Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

  Joseph writes: “ ‘Visions of Labor’ draws on a number of sources. I was born and raised in Detroit and, except for two fellowship years in Cambridge, England, I lived in Detroit or in nearby Ann Arbor until my early thirties when my wife and I moved to New York City. My parents, children of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, were born in Detroit and lived their entire lives there. When my father’s and uncle’s grocery-liquor store in Detroit could no longer support two families, my father worked for the A&P as a meat cutter while working at the store three nights a week. We were, in socioeconomic terms, lower-middle, working class. My father retired a proud and grateful union member, as did uncles of mine.

  “As a Catholic, on the Catholic Left, I’ve closely read the papal social encyclicals on labor and capital, and have been involved with the Catholic Worker Movement; politically, I’ve always been positioned to the left of what was the social democracy of Walter Reuther’s UAW. For over a year, I worked on assembly lines in Chrysler and General Motors factories, and in press-machine shops, in Detroit and Pontiac, Michigan. During my forty years as a lawyer and law professor, I’ve practiced, taught, written, and lectured on labor and employment law, especially workers compensation. My poetry, essays, and prose works have from the start included issues of labor and capital, class and race.

  “In its broadest sense, ‘Visions of Labor’ presents a language of labor that purposely reflects a moral vision. Among its formal-structural-rhetorical influences are Ezra Pound’s ‘Canto XVI’; Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A’-8; Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’; Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World; and Robert Hayden’s ‘[American Journal].’ ”

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  JULIE KANE was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1952. Despite her Boston Irish roots, she has lived in Louisiana for four decades now and served as the Louisiana poet laureate from 2011 to 2013. She is a professor of English at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Her poetry books are Paper Bullets (White Violet Press, 2014), a collection of light verse; Jazz Funeral (Story Line Press, 2009), the winner of the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize (David Mason, judge); Rhythm & Booze (University of Illinois Press, 2003), Maxine Kumin’s selection for the 2002 National Poetry Series; and Body and Soul (Pirogue Publishing, 1987).

  Of “As If,” Kane writes: “Strangely, the image that gave rise to the poem did not wind up in the poem. Many years ago, I saw a murder play that ended with a dead body lying on the stage. When it came time for curtain calls, the body jumped up and took his bows with the rest of the cast. That moment of surprise and childlike delight in seeing the dead man spring back to life made a strong impression on me, and years later when a long-dead relationship was resuscitated, it kept coming back to mind—though a real corpse took the place of the stage corpse in the resulting poem. But I guess the metaphorical applause in the last line might be a nod to the poem’s origins. And of course, the poem wanted to be a sonnet because that’s the form most associated with love, though I hope that the language sounds conversational despite the rhyme and meter.”

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  SUJI KWOCK KIM’s parents and grandparents were all born in what is now North Korea, where her grandfather, uncle, aunt, and cousins still live. She is the author of Notes from the Divided Country, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2002; Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and Disorient, which is forthcoming. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright/IIE, the Association for Asian Studies, the Blakemore Foundation for Asian Studies, the Korea Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and other institutions. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus and recorded for National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. An earlier version of “Return of the Native” won the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2012.

  Kim writes: “ ‘Return of the Native’ is part of a longer sequence exploring the questions of remembering and forgetting, seeing and saying, interiority and exteriority, in the context of North Korea, where surveillance and snitching mean loyalty to the regime and must constantly be ‘performed,’ while an estimated 150,000–200,000 political prisoners work in the labor camps, which are clearly visible in satellite photos, although the regime denies that they exist. This is a country where Kim Il-Sung is ‘Eternal President,’ the only corpse in the world to hold executive office, although he’s been dead for more than twenty years.

  “I’ve never met my grandfather, and my father last saw him when he was ten years old. When I was doing research in a small suburb southwest of London called New Malden—it has the largest population of North Korean refugees outside Asia, surprisingly, more than the entire United States—I met a man about the same age as my grandfather, who came from a village not far from his. (In the dedication, his name and hometown have been altered, to protect his family.) Their lives have several other parallels, with one exception, of course: he escaped, and my grandfather did not.

  “I’m deeply grateful to Mr. K., who generously took the time to help me understand a little of what he lived through, and by extension, a little of what my grandfather must have lived through, the grandfather I’ll never know.”

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  LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH was born in the San Joaquin Valley of California in 1961. She has lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for two decades, and teaches Caribbean literature, creative writing, and courses related to the medical humanities at the University of Puerto Rico. She had previously lived in Jamaica, England, and Canada. She earned an MFA in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English. Her poetry collection The Twelve Foot Neon Woman (Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry (Trinidad and Tobago). The Literary Arts section of the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día named it one of the top ten books of the year (2012) by a Puerto Rican author. She has recently been a guest poet at the Bim Lit Fest in Barbados, the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago, the book fair in St. Martin, and the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica.

  Klobah writes: “The poem ‘Tissue Gallery’ describes, with exactitude, I hope, a small collection of ‘human tissue’ specimens that I was invited to view at a medical school in Puerto Rico, where I live. Given that various medical museums do exhibit—for educational purposes—medical oddities, preserved fetuses in jars, specimens that demonstrate pathology or anomaly, wax models, antique, seemingly macabre medical instruments or flayed cadavers, the speaker’s physician-friend’s proposal for artistically exhibiting the specimens is not odd. At the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, for instance, one may ogle the liver of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng, as well as a number of preserved fetuses. These medical museums are seen as respectable, compared to the circus sideshows, freak shows, penny arcades, and curiosity cabinets where ‘pickled punks’ have been displayed.

  “A few people at a time were escorted into the lab room where the collection had been set out. As the poem indicates, I didn’t previously realize that I would be seeing this kind of ‘human tissue.’ I was the last person to leave the room. I thought of the women who had carried these stillborns. I thought of our historical context here in the Caribbean. Drawing upon a Caribbean cosmology, the poem acknowledges these little ones who are both here and not here, but still have the power to move us. For me, although it raises issues of ethics, language, and race, it is not a poem to be read in an overly determined way in the context of U.S. abortion debates about pro-choice/pro-life. It does not advocate for limiting a woman’s freedom of choice, which, as a woman and mother, I believe in. It is a praise song, a velorio; it is a whisper for sisterhood. The public exhibition has not taken place.”

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  JOHN KOETHE was born in San Diego in 1945. He received an AB from Princeton in 1967 and a PhD in philosophy from Harv
ard in 1973. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has published ten books of poetry and has been awarded the Frank O’Hara, Kingsley Tufts, and Lenore Marshall awards. His most recent poetry books are The Swimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and ROTC Kills (HarperCollins, 2012). He has written books on Wittgenstein and on philosophical skepticism as well as a collection of literary essays. He lives in Milwaukee.

  Of “The Swimmer,” Koethe writes: “In the 1970s and ’80s my ex-wife and I used to spend a week each summer on a lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and on one of those visits in 1982 I read a lot of John Cheever’s short stories and subsequently wrote a poem, ‘In the Park,’ that appeared in my book The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), and which I thought had a kind of Cheeveresque feel to it. A few years ago I was reading a book about six alcoholic writers, of whom Cheever was one. It discussed his famous story ‘The Swimmer,’ that I was sure I’d read back in 1982, though its description of the story didn’t ring a bell. I looked at the story and realized I’d never read it in the first place, or if I had, I’d completely forgotten it. I started writing a memory poem centered on the story and on that distant summer, using the stanza form and something like the tone of ‘In the Park,’ resulting in the poem here, which I titled after Cheever’s story.”

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  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), The Chameleon Couch, The Emperor of Water Clocks, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. He has received the William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. They include Slipknot, Wakonda’s Dream, Nine Bridges Back, Saturnalia, Testimony, The Mercy Suite, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (with Chad Garcia). He teaches at New York University. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

  Of “The Fool,” Komunyakaa writes: “I have always thought of the fool in classical literature and folklore as the wise man or proxy king, and sometimes he’s the freest of the lot. He is a master of satire and his linguistic daring is usually edgy, succinct, and political. Likewise, when considering more modern versions of the fool, I particularly think of Lenny Bruce, Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, and Richard Pryor. We admire the fool’s skill and finesse in critiquing fractions of absolute power. Perhaps that is why in hard times we embrace our comedy clubs, replaying vaudevillian skits—the theater of ridicule. Ironically such a subversive symbol of power survives because he or she is an appendage, a go-between, or a mouthpiece. In a classical sense, the fool is the king’s alter ego. The lone figure goes up against an institution. Sometimes the fool is free to say what the king cannot say to himself. He is the king for a moment. But with the snap of a finger the axe could fall. The king and the fool are fully aware, and this becomes a contest of perverted fun.”

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  KEETJE KUIPERS was born in Pullman, Washington, in 1980. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. Her first book of poems, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. She is an associate professor at Auburn University, where she is editor of Southern Humanities Review.

  Of “We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,” Kuipers writes: “This poem began with the image of the sheriff lighting the cigarette—something I saw on a drive through rural Alabama not long after moving there nearly three years ago. That image stuck with me, but I didn’t know what it meant yet or how I would use it. Along the way I collected additional images from my new life in the South, along with a number of resonant place-names, including the town of Notasulga, which is not far from where we live. Finally, I wrote this poem last year, and just a few months later married my longtime partner, a moment fourteen years (and plenty of heartache) in the making.”

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  DEBORAH LANDAU is the author of The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011), both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium (2004), which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. She directs the creative writing program at New York University, where she also teaches.

  Landau writes: “ ‘Solitaire’ is an extract from my third book, The Uses of the Body, which considers the pleasures and complexities of living in a female body, and of marriage and domestic life. The book is comprised of linked lyric sequences—a form I’ve come to love because it allows perspective on the same subject from many angles for a cumulative, prismatic effect. ‘Solitaire’ rides on the myriad anxieties of living in a body as time passes. Like much of my writing it is driven by music—I let the sounds carry it along. ‘I don’t have a pill for that’ is a favorite saying of a favorite doctor of mine.”

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  LI-YOUNG LEE was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. He is the author of the poetry collections Rose, The City in Which I Love You, Book of My Nights (all from BOA Editions, Ltd., in 1993, 1990, and 2001), and Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2009), as well as the book-length prose poem The Winged Seed (Simon & Schuster, 1995). He has a full-length collection forthcoming from W. W. Norton. He lives in Chicago with his wife.

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  PHILIP LEVINE (1928–2015) was born into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants and worked in Detroit auto factories from the age of fourteen. Described by Edward Hirsch as “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” Levine was the celebrated author of more than twenty poetry collections and a legendary teacher who influenced countless young poets from California State University, Fresno, on the West Coast to NYU and Columbia on the East. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, he wrote about his experiences as a factory worker and about such of his mentors as Berryman and Yvor Winters. About Berryman he commented, “He was a guy who didn’t want you writing like him. He considered himself, and rightly so, as a rather eccentric poet, and he urged me away from that kind of eccentricity.” Levine told his Paris Review interviewer that he used to memorize poems “when I worked in factories and recited them to myself. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.” Levine’s final two books are scheduled for publication in November 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf: The Last Shift, a collection of poems, and My Lost Poets, a prose book.

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  LARRY LEVIS (1946–1996) was born in Fresno, California. He grew up as a ranch boy in the small town of Selma, the “raisin capital of the universe.” Working as a janitor in a steel mill, he started writing poetry at California State University, Fresno, where he studied with Philip Levine, who became a lifelong friend. “That an unathletic, acne-ridden virgin who owned the slowest car in town should at age sixteen decide to become a poet struck [Levis] as both outrageous and perfectly right,” Levine writes. Levis went on to receive his BA from Syracuse University and his PhD from the University of Iowa. He published five collections of poetry during his lifetime. Three volumes have appeared posthumously: Elegy (Pitt Poetry Series, 1997), edited by Philip Levine, The Selected Levis (Pitt Poetry Series, 2000), and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), both edited by David St. John. “When I am weary of the mediocrity or smallness of so much that passes for poetry, I go to Larry’s work and revive my belief in the value of the art we shared,” Levine wrote.

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  ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which won the 2015 National Book Award in poetry. She is a Provost’s Fellow in poetry and visual studies at t
he University of Southern California. She is also a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard Divinity School. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA program in Paris. She was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

  Lewis writes: “At its most central motivation, ‘On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari’ is an homage to the Goddess Parvati. I wanted to write something that pleased Her—a poem as an offering, something that could say thank you for destroying my ridiculous life. I appreciate, very much, certain ideologies that ask us to understand our individual lives as private expressions of the divine. Within that frame, everyone, including oneself, is a manifestation of the divine—in this case, the Goddess. The problem with this ideal, of course, is that life is a helluvalot harder, sicker, darker than any ideology. It has to be lived, practiced—not merely discussed: So your partner—that ass!—is really the Goddess hiding behind a mask (this mask called ‘the body’). And here’s the kick—She’s hiding just for you. I also wrote this poem because I wanted to explore what happens when the most precious thing dies, literally. It wasn’t merely the dissolving of a relationship that held my attention; it was more serious than that: Love Herself was walking away. Because I was of a certain age with very few pearls left to clutch—I was trying to understand that kind of devastation from a different perspective. I’m suspicious about heteronormativity, how insidious it is. Even our breakups are constructed, scripted. I was looking for a richer way to represent falling out of love.