The Best American Poetry 2019

by David Lehman

  NABILA LOVELACE, a Queens native, was born in 1991; her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is out now from YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.

  Of “The S in ‘I Loves You, Porgy,’ ” Lovelace writes: “There are times when I’m listening to music that I go into a trance because of the voice of the singer. Nina Simone does that to me every time. After listening to her rendition of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ upward of a hundred times I could not stop hearing the ‘s.’ I could not hear love without hearing the plural.”

  CLARENCE MAJOR, born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1936, is a poet, painter, and novelist. His most recent book of poems, My Studio, was published by LSU Press in 2018.

  Major writes: “My poem ‘Hair’ evolved out of my family lore about hair; it also evolved out of my knowledge of superstitions about hair that I found in many other cultures. Early on, I became interested in how the human mind was apparently so easily susceptible to irrational beliefs. I began collecting some of these little ‘unbelievable’ stories, especially the ones that had no connection with logic or reason or even common sense.”

  GAIL MAZUR was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937. Her collections include Forbidden City, Figures in a Landscape, Zeppo’s First Wife, winner of the Massachusetts Book Prize, and They Can’t Take That Away from Me. She is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge. Land’s End: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2020.

  Of “At Land’s End,” Mazur writes: “Everything in a garden has a history, and in Provincetown, the history of fishing families, artists, and writers is gentled and enriched in their gardens. I often think of Stanley Kunitz, and my ‘legacy’ anemones, of the order he created in his dune garden, fueled by his sense of agency, of possibility. In this politically devastating time, I’m also companioned by the urgent (and absurd) question: What are we going to do about Bosnia? What are we going to do?”

  SHANE MCCRAE was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1975. His most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Prize. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. He is the poetry editor at Image, teaches at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.

  Of “The President Visits the Storm,” McCrae writes: “Superstitiously, I fear revealing too much about how I write, because I fear that if I do, I won’t be able to write at all. But there’s no way for me to know I’ve revealed too much until I’ve already revealed too much, so: Often, before I go to bed, I’ll think something like, ‘I sure would like to write a poem,’ and then try to conjure up a line or two. That’s how ‘The President Visits the Storm’ got started. I thought the thought, and the lines, ‘America you’re what a turnout great / Crowd a great crowd big smiles America’ occurred to me, almost without additional conjuring beyond the initial thought. Then I went to sleep. The next day, after taking my youngest daughter to school, I opened up gmail—I had written the lines down, as I always do when writing lines down before bed, in a fresh email draft—took a look at the lines, and wrote the rest of the poem. It came out fairly quickly—probably because I had already written some poems about Trump, and knew pretty much the voice I wanted, but also probably because, as John Lydon said, ‘anger is an energy.’

  “As I wrote the above paragraph, I felt certain I would end it by saying something more about Trump. And while invoking Public Image Ltd’s anti-apartheid anthem, ‘Rise,’ is saying something more about Trump, I had felt I would say something more direct than that. But I find that Trump has wormed his way into an area of evil few people before him have reached, and it is an area beyond the boundaries of effective criticism: What critique can one make of the antichrist? So I will conclude, instead, by saying that I wrote the poem against him, as all art is made against people like him.”

  JEFFREY MCDANIEL was born in Philadelphia in 1967 and is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (University of Pittsburgh Press). He is working on a new book, Holiday in the Islands of Grief, and has just finished a semiautobiographical novel, 4,000 a.m. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in the Hudson Valley with his twelve-year-old daughter, Camilla, and his wife, Christine Caballero.

  Of “Bio from a Parallel World,” McDaniel writes: “Right before he died in 1979, my grandfather wanted to change his will and leave every dime he had to me. My father and grandmother talked him out of it. This poem borrows the format of bio writing and imagines the potential burden of that inheritance, as well as possible outcomes of my life if I didn’t get clean and sober in 1994.”

  CAMPBELL MCGRATH was born in Chicago in 1962. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Miami and taught at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of creative writing.

  McGrath writes: “ ‘Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool/The Founding of Brasilia (1950)’ was originally intended to be part of my 2016 collection XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, but ended up, somewhat quixotically, on the cutting-room floor. XX features a poem for each year of the century, written in various historical guises and personae, and I had two or even three poems for some years, and no very good ideas for others. For 1950 I wanted to write a poem about Miles Davis but I also wanted to commemorate the founding of Brasilia, a purpose-built modernist capital in the wilderness. In the end, I decided that Miles could birth the cool and found Brasilia with his horn, but the poem never felt perfectly finished, and I ended up using a poem about Charlie Parker instead. Two years later I ‘rediscovered’ the poem, realized it was quite interesting, and wondered why exactly I had failed to find a home for it in XX. Oh well, live and learn. I am glad to have it in the world now, even at some remove from the grand historical project that was its genesis, and delighted by its inclusion among such esteemed company.”

  ANGE MLINKO was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1969. She has lived and worked in New England, New York, Houston, Morocco, and Lebanon, and now teaches in the creative writing program of the University of Florida. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Distant Mandate (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), and her poetry criticism appears regularly in Poetry, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.

  Mlinko writes: “ ‘Sleepwalking in Venice’ is one of a series of poems I have been writing from Airbnbs during periods (summers, holidays) when my sons are with their father. I have complete faith in a kind of Rilkean quietism, where the discipline of writing stanzas confers grace in solitude. This poem owes a debt to Joseph Brodsky’s book on Venice, Watermark, as well as to his Venetian poems; to Venice: A Traveller’s Reader by John Julius Norwich; to Leopardi and Thomas Mann; and to insomnia.”

  KAMILAH AISHA MOON was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1973. She is the author of Starshine & Clay (2017) and She Has a Name (2013), both published by Four Way Books. She teaches at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

  Of “Fannie Lou Hamer,” Moon writes: “This poem was written to move past a moment that hurt deeply and stopped me in my tracks—a scenario that I know I will continue to encounter as our country continues to struggle with closing the chasm between our ideals and our connected realities. This was a weary moment in the long trudge toward the unlimited collective potential we have if enough of us are willing to do the internal and external work necessary for progress.”

  ANDREW MOTION was born in London in 1952. Cofounder of the Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org), he was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. In 2015 he moved to Baltimore, where he teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent publication is Essex Clay (Faber & Faber, 2018).

  Of “The Last of England,” Motion writes: “I began writing this poem shortly after leaving London to live in Baltimore in the summer of 2015—and (despite
its brevity) took about a year to finish it. The title comes from the famous oil painting of the same name painted by Ford Madox Brown in 1855—which shows two anxious-looking emigrants leaving home to start a new life (in Australia, in fact, and not the USA). My own feelings on leaving the place that had been my home for the previous sixty-two years—or some of them, anyway—are the subject of my poem.”

  PAUL MULDOON was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. His thirteenth collection of poems, Frolic and Detour, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2005.

  Of “Aubade,” Muldoon writes: “The ‘dawn song,’ known as an aubade or alba, has been a staple of poetry in English since at least the seventeenth century. In this case, the setting is North America in the twenty-first century, though some of the imagery of the poem harks back to the Mongolian shamanic tradition of the ‘deer stone’ while at least two words have an Irish or Scottish resonance. A haggard is ‘an enclosure on a farm for stacking grain, hay, etc.’ while a hag refers to the last sheaf of a harvest, thought in many European countries to embody ‘the spirit of the corn.’ ”

  JOHN MURILLO was born in Upland, California, in 1971. He is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010) and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020). He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952. Her most recent books are Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018), and The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019). She is currently on the faculty of Texas State University.

  Of “You Are Your Own State Department,” Nye writes: “I am fascinated with how poets attempt to comfort themselves during particularly difficult times—what images, curiosities, connections, and questions arise. Sometimes the audience at a reading feels so supple and hopeful it breaks my heart.

  “It’s as if people think the poet might put things back in place. This is a tenderness beyond measure—a belief in the powers of language and metaphor—a dream of abiding meaning.”

  SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco in 1942 and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Stag’s Leap, her 2012 collection, won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. She is the author of ten previous books of poetry. Her latest book is Odes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). She teaches creative writing at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her next collection, Arias, will come out with Knopf in 2019. She lives in New York City.

  Of “Rasputin Aria,” Olds writes: “I don’t remember where I first read about Rasputin—maybe in the Canadian Book of World Records. I was horrified by his cruelty, and by the cruelty done to him. And I felt I had no ability to imagine him from within. So I could almost not even wonder if it changed—his sense of what cruelty was—when he became the subject of it. I seemed to have no way to think about him, yet I was haunted by the terrible humanness of his actions. I think I thought it might be wrong of me to have any sympathy for him. If he had tortured to death someone I knew, would I have wanted to torture him to death, instead of lock him up for life? The facts of his life and death would suddenly shoot through my mind. I knew something of my own schadenfreude, but this was in a realm far more horrible.

  “I knew that an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, meant no more than an eye for an eye—not two eyes and a nose. (I looked it up. The talionic law—mirror law—originated with the Babylonian King Hammurabi; later, when the Hebrew Bible came out, Hammurabi’s Code was featured in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.) But the murderous, nullifying crimes of rape and castration should not, I thought, be met with rape and castration. Someone somehow would have to stop the retaliation—and the escalation—if our species were to survive. Prison without parole? Eye for an eye seems not promising in terms of the survival of our species or of the earth. To call the original taking of the eye illegal, and the government’s taking, in return, of an eye, legal, does not augur well.

  “It was months—a year—before it occurred to me to mull over the subject in a poem. Before then, the idea of working in the realm of a poem-draft hadn’t occurred to me—I’d been blocked in my thinking. My pity and terror about the pain the body goes through—‘even’ the body of a hideously sick, an evil, person—might have been connected (I had not thought of this until now) with my guilt, as a child, for the fact that my sins had tortured Jesus to death. But now I began to somehow trust that I wasn’t obsessed in an evil way, but haunted in a normal way by evil and suffering and the uses of power. And then the first line of ‘Rasputin Aria,’ banal and true, came, and the unscrolling of the poem began. And during the writing of the aria (late 2016), my themes came home to roost—came home to the United States, came home to a certain crock of shit-ka-doodle-do.

  “Today I tried to think more about my relationship to the poem since I wrote it. I liked the dysphoria of rasp and sputum against the melodic word aria—like audible sarcasm about human nature. (Often I think about beauty as a problem in art that tries not to look away from the popular human phenomenon of torture. I was saying to someone today, Poetry is a place where torture can be considered while being mourned and protested—art might be a place that provides some moral ground from which to consider it. Maybe it’s similar to the fact that we turn to rhyme and meter for their seeming power at times of death and birth.)

  “So I was relieved that I’d been able to think about such a person, an egomaniac torture-murderer, and relieved to believe that it was okay for me, in an attempt at a work of art (a first draft no one will ever see) to say, ‘I wish I didn’t think about him so much.’

  “ ‘Rasputin Aria’ was written sometime shortly after November 8, 2016. By the end of writing the poem, which came out pretty fast and pretty much whole, I had a better idea of why I’d been obsessed with Rasputin and other dictators. Doing the thinking a poem does seemed to be a kind of action. Obsessing hadn’t been action—but being able at last to turn, and face the subject, and take up a pen, was. Most of the poems I write, no one sees—they aren’t good enough. So I am used to writing bad poems. The unlikelihood that I am ‘up to’ writing a good enough poem on a subject doesn’t stop me from trying. I joined my first picket line when I was fourteen, but I’ve been late in believing that I have any ability to exercise any power in art. But I know that writing is action, reading is action, which can lead to more action in art, and on the street, with our feet, and our voices. In opposition to bullying—to take the action of speaking up.

  “The sentence above was the way I ended this little essay. And then a couple of further, contradictory thoughts came to me. How was it possible no one had written a poem on the subject of Rasputin? And: no wonder no one has, what a terrible subject. It would need someone smart, nice, tasteful, subtle.

  “I’d been called a practitioner of ‘sensationalism’—that didn’t sound good! And I was a fearful person, anxious, subject to nightmare and hypnopompic ‘waking terrors’ in childhood, adolescence, and my twenties. Maybe only a really ‘Good’ person should think about evil.

  “Then a friend, the poet Madeleine Mori, read me an Alexander Chee quote, from a Q&A he did with Goodreads in 2016, that allowed me to ask myself helpful questions. What had made me feel ill-equipped to consider Rasputin?

  “These were Chee’s words: ‘For me, writer’s block means I’ve somehow rejected my own ideas as improbable, or unacceptable, or otherwise unthinkable. And so to deal with it I have to deal with why that is. Like many people, I have the belief that keeping myself silent in certain situations will make me invisible or will somehow protect me. When I want to silence myself, I fear myself. So I move toward the block that way: what do I fear will happen if I write this? Is that an honest fear or a dishonest one? The problem with having an imag
ination is that you can scare yourself out of your whole life if you’re not careful. You can imagine a story, or . . . imagine yourself as a failure—both are stories, only one [will be published, and reach another person]. The other is you, blocking the door to your own life.’ ”

  MICHAEL PALMER was born in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. His most recent book of poems is The Laughter of the Sphinx (New Directions, 2016). He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. He has also been an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for more than forty years.