Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

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  PAULA BOHINCE was born in Pennsylvania in 1976. Her three poetry collections are from Sarabande Books: Swallows and Waves (2016), The Children (2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008). She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America and the United Kingdom National Poetry Competition. She lives with her husband in Pennsylvania.

  Bohince writes: “When I lived in Paris, I went on long walks and filled my eyes and notebooks with images from art and everyday life. The ones in ‘Fruits de Mer’ rested in mind for several years before they rose to the surface in a low-key castle in Scotland, the poem then revised with good suggestions from Herbert Leibowitz, editor of Parnassus. The imagined feast in Hemingway’s La Closerie des Lilas seemed more crucial each time I visited it: the ambivalence in the luxurious meal against lines that hold so much death. The Le Monde headline translates to ‘Justice is served.’ This poem, in its push-pull of war and hope, to me seems mostly about the power of images and imagination, wedding the visible and invisible.”

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  MICHELLE BOISSEAU was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1955. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she is senior editor of BkMk Press and a contributing editor of New Letters. She won the Tampa Review Prize for her fifth book of poems, Among the Gorgons (Tampa Review Press, 2016). A Sunday in God-Years (University of Arkansas Press, 2009) examines her paternal ancestors’ slave-holding past in Virginia into the seventeenth century. Other titles include Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press, 2003), Understory (Northeastern University Press, 1996), and No Private Life (Vanderbilt University Press, 1990). The eighth edition of her textbook, Writing Poems (Longman Publishing Group), was written collaboratively with Hadara Bar-Nadav. Boisseau has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Boisseau writes: “Over the past several years, as I worked on the poems that became Among the Gorgons, I have been exploring the double helix of the beautiful and the monstrous. As I was thinking about an incident between two of the giants of literature, ‘Ugglig’ came to be.”

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  MARIANNE BORUCH, a native of Chicago, passed through its parish schools, then the University of Illinois at Urbana, and finally the University of Massachusetts, where she received her MFA in 1979. Her eighth poetry collection, Cadaver, Speak, came out in 2014 from Copper Canyon Press, which will publish her Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing in 2016. The Book of Hours (2011), from the same publisher, won the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her prose includes two essay collections on poetry, Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995) and In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity University Press, 2005), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she was a 2012 Fulbright/Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College.

  Of “I Get to Float Invisible,” Boruch writes: “A lot of time is spent overhearing things. Shards and hesitations and curious claims. I stumbled into this fractured real story by accident, the brother of the woman in question arguing how impressive his sister’s poems about adultery were. Adultery! I was a stranger. No matter. But words mean and follow you.

  “And images haunt: her brother’s blithe retelling in public, the young woman drinking alone, writing such things as her world breaks around her. Maybe I was merely picking up the soundtrack of what it is to live with so little privacy now, taking in intimacies we have no right to know, engaged in an empathy strange and compelling, often out of the nowhere of subway cars and elevators and grocery lines. People move, hold forth, rage and love and shrug while we let a world fall through us. And some of it catches.”

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  DAVID BOTTOMS was born in Canton, Georgia, in 1949. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His most recent book of poems, We Almost Disappear, was released in fall 2011 by Copper Canyon Press. He has held appointments at the University of Montana, Mercer University, Johns Hopkins University, and Georgia Tech, and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writing Seminars. He served for twelve years as poet laureate of Georgia. He is a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and a founding editor of Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.

  Of “Hubert Blankenship,” Bottoms writes: “For a little more than fifty years, my grandfather ran a country store in Canton, Georgia. He sold mostly canned goods, but also an assortment of things ranging from horse feed to fishing lures. Most of his customers were very much like Hubert Blankenship, poor but proud. They were hardworking dirt farmers and cotton mill hands.”

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  JOSEPH CHAPMAN was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1982. He studied English, philosophy, and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went on to earn an MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. His work was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2012. He is currently in the first year of a master of divinity program at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

  Of “32 Fantasy Football Teams,” Chapman writes: “It may seem bold to start off an artist’s statement with self-congratulations, but rereading this poem I’m struck by just how plain funny and alive it is. That probably shouldn’t have been the case. When George David Clark, a good friend from my MFA days and the editor of 32 Poems, solicited a list poem from me, I knew I needed to collaborate with someone if I was going to write anything resembling humorous poetry. The thing is, I didn’t feel up to writing a playful poem on my own—my own poems were stalled, I felt stalled at my desk job—and so I selfishly got in touch with someone whose energy would be catching. Laura Eve [Engel], with whom I co-taught at the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia and who is also one of the funniest people I know, agreed to collaborate with me. It took only one or two emails to settle on our title. The puns came pretty quickly after that, as did the last line. It was a blast to write. In ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ Robert Frost famously cautions poets, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.’ However, this collaborative poem reminded me of the simple delight of wordplay. It reminded me that if I’m not having fun then the reader probably isn’t either.”

  See Laura Eve Engel, coauthor of “32 Fantasy Football Teams,” in these Contributors’ Notes.

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  MICHAEL COLLIER was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953. His two most recent collections of poetry are Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and An Individual History (W. W. Norton, 2012). He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

  Of “Last Morning with Steve Orlen,” Collier writes: “A few days before Steve Orlen passed away, on November 16, 2010, a little less than three weeks after having been diagnosed with lung cancer, he told his wife, Gail, that he’d never been happier in his life. He had spent the afternoon in his backyard, stretched out on a bed in full pasha mode, visiting with friends, talking about poetry and art, gossiping, telling stories, and offering up semi-oracular statements. Although he hadn’t eaten for several days, when a friend showed up with a loaf of homemade challah, Steve ate hunks of it slathered with butter and fig jam. I was fortunate to be there, among his friends, and he did seem truly happy. He was also fearless, and the way he faced death inspired and encouraged those who were with him. It’s not surprising that he was happy; friendship was one of the most abiding forces in his life.

  “I met Steve in 1975 through John Murphy, my closest high school friend fro
m Phoenix, who was taking undergraduate creative writing classes from him at the University of Arizona. Two years later, I entered the MFA program at Arizona, where I spent two important years studying with Steve. Not only did he have tremendous influence on the way I wrote poems, but his generosity and openness as a person were a model of affectionate friendship. He was also wonderfully irreverent and loved letting the air out of pretentious behavior, real or perceived. One of his missions with me was to wear off what he thought was a sheen I had picked up by going east to Connecticut College, where I had been a student of William Meredith’s. This is how he chided me about my woeful condition, in a 1976 letter: ‘Tho you do have some polish & a bit of manners, you’re still just a regular asshole from Phoenix, and your poetry stuff should reflect it.’

  “In 1999, a few weeks before we were to teach together at Warren Wilson College, Steve sent me a letter in which he described the importance of having ‘at least one “intimate” friend to pal around with’ during the residency, so that ‘every once in a while’ they could ‘get deeper into friendship.’ He offered this as an example of that ‘deeper friendship’: ‘One late night, last residency with Tony [Hoagland], and I’m in my chair and he’s sitting cross-legged on my bed in his long johns, on his head, a bright yellow T-shirt tied up to stay put, not like an Arab headdress, but like a—what?—a clown hat, or something. I laughed at him, and he said in his defining, factual, defending, self-laughing way, that bald people lose most of their body heat through their heads. I tell you, I love friendship almost more than anything in life.’

  “ ‘Last Morning with Steve Orlen’ follows pretty closely the visit of the final morning I had with Steve. The day before, I’d heard Gail say she was trying to find a way to go to the gym, to get out of the house for a bit, so we agreed that since I wake early and was staying with Buzz and Linda Poverman a few blocks away, I’d come over at 7 a.m. She thought Steve would likely be asleep and all I’d need to do was be in the house in case he woke, but when I arrived and just as I was about to ring the doorbell, I could hear Gail laughing and Steve chuckling in his distinctive, resonant way, so I opened the door on my own, called out, and followed their voices to Steve’s study, which had been set up as his sickroom. Gail was sitting at the middle of the bed and Steve was propped up at the head. It was clear that whatever Steve had been saying to Gail had delighted her and probably even embarrassed her, which is something he liked to do. I asked Steve, perfunctorily, how he’d slept, and then he launched into the business of writing the novel, English or Russian. The ‘faithful amanuensis’ refers to the fact that over the past few days when Steve would say something he was particularly proud of, that seemed to have poetic possibilities, he would ask whoever was near to write it down, and by the same token if you said something he liked, he’d want you to add it as well to the notebook being kept for his utterances. I wish I could serve up one or two of these mostly surreal bon mots, but I can’t, although you get a sense of what they were like in Steve’s morning claim that he’d spent the night in serious literary endeavor, fueled by terminal morphine.”

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  ALLISON PITINII DAVIS was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1986. She received an MFA from Ohio State University and received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute. She is the author of Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013) and a forthcoming book (tentatively titled Line Study of a Motel Clerk) from Baobab Press in 2017.

  Of “The Heart of It All + A Free Beer,” Davis writes: “ ‘The Heart of It All’ was the slogan on Ohio license plates. The poem would be funny if it wasn’t difficult getting dumped so many times. It’s a companion to my poem ‘Falls In Love, Or Reads Spinoza,’ in which I’m rejected by this poem’s Lorca translator. I grew up in a family that runs a motel and I helped clean rooms, so my early encounters with love was after it was over, the crumpled sheets left behind. Somewhat like when I swept theaters after movies, that sense of entering a room as everyone else is leaving it. This is the moment of this poem’s narration—I walk into the poem after all these failed relationships expecting abandoned space. But then I run into family members, into history, into the sense—to badly paraphrase Brodsky—that we’re effects trying to reconstruct a cause. My parents, who wait for each other at the end of the poem, are happily married. I’ve since found love as well.”

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  OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS was born Ukrainian in Detroit in 1963. She “engages in the practice of law and, way more rarely, poetry, in the Detroit-like Anchorage, Alaska. Check out the review of The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) in The New Yorker. It was very good.”

  Of “On the Certainty of Bryan,” Kalytiak Davis writes: “In a spirit of collaboration/testing, I asked my friend Bryan, who stars in the poem to edit the poem. He was audacious (maybe not but yes and yes), and/but oddly sparing and accurate, so I decided to keep and highlight his edits (ideally they should/would be red). I did invent the ‘endless line’ all by myself, if that is an invention. The ‘issue with the tongue on/through the front’ is an issue of Green Mountains Review. The Glück poem is ‘An Adventure.’ Bryan has recently quit his job.”

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  NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program and splits her time between the East Coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.

  Of “How the Milky Way Was Made,” Diaz writes: “This poem speaks to specific beasts of me—coyotes and the mythical salmon of my Mojave desert. ’Achii ’ahan translates to the true fish, because they were so revered by my people. Though they are not related to salmon, they were as resilient, leaping puddle to puddle after rains, flipping themselves across the desert, escaping lagoons after spring floods. Like me, like all my beasts, they have teeth. They are endangered, as is their home—the Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States. In the Mojave sky, there is no man in the moon—we see Coyote, who tripped and fell into the moon when he tried to steal a fish as they leapt the night. We call the Milky Way the road the true fish make across the sky. As it is every time I follow the beasts of hunger and teeth to the page into the night, I am led to my own desires.”

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  DENISE DUHAMEL was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961. Her most recent book of poetry, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), won the 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (winner of the Crab Orchard Award; Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). In 2015 Sibling Rivalry Press published CAPRICE: (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New), a retrospective of her work with Maureen Seaton. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013 and is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

  Of “Humanity 101,” Duhamel writes: “This poem started with a Words with Friends game in which I added an E to ‘HUMAN’ so I could branch out to a triple word score. The big difference between being human and humane haunted me, as sometimes words within words do. When I started thinking of humanity and the humanities, I was off to the poetry races. My smartphone guilty pleasure has led me to build the word ‘WOMEN’ from ‘OME
N,’ another unsettling poetry-producing moment.”

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  LYNN EMANUEL (born 1949, Mt. Kisco, New York) is the author of five books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta (University of Georgia Press, 1984), The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992), Then, Suddenly—(University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series, 1999), Noose and Hook (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series, 2010), and, most recently, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series, 2015). Her work has been featured in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Best American Poetry and is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the Norton anthology of American hybrid poetry. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Warren Wilson program in creative writing, and the Bennington College low-residency program. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Series Award, the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets, and, most recently, a fellowship residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria.

  Emanuel writes: “ ‘My Life’ is adapted from the Middle English alliterative poem Patience (Pacience) written by the poet variously known as the ‘Pearl’ or ‘Gawain’ poet. Patience narrates the Old Testament story of how Jonas (as he is called in the poem) tests God’s patience, is swallowed by the whale, and is then released. The poem is a fairly straightforward telling of the story, but there are important differences between the Bible’s manner of presiding over that story and the poem’s. First, there is the colloquial tone Jonas uses to address God and, second, there are the extraordinary descriptions and images. One of the most famous (Jonas entering the mouth of the whale like a mote of dust entering the door of a cathedral) I kept intact, although adapted for my own purposes. I also preserved two Middle English words because I could not translate them without losing their power. The first of these is ‘muckle,’ from which we get ‘much,’ but which in Middle English means ‘enormous’ or ‘huge.’ The second is ‘bower.’ In Middle English this simply means ‘room.’ ”