The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  “At the time of the first draft, the bankruptcy was a lead story. If it wasn’t the media talking about my city like no one lived here (we do) and no one thrives here (I do), then it was the lazy art. Everyone in Brooklyn thought they were the first to photograph decay porn. Our own glowing send-ups to Motown and one-sided rants about how awesome we are, while encouraging, began to feel as thoughtless as the doom-saying. I wanted to share something about the complexity of this place in a way that a young student could understand, in a way that any reader could memorize, and still have layers for the advanced lit-heads to peel back. None of these pleasures are either pretentious or trivial. Since publication, ‘There Are Birds Here’ has been republished by the New York Times Learning Network and translated into other languages. It receives thousands of reads a day online, and an ACLU chapter vice president recently used the poem to explain why a housing class action lawsuit was important. The poem has left me encouraged in this belief: When I flatly state my opinion, all you can do is agree or fight me. When I artfully present my interior, you have to take the third option, the one you’ve always had: think.”

  LAURA MCCULLOUGH was born in 1960. Her most recent books include Rigger Death & Hoist Another (poems, Black Lawrence Press, 2013), Ripple & Snap (prose poem hybrid, ELP Press, 2014), Shutters: Voices: Wind (dramatic monologues, ELP Press, 2014), and The Smashing House (short fiction, ELP Press, 2014). She has edited two anthologies, The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014) and A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (University of Georgia Press, 2015). She teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-residency MFA. She is the founding editor of Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.

  McCullough writes: “ ‘There Were Only Dandelions’ is placed almost in the center of the book that became Rigger Death & Hoist Another (Black Lawrence Press), named from the title of a more narrative poem, the second in the collection. A dandelion was the initiating image that sent me on the series of self-queries that manifested this collection, and my ongoing concern, sorrow, and wonder about the world of masculinities and of masculine violence, and, increasingly, violence in general and globally. The cover of the book is a dandelion head in contrast, not white against black, but a black head against white. I was writing in response to my previous book of poems, Panic (Alice James Books), which were all third-person narratives located on the Jersey Shore, not a single first-person I in any of them. That book is deeply emotionally autobiographical, but the character of self does not show up in them; it was all about witness and narrative distance.

  “ ‘There Were Only Dandelions’ is something of a manifesto, an assertion against distance, an effort to be both complicit in my own work and more genuine, to find the confluence between mind and storification, the sensual and the cerebral, the fictive and the poetic. I am searching in my work for ways to collude many opposites, or things that are seeming oppositional, to colocate the miniature and the massive, to find the juxtaposition in what may present as incongruous. And I wanted to begin to shed veils, the things that occlude our understanding of self as well as obscure our apprehension by others; in a word, I wanted to be more genuine. Yet maybe that is why I landed this poem in the center of the book rather than forefronting it. It scared me some. Maybe that’s where we have to go, though, toward what we fear?”

  RAJIV MOHABIR was born in London in 1981 and has lived in Orlando, New York, Honolulu, Jaipur, and Varanasi. Winner of the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut (spring 2016), he received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY, where he was editor in chief of the Ozone Park literary journal. He is pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i.

  Of “Dove,” Mohabir writes: “I call this a ‘chutney poem’ because it mimics ‘chutney music,’ a genre of Indo-Caribbean folksong developed by Sundar Popo. It has a Guyanese Hindi chorus that informs the following couplets and draws from my three languages: Guyanese Hindi/Bhojpuri, Creole, and English. To this music/poetic themes of loss, love, and separation are vital.

  “I find myself attempting to harness the palimpsest of Caribbean poetic sense and channeling it into a queer sonnet. I imagine the dholak, harmonium, and my Aji singing from India to Guyana to Toronto to New York to Orlando. I purposely queer the sonnet as a slyly civil anticolonial measure to make it as queer as an Indian in South America; a sari in sea-trunk.

  “To create a form I connect to my family’s own folk literature. Every poem in this genre I’ve written is singable to the tune of ‘Kaise Bani.’ To engage with the American poetic landscape it must be honest: something syncretic, something musical.”

  AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1974. She received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Ohio State University. She is the author of Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the ForeWord Poetry Book of the Year Award; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the gold medal in poetry from the Independent Publishers Book Awards, all from Tupelo Press. With Ross Gay, she is coauthor of the epistolary chapbook Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014). She is a professor of English and a recipient of a Chancellor’s Medal at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

  Of “Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog,” Nezhukumatathil writes: “One of my favorite stars to scorch up the summer sky is Albireo, the head of the swan, in the constellation Cygnus. In the second century, Ptolemy included Cygnus in his famous list of forty-eight constellations. When I was eight months pregnant with my youngest child, I received a note from a former love that the dog we once raised together in grad school was days away from dying of old age. Of course I was devastated about the loss, and yet—the bright kicks of my baby boy pulled me toward a new life, a new sky. In thinking about finding solace in nature, I’m reminded of the marginalia found in Ptolemy’s sky notebooks: ‘I know I am mortal by nature . . . but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet.’ ”

  D. NURKSE was born in New York City in 1949. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, and The Fall (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 2008, 2005, and 2002). He has also taught at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility and written for human rights organizations. A recipient of poetry awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tanne Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, he lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

  Nurkse writes: “ ‘Plutonium’ visits the threshold of the nuclear age. I’m moved by Richard Rhodes’s excellent book The Making of the Atom Bomb. My poem re-creates a few scenes and incorporates part of a quote from Neils Bohr. The image of the man with his eyeball in his hand recurs in accounts of Hiroshima. It feels like a metaphor for shock you can’t assimilate. But it isn’t a symbol. It happened. That maddening sense of a dream becoming real is at the core of the era. Suddenly, squiggles on a chalkboard could kill not just people but civilizations. I’m a child of that moment. But I haven’t digested it, though its challenges are still in front of my nose. How deep these nightmares are buried in my generation’s psyche is marked by the speed with which we emigrated to the Internet, a world without death.”

  TANYA OLSON was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1967. She currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and teaches English at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize, and she was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Liter
ary Foundation.

  Olson writes: “ ‘54 Prince’ began as a high five to scientists for coming up with such an awesome term as “Goldilocks planet.” I thought the phrase gave us narrative-craving humans an immediate idea of what the planets were like but still kept them mysterious; just like a fairy tale, the term taught us something important and made the planets seem just this side of impossible. Why fifty-four of them? I always think about reading a poem aloud and the number repeats a lot, so I needed something that sounded musical and falling. Fifty-four it was, even though Kepler has currently spotted only about a dozen planets that orbit a star at the right distance to allow for liquid water. (That’s what a Goldilocks planet technically is.) Why Prince? I wondered what else all these ‘good enough’ planets would need to survive. Wouldn’t life be easier if each planet had its own Prince—brilliant, a little off, possibly extraterrestrial anyway? ‘Worried Man Blues’ is a brilliant, eerie song, especially in Carter Family renditions. Mother Maybelle and Prince fit nicely together at the end and lend the poem an air of being a little, American fairy tale.”

  RON PADGETT grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the Los Angeles Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. “Survivor Guilt” forms part of his new collection, Alone and Not Alone (Coffee House Press). Padgett has translated works by Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages.

  ALAN MICHAEL PARKER was born in New York in 1961. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Ladder (Tupelo Press, 2016), and three novels, and is the coeditor of various works about poetry, including The Manifesto Project (University of Akron Press, 2016). He is Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, and also teaches in the University of Tampa low-residency MFA program.

  Of “Candying Mint,” Parker writes: “I have been asking questions in my poems for years—of Simone de Beauvoir, Odysseas Elytis, Du Fu, Ludwig Wittgenstein, et alia—as I have come across their wisdom in my meanderings. Here, reading and asking questions of Martin Buber’s ideas inspired the poem.

  “I like to cook, and I often find meaning in my kitchen. In this case, I candied mint as part of the finale to a holiday blowout with family and friends. The recipe and the occasion were special, and stuck with me for nine months, when the first draft of the poem was written. The final draft of the poem begins with instructions that can be followed precisely; it’s an easy dish to make, part herb and part metaphysical inquiry.”

  CATHERINE PIERCE was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1978. She is the author of The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia, 2012) and Famous Last Words (2008, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize). Her third book, The Tornado Is the World, is forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2016. She is an associate professor at Mississippi State University, where she codirects the creative writing program.

  Of “Relevant Details,” Pierce writes: “This poem came out of a failure of memory. I wanted to write about a bar I’d gone to once, many years and many cities ago, and I could not for the life of me remember what it was called, which seemed an inauspicious beginning. I started writing anyway, trusting—or at least hoping—that if I kept going, the poem would eventually reveal its significance. For a long time, it didn’t. I was just riffing on this idea of imprecise memory, and the whole thing was starting to feel gimmicky. I almost gave up, but instead decided to see what happened when I stepped back and acknowledged the gimmick directly. Once I gave myself permission to do that—to revise toward the problem rather than away from it—the poem broke open for me and I was able to push it until I could see what it was really about.”

  DONALD PLATT was born in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1957. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University. His poems have been included twice before in The Best American Poetry series (the 2000 and 2006 editions). His fifth book of poems, Tornadoesque, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press’s Notable Voices Series in 2016. His other volumes of poetry are Dirt Angels (New Issues Press, 2009), My Father Says Grace (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), Cloud Atlas (Purdue University Press, 2002), and Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns (Purdue University Press, 1994). In 1996 and again in 2011, he won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Platt writes: “I remember the genesis of ‘The Main Event’ very clearly. The day after my fifty-sixth birthday, I read the front-page obituary of boxer Emile Griffith in The New York Times (July 23, 2013) by Richard Goldstein. The article recounted the shocking story of the third Griffith vs. Paret fight. Having never encountered this story before, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Eager for more particulars, I turned to the Internet and pulled up all the source material I could find about Griffith, Paret, and their fatal boxing match. I went on to watch the entire TV footage of the March 24, 1962, fight with Ruby Goldstein as referee and Don Dunphy as the ABC announcer. At the end of that footage, after Benny ‘Kid’ Paret had been carried out of the ring on a stretcher, they replayed the minute and a half leading up to the knockout in slow motion. It seemed much slower than the slow-mo of today’s televised boxing matches.

  “The replay lasted three minutes and seven seconds and included some of the most brutal boxing I had ever witnessed. Even on this first viewing, I noted the detached tone with which some of the commentators described the precise mayhem that Griffith inflicted on Paret, who wouldn’t go down because he was caught in the ropes. The unintentionally ironic resonances of Dunphy’s final words on the broadcast, in which he lists the ‘hosts’ of the event, were also singularly striking. Next, I watched on YouTube the 2005 Ring of Fire, a documentary about Emile Griffith, directed by Dan Klores and Ron Berger. It provided the context for the fight and would later be the source of most of the quotes I used in the poem.

  “From the moment I saw Griffith’s obituary, I knew that I wanted to write about the fight, the sexually charged insults at the weigh-in, and how the fight’s aftermath affected Emile, Paret’s family, the boxing ‘industry,’ and, therefore, the whole nation. The undercurrents of that old story from 1962 are with us today. Nearly three months before Griffith died, NBA player Jason Collins came out and would become the first openly gay active player in any of the four major professional sports in the United States. As of this writing, no active player in the NFL has publicly acknowledged that he is gay. Emile Griffith showed a similar reluctance to talk openly about his sexual orientation. Reflecting years later on the verbal abuse that he received from Paret at the weigh-in on March 24, 1962, Emile declared angrily, ‘I wasn’t nobody’s faggot.’ ”

  CLAUDIA RANKINE was born in 1963. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and the plays Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre, and Existing Conditions (written collaboratively with Casey Llewellyn). Rankine is coeditor of the American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century series with Wesleyan University Press and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind with Fence Books. A recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Foundation, the NAACP, Poets & Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches at Pomona College and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  Of this excerpt from Citizen, Rankine writes: “Jim Crow Road was photographed by Michael David Murphy. When I first saw the image I was sure it was Photoshopped. I was wrong. The road is located in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Sometimes when I am waiting for something else to happen I wonder what’s it’s like to have a signifier of our racial caste system as a destination, a home address.”
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  RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN was born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1955. After graduating from Bennington College, he moved to New York City in 1979, where, apart from several years in Milan, Italy, he has lived ever since. His poetry publications include The Basement of the Café Rilke (Hard Press, 1997), The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now, 2005), The Cry of Unbalance (Song Cave, 2013), and the forthcoming A Geniza (Granary Books). He is also the author of Postcards from Alphaville (Hard Press, 2000), Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990–2002 (Hard Press, 2003), and The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014). He has received the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital arts writers grant. From 1994 to 2007 he was an editor at Art in America. He is currently professor of critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art.