Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

  DAVID FEINSTEIN was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1982. He is the author of the chapbooks Woods Porn: The Adventures of Little Walter (No Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2014) and Tarantula (Factory Hollow Press, 2016). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches writing and is a member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theatre.

  Of “Kaddish,” Feinstein writes: “The Mourner’s Kaddish is a hymn of praise and remembrance recited near the end of the Jewish prayer service. I have a weird relationship with the Hebrew language; because I only learned it in order to recite certain prayers (including the Kaddish) I can pronounce most words without having any idea what they mean. Mumbling in synagogue as a kid was probably one of my earliest encounters with the mysteries of language—of sensing that words were objects originating from beyond to temporarily inhabit the body. I think poems are in search of a similarly strange and elusive purity of sound; they are forever ‘en route,’ in the words of Paul Celan, ‘heading towards something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps an approachable reality.’

  “The poem ‘Kaddish’ is dedicated to all people of the book, for whom the book is holy and never complete, and who have prayed their names be inscribed in the book of life. It is to my grandparents Ida Feinstein, Sabina and Sam Kowlowitz, and to all the beloved both named and unnamed, who I want to live and die with and who will never die, in that constant song that is not a song at all but is solely our singing.”

  CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blue Hour, and has edited two volumes of poetry: Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness and, with Duncan Wu, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Mahmoud Darwish, and Robert Desnos, and her own work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She has received many fellowships and awards, including the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture (Stockholm) and, recently, the Windham Campbell Prize in Literature from Yale University. She is university professor at Georgetown University, where she serves as director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Her forthcoming works include a book of poetry, In the Lateness of the World, and a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True.

  Forché writes: “For the past seven summers, I have lived on two islands in the Aegean: Serifos in the Cyclades and Thasos, near the island of Lesvos, the landing place for many refugees attempting to reach Europe. ‘The Boatman’ is a poem written in the aftermath of those summers, but it is a record of conversations with one particular refugee from Homs, Syria, who is now driving a taxi in a city in the upper Midwest of the United States. This is his story, which he asked me to tell, and somehow it came to the page intact.”

  VIEVEE FRANCIS was born in San Angelo, Texas, in 1963. She is the author of Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Smartish Pace, The Common, Waxwing, The Best American Poetry (2010 and 2014), and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry. She recently received the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. An associate editor for Callaloo, she is on the faculty of the Pacific University low-residency MFA program and is an associate professor of English (creative writing) at Dartmouth College.

  Of “Given to These Proclivities, By God,” Francis writes: “In an oh so conventional world, a world insistent upon its rightness, where goodness becomes a skinny stretch of blinding road that few may walk without falling or failing, what is a poet with no inclination toward toeing the straight and narrow to do? So fine. If a sinner is what I’m called, then a sinner I’ll be. Now what? Whatever it is I am I got there honestly. I’m here honestly. This is a facetious ditty meant to push back against uninterrogated ideas of personal ‘uplift’ and ‘ascension.’ Mad woman. Bad woman. Woman refusing to follow patriarchal orders or cultural constraints. I’ve been given my walking papers and I still trip up. Poor puss. I don’t write poems that assume the hero wins, hope, or even survival. Instead, I am asking why can’t we admit failure or the loss of hope or the inevitability of death, and by considering it perhaps we will indeed find a way to handle such realities. Further, who’s to say what ‘failure’ is? I resent the positivism that passes for insight, the fear of anything that upsets the convenience and comfort of the social order. While on a trail in western North Carolina I saw a wall of early rhododendrons and my first thought was how lovely it would be to feel that cascade against my naked skin. I am given to the sensual world. To its delights as much as the world would have me meet its damage. I’ve fallen, to put it in pedestrian terms. I trip. I skip and attempt a quicker pace then down I go. The stairwell. Any given slope. My ankles are weak. My ability to resist stretching my limits, forcing my weight against a closed door, moving past the boundaries, even weaker. So I will fall again, God help me. And perhaps at some point I’ll stop frustrating those giving me the side-eye (or a push) and stay down. Let the ancient roots of some mountain grapevine wrap round me like a blanket or rest upon me like an incubus.”

  AMY GERSTLER was born in 1956 in San Diego, California. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent books of poems are Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015) and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009). She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2010.

  Of “Dead Butterfly,” Gerstler writes: “When I found an intact but lifeless orange and black butterfly lying on the floor of my office, I wondered whether this was a ‘good sign’ or a ‘bad’ one. That’s a pretty selfish and reductive reaction, I admit. Surely, being dead was far from an excellent development for the poor butterfly. And periodically I have to remind myself that not everything is a portent, and that many events are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. I tried to do some research, but as there are several kinds of similar-looking butterflies, and I’m a terrible lepidopterist, I couldn’t figure out whether this one was a true monarch or not. I started thinking about the butterfly as royalty, anyway, due to the word ‘monarch.’ Hoping to try to write about it, I kept the butterfly for almost a month, until I began to feel a bit morbid, and guilty, for not taking its leaflike body outside to rejoin nature. And I feared by that point that it was going to turn to dust any minute, anyway. I hadn’t planned for my dead father to enter the poem, but he did, after a few drafts. Maybe that happened when I remembered that according to Japanese tradition, butterflies may ‘carry the souls of the dead or represent the souls of the dead. . . .’ Or so I read long ago in a book, and more recently, on the Internet. The poem was also inspired by my deep admiration for Henri Cole’s poem ‘Dead Wren.’ ”

  REGINALD GIBBONS was born in Houston in 1947, attended public schools, then Princeton University (BA in Spanish and Portuguese) and Stanford University (MA in English and creative writing; PhD in comparative literature). He was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, and is now Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His many works include ten books of poems, most recently Last Lake (University of Chicago Press, 2016); a critical book, How Poems Think (Chicago, 2015); the novel Sweetbitter (Broken Man Press, 1994); translations (Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments [Princeton University Press, 2008]; Sophocles, Antigone [with Charles Segal, Oxford University Press, 2003]; Euripides, Bakkhai [with Charles Segal, Oxford, 2001]; Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda [Sheep Meadow, 1999]; and other volumes); a collection of short fiction, An Orchard in the Street (BOA Editions, 2017), and other books. With Ilya Kutik, he is completing a volume of translations of poems by Boris Pasternak. His book Creatures of a Day was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, and he has fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Center for Hellenic Studies. He is a longtime volunteer for the Guild Literary Complex and the American Writers Museum (both in Chicago).

  Gibbon
s writes: “ ‘Canasta’ came out of my growing understanding of emotional losses over time—in this poem, not my own losses, but those of Sophie, my maternal grandmother. She was a young woman when she emigrated to the United States in 1900 with her husband and the first of her eight children, who had been born earlier that year. By the time I, a small boy, began to know her, her losses had already accumulated devastatingly: the murdered world of her extended family and her cultural sphere in Poland; her lost opportunities in America to be the person she must have thought she would become, when during her gold-medal student days in her gymnasium in Lodz she had imagined her future; the five years of absence from four of her children when their father took them away with him to the Far East and Australia to tour as child musicians with him; later, the deaths of three of her children in their twenties (two of illness, the third in World War II); and more.

  “Yet in her minor way, she made a life buoyed at least somewhat by her intellect, her knowledge of languages, the pleasures of music, and evidently by her pursuit of religious novelty. I don’t know how many religions she tried or joined; she and her husband (to me a fascinating but forbidding grandfather whom I was not allowed to know very well) seemed to have completely disavowed Judaism, and I don’t think I heard them or any of their children, certainly not my mother, ever even say the word ‘Jewish.’

  “From my childhood and youth I have images that bring Sophie to mind, yet without my knowing very fully what they might stand for or why these particular images are still with me. In the context of Sophie’s catastrophes—historical, cultural, spiritual, and familial—I want to think of her independence, too, through all the years (I was not yet born) when she and her husband lived separately in nearby small frame houses in the old Houston neighborhood called The Heights. Writing this poem, I felt the impulse to put among my words a repeated sound like a slow beating of a small drum, which seemed to help me create what is simply an acknowledgment, however imperfect, of Sophie—helped me suggest her efforts to live with some lightness despite the heaviness of a past that was experienced by so many as an eradication not only of what was, but also of what could then never come to be.”

  MARGARET GIBSON was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1944. She is the author of eleven books of poems, all from LSU Press, most recently Broken Cup (2014), whose title poem won a Pushcart Prize for 2016. Broken Cup was a finalist for the 2016 Poets’ Prize. Awards include the Lamont Selection for Long Walks in the Afternoon (1982), the Melville Kane Award for Memories of the Future (1986), and the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry for One Body (2007). The Vigil was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 1993. LSU will publish a new volume of poems, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, in 2018. She has written a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). Gibson is professor emerita, University of Connecticut, and lives in Preston, Connecticut. For more information, visit her website and Facebook page: www.margaretgibsonpoetry.com and www.facebook.com/MargaretGibsonPoetry.

  Gibson writes: “As I was writing poems for what has become Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, a series of individual poems, each entitled ‘Passage,’ began to emerge, each poem finding its place at intervals throughout the longer work. In the first of these, the speaker is standing in a dark room, sensing an open door, and beyond that door also darkness. Generally speaking, the series of poems moves toward or into the light. All short, most with long lines, the poems seem to put the speaker at a threshold one might easily miss, the length of passage often being as short as a single breath or the flicker of an image. But all are transformational or hold that possibility. The ‘Passage’ selected for The Best American Poetry 2017 is the final passage of that series and also the last poem in the book. I have no idea why it surfaced and declared itself. While I love hanging laundry in summer on a line outside, I haven’t done that for some years, as the line has seized up and won’t move and has turned green. Well, we’re all getting on out here in the woods. But once I had the opening image of pinning the cotton sheet, I remembered smoothing the sheet, and from that came the swift passage toward . . . what might have happened, but didn’t. Whatever did happen, however, is remembered as a recurring joy that embraces everything. And so it continues.”

  ARACELIS GIRMAY was born in Santa Ana, California, in 1977. She is the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005), as well as the poetry collections Teeth (Curbstone Books, 2007), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), and The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016). Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program.

  JEFFREY HARRISON was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1957. He has published five books of poetry: The Singing Underneath (E. P. Dutton, 1988), selected by James Merrill for The National Poetry Series; Signs of Arrival (Copper Beech Press, 1996); Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001); Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006); and Into Daylight (Tupelo Press, 2014), the winner of the Dorset Prize. A volume of selected poems, The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2006 by the Waywiser Press in the United Kingdom. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in eastern Massachusetts.

  Of “Higher Education,” Harrison writes: “Since the poem is straightforwardly autobiographical, there’s not much to explain. My father really did list those three colleges as off-limits, and I really did go to Columbia anyway, where I was lucky to be able to study with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro while also taking the courses that comprise the college’s core curriculum, which the poem obliquely mentions.

  “As is often the case with me, I wrote the first few lines without knowing where they were going to lead, and the poem went through many versions before it found its shape and current ending. It became clear fairly early that the poem was not so much about college education as about the learning that goes on, or does not go on, between fathers and sons. But facts still underpin the poem, and one of them was sitting in plain sight but came into the poem surprisingly late in the game: that my own son had recently graduated from my father’s alma mater, Kenyon. Getting that in led to the imagined, temporary reconciliation at the end of the poem.”

  TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He is the author of How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015). His other books are Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He received a 2010 National Book Award and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.

  Hayes writes: “If ‘Ars Poetica with Bacon’ was a painting, its focal point might stir somewhere in the vicinity of ‘we have no wounds to speak of / beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.’ ”

  W. J. HERBERT was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, second prize in the 2015 Morton Marr Poetry Competition. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art and a master’s in flute performance. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Of “Mounting the Dove Box,” Herbert writes: “The poem conflates two longings. The first, that fledglings born in our arbor would come back to build a nest. Our older daughter had left for college and the younger would soon follow and, for several years, I chose a new spot each spring for the unused box. The last was high up under the eaves and I couldn’t see inside, but sometimes I’d watch, hoping a dove would fly in with a twig in her beak. All this was long ago. We sold our house. But before leaving, I climbed a ladder to take down the box and found a bundle of half-stitched twigs, dry weeds, and pine needles deep inside. The second longing is to go back to the last days of my father’s life and act with more compassion.”

  TONY HOAGLAND’s sixth book of poems, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, will be issued by Graywolf Press in 2018. He teaches at the University of Houston, and is working on a craft book abou
t poetry, called Five Powers, Forty Lessons. He has also published two collections of essays about poetry, both from Graywolf, Real Sofistakashun and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays.

  Hoagland writes: “ ‘Cause of Death: Fox News’ originated in a ‘joke’ I spontaneously made at a dinner one night soon after my father had died. I claimed that when I went to the morgue, the autopsy report on my dad’s body said, ‘Cause of Death, Fox News.’ As jokes often are, it was truer than the literal facts. In his last decade, my father had become increasingly more conservative, paranoid, and vitriolic. Whenever I visited him and his third wife in their ranch house, at the end of a six-mile-long dirt road in rural Colorado, the voices of Fox News commentators raged from the living room TV, spewing their choleric version of the world.

  “At first this seemed like a kind of sport or entertainment for them. My father and his wife relished the wild stories of welfare mothers and urban crime; the dire predictions about impending economic collapse; the contemptible intellectual follies of Ivy League apologists. They also delighted in giving offense to visiting liberals. Gradually, though, they seemed to believe their own paranoid, furious narratives about the decline of the country. Their garage filled up with bales of bottled water, canned beans, and toilet paper; a survivalist’s checklist.

  “Most striking to me was the way in which my father’s vision of an embattled nation seemed like a metaphor for his personal decline, his own diminished male power; his body itself with its increasingly weakened borders, a body being invaded and taken advantage of by ‘opportunistic’ outsiders, immigrant viruses, and alien life-forms.