The Best American Poetry 2013 (24 page)

M
ARTHA
C
OLLINS
was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1940 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. She is the author of
White Papers
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and the book-length poem
Blue Front
(Graywolf Press, 2006); she has also published four earlier collections of poems and two collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of creative writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for
FIELD
magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Of “[white paper 24],” Collins writes: “While I was writing
Blue Front
, which focused on a lynching my father witnessed as a child, I was thinking about how that experience might have affected him. But the more I wrote, the more I began to consider what this had to do with me, a white woman living one hundred years later. Shortly after the book was published, the term ‘white papers' came into my consciousness and led me to begin what ultimately became a book of numbered but untitled poems that deal with race, addressing particularly the question of what it means to be ‘white' in a multiracial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past. ‘[white paper 24]' appears about halfway through the book, but was in fact one of the last I wrote. A number of the poems are personal, focusing particularly on my very white childhood; others, like 24, made use of historical information—much of it gleaned, in this case, rather accidentally, before I had even thought about writing the poem.”

Born in Ghana in 1962, K
WAME
D
AWES
spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. Dawes has edited anthologies and published two novels, a collection of short stories, a memoir, plays, and scholarly books. His sixteen collections of poetry include
Back of Mount Peace
(Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and
Wheels
(Peepal Tree Press, 2011). In 2013 Copper Canyon Press will publish
Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems
. A winner of an Emmy for his poetry and reporting on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, Dawes has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of
Prairie Schooner
and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Dawes writes: “ ‘Death' is part of a sequence of poems I have written that respond to the plays of August Wilson. These poems are collected in an evolving manuscript called ‘August: A Quintet.' Wilson's monumental project of charting the experience of African Americans in the twentieth century has appealed to me for its scope and grace, but especially
for the wonderful Africanness of his vision and the way it engages themes that resonate with someone who sees himself fully shaped by the rewards and challenges of being a child of Africa and her Diaspora. ‘Death' was at one stage titled ‘Death: Baron Samedi,' alluding to the complex and fascinating Haitian deity of death and sexuality who makes a cameo in the poem. As startling as this ‘almost-persona' poem is, it is important to understand it in the way that we understand the tools we often employ to overcome the things we most fear. Somehow, by speaking of death, one can achieve a certain mastery over its effects, which are deeply rooted in fear. In many ways this poem tells an old story about the power that we gain by arriving at the most base place of our morality and our humanity. If we can dance with death we become quite dangerous to those who seek to control us by the fear of death. And it is in this sense that I dared to speak this poem. I trust it is clear that I could never leave this poem claiming to have achieved such mastery of death.”

C
ONNIE
D
EANOVICH
was born near steel mills outside of Chicago in 1960 and was the first person in her Serbian family to go to college—Columbia College (BA) and DePaul University (MA). She began writing when she was six, was published while a student, and won a Whiting Writers' Award in 1997. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches the occasional class, reads, writes, enjoys comedy, and attempts to live a spiritual life. Her books include
Zombie Jet
(Zoland Books, 1999),
Watusi Titanic
(Timken Publishers, 1996), and
The Spotted Moon
(unpublished, with excerpts published in such magazines as
Hambone
).

Deanovich writes: “My poem ‘Divestiture' encapsulates a difficult time made more painful by my own actions while ill, a time that's best tossed on the compost for Nature, a power greater than me, to take care of. I want it also to be sheathed, however lightly, with Hope.”

T
IMOTHY
D
ONNELLY
was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1969. He is the author of
Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
(Grove, 2003) and
The Cloud Corporation
(Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O'Brien he is the coauthor of
Three Poets
(Minus A Press, 2012). He has received
The Paris Review
's Bernard F. Conners Prize and fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a poetry editor for
Boston Review
and teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts in New York City.

Donnelly writes: “I started writing ‘Apologies from the Ground Up' while walking home from work one night. As I passed by the stoops in front of all the big Victorian brownstones in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, it occurred to me that, counter to the novelty we so often strive for and celebrate in our poetry and elsewhere, the staircase's basic design seems to have undergone very little alteration (if any) since its invention back in the earliest days of yore. The poem's first line, ‘The staircase hasn't changed much through the centuries,' shuffled up from the word-mush in my head, followed by ‘I'd notice it'—something of a boast, it seemed to me, in light of the length of time referred to (it half-implied some kind of superhuman longevity). Technically, I knew, this should have been ‘I'd have noticed it,' but I liked the way the former prolonged the first line's iambics and, moreover, I tend to welcome, when it feels right, the confusion of tenses in my poems, which often have to do, at least in part, with the past's place in the present.

“Thoughts of escalation and the distant past brought to mind the Tower of Babel, whose story has always fascinated me, and this in turn recalled a sort of nightmare fantasy I used to taunt myself with on the subway from time to time—namely, that all the thoughts in the train's other passengers' heads might suddenly become audible to me in one loud outburst. I imagined this would happen either through synchronized acts of speech or else by way of some unexpected telepathic event (I would hear them in my head). In either case, it would result in a chaos of tongues, a sort of local, personal Babel that I would have to suffer through for having been so preciously sensitive to the presence of others' speech and thoughts and selves in the first place.

“With the second line, a mild self-inflation had entered the poem, a more or less accidental egotism that seems to me to be a common byproduct of, if not a precondition for, the kind of voluble inner monologue the poem hopes to simulate. This egotism resurfaces in the subway Babel scenario and elsewhere, the poem's speaker freely dropping in on Breughel, my psyche, certain facts concerning the American buffalo, etc. But he forges ahead in his own head mostly, which is related to but isn't mine, struggling to identify with the collective even as his thinking compels him to remain distinct from it. This is the heart of the matter for me, this struggle—and how the wafture of it fans the pleasure and the shame of being too much oneself. Self-possessed but giddy with guilt over it, the speaker closes the poem with a big fat apology, but one in which he makes a fairly ridiculous and self-dramatizing spectacle of himself, even if he does get certain things, in my opinion, just right.”

S
TEPHEN
D
UNN
was born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including
Different Hours
(W. W. Norton), which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. His seventeenth collection,
Lines of Defense
, forthcoming from Norton in January 2014, will include “The Statue of Responsibility.”

Of “The Statue of Responsibility,” Dunn writes: “For many years, I've had in one of my notebooks this quote from Viktor Frankl's
Man's Search for Meaning
: ‘I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.' However, when I began the poem I had forgotten who said it. I may have even come to think that it was my idea. Only recently did I discover it in the notebook.

“I thought the idea spoke to a fundamental American issue: Can our liberties be truly significant without a commensurate sense of responsibility? In retrospect, I'm glad that I'd forgotten it was Frankl's idea, because I might have been too obviously indebted to it.

“I think my poem became the invention it is because of my bad memory. As I was writing the poem, I did remember the lines that are attributed to the Pope, lines that I've loved that now—knowing what we know—seem irresponsible, if not obscene. The surprise and discovery of the poem was that I think the statement, ‘See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little,' remains, for me, in spite of its misuse, important moral wisdom.”

D
AISY
F
RIED
was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1967. She is the author of three books of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press:
Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice
(2013),
My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again
(2006), and
She Didn't Mean to Do It
(2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. She has received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships. She was awarded
Poetry
's Editors Prize for a feature essay for “Sing, God-Awful Muse!” on reading
Paradise Lost
and the Nipple Nazi of Northampton. For two years she was the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.

Of “This Need Not Be a Comment on Death,” Fried writes: “I worked on pieces of this—the film of the mother at age three, the robot bug, the birth narrative—at different times and very sporadically over a few years. Eventually I guess I decided the line breaks seemed random, or else accidentally set straight margins, and typed the poem
inside those parameters just to get my mind off making certain kinds of decisions. Probably the line ‘This need not be a comment on death' seemed like a stanza ending, and when I skipped a line the thing started to look like a fridge with a top freezer. The Paglia quote I remembered from when I reviewed her book
Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems
, which I mostly liked, but thought the comment about William Carlos Williams's plum poem delightfully inane.”

A
MY
G
ERSTLER
was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. She teaches in the MFA program in writing at the University of California, Irvine. Penguin published her most recent book of poems,
Dearest Creature
, in 2009. Her previous twelve books include
Ghost Girl
(Penguin, 2004),
Medicine
(Penguin, 2000),
Crown of Weeds
(Penguin, 1997),
Nerve Storm
(Penguin, 1993), and
Bitter Angel
(North Point Press, 1990, reissued Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997). She was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 2010
.

Of “Womanishness,” Gerstler writes: “Contemplating my relationship, if any, to feminism was perhaps fodder for this poem. Wondering what a feminist or post-feminist lullaby could sound like may have been in the mix, too. Several smart female graduate students told me that since American women have now achieved equality with men, feminism is obsolete. I was amazed to hear this, and some of that astonishment filtered into the poem. Additionally, I am fond of the word ‘prissy,' which I heard a lot in my childhood, and so wanted to try to build a little word-shrine around it.”

L
OUISE
G
LÜCK
was born in New York City in 1943. Her
Poems 1962–2012
was copublished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Ecco in 2012. She has won the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and served as the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2003 until 2010. Her collection of essays,
Proofs and Theories
(Ecco, 1995), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 1993
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Yale University and Boston University.

B
ECKIAN
F
RITZ
G
OLDBERG
was born in Wisconsin in 1954 but grew up in Arizona. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and is the author
of seven volumes of poetry—
Body Betrayer
(Cleveland State University Press, l99l),
In the Badlands of Desire
(Cleveland State University, l993),
Never Be the Horse
(University of Akron Press, l999),
Twentieth Century Children
(Graphic Design Press, Indiana University, l999),
Lie Awake Lake
(Oberlin College Press, 2005),
The Book of Accident
(University of Akron Press, 2006), and
Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems
(New Issues Press, 2010)—and a collection of prose poems,
Egypt from Space
(Oberlin, 2013). Her work has appeared in the 1995 and 2011 editions of
The Best American Poetry
. She is professor of English at Arizona State University. She lives in Carefree, Arizona, “with many rabbits, quail, coyotes, javelinas, and the occasional bobcat.”