles, California, in September 1978. She is director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, where she works and teaches with the last speakers of the Mojave language. She played professional basketball in Europe and Asia after playing Division I basketball for Old Dominion University. She is a Lannan Fellow and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-residency MFA program in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona.

  Of “These Hands, if Not Gods,” Diaz writes: “The images and hands of this poem began building during Mass one Sunday. The reading was about the laying of hands on someone, and I began thinking of how my own hands work upon a body. How they do things both beautiful and awful—to trace a throat gently in one moment, to hold it tightly in another—a type of sweet wreckery that makes me feel godlike and helpless all at once.”

  MARK DOTY was born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953. His nine books of poems include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which won the National Book Award for poetry, and, most recently, A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures (Prestel, 2013), a collaboration with the painter Darren Waterston. He is also the author of five volumes of nonfiction prose, most recently The Art of Description: World into Word (Graywolf, 2010). A distinguished professor at Rutgers University, he lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. “Deep Lane” is the title poem of his new collection, which W. W. Norton will publish in 2015. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2012.

  Doty writes: “Deep Lane is a real road, in Amagansett, New York, a beautiful one, but in truth it’s the name I love: the two monosyllables, the two long vowels, the sense of going forward and down at once, descending into . . . what? Five years ago, when I began to tend a home and garden a couple of miles away from Deep Lane, that name began to draw associations toward itself, a magnet gathering bits of psychic metal; ‘Deep Lane’ came to suggest for me a kind of visionary pull toward the subterranean, the underworld, the life concealed beneath this one. I wrote a poem called ‘Deep Lane,’ but as soon as I was done I knew there was more for me to investigate in that phrase, more than I’d foreseen. At the very back of my garden is the tail end of the Ronkonkoma Moraine, a ridge of earth pushed up by the last Ice Age glacier 10,000 years ago. My narrow bit of land rises perhaps a dozen feet, just enough to create a sense of mystery, and when the wind blows down in it, sometimes I’m not sure when and where that wind is from. This poem wants to consider the idea that it’s the wind blowing out of Nowhere, the wind of the grave, and perhaps we could take pleasure in the energizing possibility of being no one, giving ourselves over to a free, wild shape-shifting wind. What might be gained from the self having no border, and what lost?”

  SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY was born in New York City in 1965. He was raised in Toledo, Ohio, and Manchester, New Hampshire, with many summers spent in Portland, Maine. As an adult he has lived in Syracuse, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, and for more than a decade on and off in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of thirteen books. They include All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2014); Scything Grace (Etruscan Press, 2013); Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2010), which was a finalist for Binghamton University’s Milton Kessler literary prize for the best book by a poet over forty; the novella The Blue City (Marick Press/Wayne State University, 2008); and Broken Hallelujahs (BOA Editions, 2007). He has won two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. He works at a pool hall and teaches private students.

  On “The Blues Is a Verb,” Dougherty writes: “Most of my work is fueled by despair, loss, and disjunction. But it also exhibits the defiance not to die that I have embraced—as have many friends, despite loss of jobs and other setbacks. We enact the Blues, the poem says. It moves, it darts, it jabs. I can locate the poem’s emotional origins and landscape in two urban areas where I’ve lived: in the east side of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, where I used to wander, drink, and shoot pool. Some lines come straight from these neighborhoods. Mrs. Janofsky, my neighbor, with her wasted son. My wanderings at night, walking everywhere, a cue on my back. Playing men for money in bars, the gaze in my eyes that said, don’t. Often we ended up laughing, talking of music and sports and our women. I lost more than enough to keep everyone laughing. The anger from all the years of losses unraveled slowly. The poem’s last line owes its origin to watching my sick girlfriend’s mother scratch a lottery ticket. All of us scratching lottery tickets, bottling up change. The drugs that I’ve seen take too many. This is the America for most of us, which too often doesn’t make it into American poetry: hence the riff on Eliot. There is nothing romantic here, except survival. No one is coming to save us but ourselves. And besides, even if we have nothing, we have our voices, bitterly fierce; we have our verbs.”

  RITA DOVE is a former United States Poet Laureate (1993–1995) and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952, she is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Sonata Mulattica (2009) and American Smooth (2004)—both from W. W. Norton & Company, as well as a collection of short stories, a novel, and a play. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). She has received numerous honors, among them twenty-four honorary doctorates, the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama, the only poet to have both medals to her credit. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2000.

  CAMILLE DUNGY was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1972, moved away two years later, and proceeded to live in eight different cities before returning to Colorado with her husband and daughter in 2013. She is the author of three books of poetry: Smith Blue (2011), Suck on the Marrow (2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006). She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) and coedited From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (2009). She has served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (2006). Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, two NAACP Image Award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She now teaches English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

  Of “Conspiracy (to breathe together),” Dungy writes: “Pieces of this poem come from many experiences, and each of them is true, though none is the complete truth. I keep notes on my experiences and my reactions to them, and I’ve learned to be patient about selecting how to use these notes. When my friend the Reverend Jack Shriver gave the etymology of the word ‘conspiracy’ one Sunday, he reminded me that the negative connotations we give the word need not be the only possibilities for understanding the act of breathing together. I realized, then, that I had discovered the glue I needed to connect some of my disparate notes. Of course, as I drafted the poem, even more revealed itself to me. That’s the beauty of poetry.”

  Born in 1954, CORNELIUS EADY was raised in Rochester, New York. He attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College. He is the author of Hardheaded Weather (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008); Brutal Imagination (2001); the autobiography of a jukebox (1997); You Don’t Miss Your Water (1995); The G
athering of My Name (1991); BOOM BOOM BOOM (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), which won the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980). In 1996, Eady and Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving black poets of various backgrounds and acting as a safe space for intellectual engagement and critical debate. Along with Derricotte, he edited Gathering Ground (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has collaborated with jazz composer Deidre Murray in the production of several works of musical theater, including You Don’t Miss Your Water, Fangs, and Brutal Imagination. He has won a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He holds the Miller Chair in Poetry at the University of Missouri.

  VIEVEE FRANCIS was born in San Angelo, Texas, in 1963. She considers herself permanently at home in the Detroit metropolitan area, where she has lived off and on for three decades. She is the author of two poetry collections, Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for a second book (Northwestern University Press, 2012). She won a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and a 2013 Bread Loaf Fellowship. She is an associate editor for Callaloo and a visiting professor of creative writing at Warren Wilson College in the mountains of Western North Carolina.