Best American Poetry 2016

by David Lehman

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  NOMI STONE was born in Los Angeles in 1981. She is the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly Books, 2008), an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson, and a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Columbia. She has a master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford and was a Fulbright Scholar in creative writing in Tunisia. She is working on Kill Class, a collection of poems based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within combat simulations in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the U.S. military across America.

  Stone writes: “Here are his hands, moving precisely over the silent bed of static, trembling like two birds in formation over the city. In ‘Drones: An Exercise in Awe-Terror,’ the Hellfire missile hatches in the pilot’s mind as his hands render the fate of a faraway landscape. He produces the spectacle he watches at a distance while it ripples into his interior space. I wrote this poem while doing my PhD coursework in anthropology at Columbia University. I was taking a class with Marilyn Ivy on theories of the ‘Sublime.’ No class in my life has ever moved or unsettled me more. We read Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, Adorno, and others about the relationship between the body and the senses to awe and terror, to safety and harm. We interrogated Enlightenment texts that contained or domesticated that awe-terror through ‘Reason.’ Together in that room, we considered the vibration of the soul when confronted by an object in the world that creates vertigo, that makes the ego cave in. We spoke about the sublime of mountains and oceans. We spoke about death and God.

  “This poem is my attempt to enact and grapple with these theories of awe-terror in wartime. When I wrote the poem, I was inspired in particular by a 2010 Frontline documentary, ‘Digital Nation,’ and a series of interviews my dear friend Caitlin McNally did with drone pilots to try to access their sensory and interior experiences. In the ensuing years, I conducted two years of my own ethnographic fieldwork with military personnel within pre-deployment trainings and interviewed many soldiers about their experiences of the perceived adversary. The poems inspired by that fieldwork constitute Kill Class, my collection in progress. In this poem, I am trying to represent the American military attempt to contain what is imagined as an ever-permutating adversary as well as the erasure of those individuals’ humanness when they are turned into coordinates. But most especially, I am interested in the potential of the moment’s gravity yawning open: the pilot’s recognition that: ‘They // told me there is a place like / that, and I am actually in / it (changing / it) (right now).’ The first two sections of the poem (‘The Imagination Cannot’ and ‘When Reason Came’) are based on the theories of Kant, and the third section (‘Black’) is based on the theories of Adorno. I seek here, through tools of form like sonic and syntax, to gesture toward the impossibility of representation amid the experience of awe and terror: the metaphor flails toward an object that can’t be captured. Language breaks down. We are all implicated. Blackout.”

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  ADRIENNE SU, born in Atlanta in 1967 and raised there, is the author of four books of poems: Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015), Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2012), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997). “Peaches” comes from her current project, which seeks to remember the Chinese Americans of Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s, often through food. Su received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 2007 and has taught at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, since 2000.

  Of “Peaches,” Su writes: “In Atlanta a few decades ago, buying an abundance of peaches in season should have been as Georgian as it gets. It didn’t require the consumer to travel with as few clothes as possible so as to fill every suitcase with food, as my parents used to do on returning from any city with a Chinatown. And unlike shrimp fried with their heads still on, or braised pigs’ ears, peaches didn’t scare the neighbors. Thus, in my childhood, peaches in quantity seemed a sign of my family’s successful assimilation, versus the many markers of our foreignness. Asians were a tiny minority in Georgia then, so small that when I chanced to meet any, I figured—often correctly—that my parents already knew them.

  “Much later, I realized that even a crate of ripe peaches stood out in suburban Atlanta. I also learned that the peach tree, after which many downtown Atlanta streets are named, is native to China. In retrospect, many of the foods I once simplistically categorized as Chinese, American, or Southern have much more ambiguous origins. Exploring them in my writing has become a way of understanding the place from which I came and appreciating the people who shaped it.

  “Having imitated my parents and moved to where the academic employment is, I now live in central Pennsylvania, where the shrimp have no heads and small farms thrive. Though Asian ingredients can be hard to find, the region is a fertile playground for a cook. Of course I can never resist summer’s peaches by the crate. Meanwhile, Atlanta, remade by an influx of new immigrants, has become the city from which I routinely bring a suitcase full of food.”

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  JAMES TATE (1943–2015) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and studied at Kansas State College of Pittsburgh and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received an MFA. His first collection of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; he would go on to receive the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award for his Selected Poems and the 1994 National Book Award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers. He also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1997. In his introduction to that volume he wrote, “In my experience poets are not different from other people. You have your dullards, your maniacs, your mild eccentrics, etc. Except for this one thing they do—write poems. And in this they are singularly strange. They may end up with an audience and a following of some sort, but in truth they write their poems with various degrees of obsessiveness mostly for themselves, for the pleasure and satisfaction it gives them. And for the hunger and need nothing else can abate.”

  Tate was married to the poet Dara Wier. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than forty years. His recent books include The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010 (2012), The Ghost Soldiers (2008), and Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004), all from Ecco Press, and Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories (Verse Press, 2002; Wave Books, 2008). John Ashbery described Tate as “the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous.” In a Paris Review interview with Charles Simic, Tate said, “I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, ‘What happens next, what happens next?’ ”

  Dara Wier writes: “The title for the poem, ‘Dome of the Hidden Temple,’ is the poem’s original and only title. When the time came to decide on a book title Dome of the Hidden Temple became one of the strongest contenders. Emily Pettit worked with Jim to winnow down the number of poems he wanted included in Dome of the Hidden Pavilion (Ecco, 2015), which turned out to be his last book—which I’m sure he didn’t feel to be his last book—before his death in July 2015. He left behind over 300 new poems written since Dome of the Hidden Pavilion was made. To the best of my memory Jim indicated he felt ‘temple’ was a little too Indiana Jones for a book title while just fine for a single poem title.”

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  LEE UPTON was born in St. Johns, Michigan, in 1953. Her sixth book of poetry, Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles, appeared from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2015. Her collection of short stories, The Tao of Humiliation (BOA Editions), was named one of the “best books of 2014” by Kirkus Reviews. She is the Francis A. March Professor of English at Lafayette College.

  Of “The Apology,” Upton writes: “How can we not yearn to describe nature and to identify with the natural world, given that we’re part of that world? We’ve despoil
ed so much of the natural world, and yet we feel summoned to describe nature relentlessly, while nature with its peculiar power defies description. Always we hit up against a limit when we see all nature as defined by human nature—not that such a tendency has ever stopped some of us from enjoying the way we’re summoned to language by natural beauty. On another level, if ‘it was asking for it,’ nature not only invokes our yearning for description but asks for its own survival. ‘It’ asks for ‘it’—all of itself, if not less of us.”

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  C. K. WILLIAMS (1936–2015)—Charles Kenneth Williams on official transcripts, Charlie to his friends—grew up in New Jersey and played college basketball before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy and English. He graduated in 1959. He began writing verse when a girlfriend asked him to write a poem, and Houghton Mifflin published his first collection, Lies, on Anne Sexton’s recommendation, ten years later. He met his wife, Catherine, a French jeweler, in 1973 at an airline ticket counter when their flight was delayed. Known for his signature long lines in verse, Williams translated plays and wrote critical essays, the latter collected in Poetry and Consciousness (1998). The author of twenty-two books of poetry, Williams received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Singing won the National Book Award. He wrote a critical study, On Whitman; a memoir, Misgivings; and two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest. His most recent books include Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010), All at Once: Prose Poems (2014), and Selected Later Poems (2015), all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He also published two children’s books, How the Nobble Was Finally Found, and A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things, both from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  Williams divided his time between Paris and Princeton, where he taught. Robert Pinsky wrote, “His fearless inventions, with their big long lines, quest after the entirety of life: he will include every emotion, every bit of evidence that has a natural claim on our attention. Contemporary life is so rich and vivid in his poetry that by contrast many of the movies and poems we are used to seem pale, spaced-out and insipid.” Williams once observed, “For a long time I had been writing poetry that leaves everything out. It’s like a code. You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it. But then I realized that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.” In a Los Angeles Times interview, Williams remarked that “the drama of American poetry is based very much on experience. It’s coming out of all the different cultures. We’re an enormous nation and we have an enormous poetry.”

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  ELEANOR WILNER was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937. She has published seven books of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); she coedited with Maurice Manning The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process (University of Michigan Press, 2013). She has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

  Of “To Think of How Cold,” Wilner writes: “Sometimes a line lingers in the memory over many years. Such a line, first encountered over forty years ago, was Emily Brontë’s ‘Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee . . . ’ What the line reveals, it seems to me, is how the imagination, whose envisioning and transformative powers seem boundless, nevertheless cannot imagine non-being. This is the horror that the line catches, and my poem enacts: to imagine a person in the grave as if such cold could be felt brings our sentient life to one who is loved and gone . . . and herein, helplessly, lies more grief.

  “One of the joyous experiences of my life was attending a Brahmin cremation in Bali, the body burned in the flaming effigy of a bull, its visible destruction and its release in fire to the air, the ashes carried afterward to be scattered at sunset in the sea—it is this, perhaps, among other things, that feeds the jubilant way the poem turns when Lear speaks. The poem, to fully unfold, does demand a knowledge of King Lear, but so, to my mind, does life.”

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  Mississippi-born (1939) with a Michigan finish, former California poet laureate AL YOUNG is the author of twenty-five books, including poem collections, novels, and memoirs. He has received the Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Davis, the University of Michigan, Bennington College, and Davidson College. He is Distinguished Professor at California College of the Arts’ MFA in writing program in San Francisco.

  Of “The Drummer Omar: Poet of Percussion,” Young writes: “I composed this poem-tribute to the great drummer Omar Clay in 2008, the same year he died on us. Loved or enlivened by lovers of jazz and pop music all over the world, Omar’s complex yet mindful personality walked and talked. Like today’s tempered steel drum, fabled drums of West Africa were vocally tuned. Across respectable miles, we could hear and talk to one another. Time. Space-Time. Omar, an elder, had made his way to the University of Michigan’s School of Music by the time I got there in 1957. He had fathered a daughter and was devoted to her care and upbringing. We kept meeting around campus. Omar was attending school and drumming with Ann Arbor’s and Detroit’s star musicians. I was learning guitar, performing folk songs and blues, coediting Generation, the campus inter-arts journal, and drifting cross genre. I remember a certain sunny Ann Arbor spring afternoon, a Saturday. He’d dropped by to hang for a minute. We’d been listening to Sonny Rollins’s ‘Airegin’ (Nigeria spelled backward), then switched to Billie Holiday of the 1930s (those stubborn old cuts, now Columbia classics—‘Me, Myself and I,’ ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight,’ ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’—loved-up with scratches). Omar said: ‘You like this old shit, don’t you?’ He didn’t say it in a judgmental way; he just said it. We laughed. He’d come to my gigs and I to his. Omar and pianist-trumpeter Bob James put a band together. The two of them ended up working quite fruitfully with singer Sarah Vaughn. Later, while I was auditioning New York as the place, Omar would show up. Never will I forget the summer night at the Showcase when Charles Mingus was testing out bass players and drummers. Ron Carter was there that night. Omar showed up with a little pennywhistle he’d tweet at the end of one of his impeccable drum press-rolls. Once the eye-rolling Mingus tired of this, he reached out and snatched the whistle from Omar’s hand. ‘Mingus,’ Omar had said to me before going onstage. ‘Nut music.’ We both then drifted to the San Francisco Bay Area, making it home. All I tried to do in the poem, a sonnet, was capture in Zen brushstrokes the magnificent splash of our relationship. I dedicate this comment to Barbara Chew, whose loving presence in drummer-golfer Omar Clay’s life remains indelible.”

  MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED

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  32 Poems, ed. George David Clark; associate eds. Nick McRae, Matt Morton, Sarah Rose Nordgren, and Michael Shewmaker. Washington & Jefferson College, Department of English, 60 S. Lincoln Street, Washington, PA 15301. www.32poems.com

  The Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day, ed. Alex Dimitrov. www.poets.org

  Alaska Quarterly Review, editor-in-chief Ronald Spatz. University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508. www.uaa.alaska.edu/aqr

  American Poets, ed. Alex Dimitrov; director of content Mary Gannon. www.poets.org/american-poets-magazine/home

  The American Poetry Review, eds. David Bonanno and Elizabeth Scanlon. 320 S. Broad St., Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102. www.aprweb.org

  Birmingh
am Poetry Review, editor-in-chief Adam Vines; features ed. Gregory Fraser. 1720 2nd Avenue South, HB 203, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260.

  Boston Review, poetry eds. Timothy Donnelly, Barbara Fischer, and Stefania Heim. bostonreview.net

  Brilliant Corners, ed. Sascha Feinstein. Lycoming College, 700 College Place, Williamsport, PA 17701. www.lycoming.edu/brilliantCorners

  Cherry Tree, ed. Jehanne Dubrow. www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse/cherry-tree

  The Common, poetry ed. John Hennessy. www.thecommononline.org

  Connotation Press, poetry ed. Julie Brooks Barbour. www.connotationpress.com

  Copper Nickel, ed. Wayne Miller; poetry eds. Brian Barker and Nicky Beer. copper-nickel.org

  Crab Orchard Review, poetry ed. Allison Joseph. Department of English, Faner Hall 2380, Mail Code 4503, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901. craborchardreview.siu.edu

  The Georgia Review, ed. Stephen Corey. Main Library, Room 706A, 320 S. Jackson St., The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-9009. garev.uga.edu

  The Gettysburg Review, ed. Mark Drew. Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325-1491. www.gettysburgreview.com

  Green Mountains Review, poetry ed. Elizabeth Powell. greenmountainsreview.com

  The Greensboro Review, poetry ed. Mackenzie Connellee. MFA Writing Program, 3302 MHRA Building, UNC-Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170. tgronline.net