The Best American Poetry 2013 (29 page)

T
IM
S
EIBLES
was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He is the author of several poetry collections, including
Hurdy-Gurdy
,
Hammerlock
, and
Buffalo Head Solos
. His first book,
Body Moves
, will soon be rereleased by Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of their Contemporary Classics series. In 2010, he was invited to be poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for a semester. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he was also awarded a writing fellowship by the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poem “Allison Wolff” was included in
The Best American Poetry 2010
. He is a visiting faculty member at the Stonecoast MFA Writing Program sponsored by the University of Southern Maine. He live in Norfolk, Virginia, and teaches at Old Dominion University.

Of “Sotto Voce: Othello, Unplugged,” Seibles writes: “This poem began to take shape because of a conversation I'd had with a good friend. There was a woman he'd been pursuing who, herself, had another suitor. His discomfort made me think of Othello and how readily his feelings for Desdemona had been twisted into jealous rage by the clever Iago. In working through Othello's voice, I began to see that such violence was more likely driven by narcissism, rather than by an overwhelming passion for the beloved. It seems so often that people
consider jealousy a natural part of
real love
, when it's equally probable that the ‘green monster' is simply a marker of a felt loss of face.

“With regard to the writing itself: I wanted the stanza variations to be the visual equivalent of the players: Othello
alone
, he and Desdemona,
the couple
, and, of course, the poison
triumvirate.
Otherwise, I merely wanted the lines to breathe as we might imagine sad Othello did, as he tried to make sense of his own actions. I'm not sure I would have ever begun to revise an idea of jealousy—or to rethink
Othello
—if it hadn't been for my love-struck friend whose angst pushed me to begin this poem.”

V
IJAY
S
ESHADRI
was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, and came to America as a small child. He is the author of four volumes of poetry—
Wild Kingdom
(Graywolf, 1996),
The Long Meadow
(Graywolf, 2004),
The Disappearances
(HarperCollins India, 2007), and
3 Sections
(Graywolf, 2013)—and many essays and reviews. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

Seshadri writes: “I sat down to write ‘Trailing Clouds of Glory' inspired, if that's the word, by Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the draconian immigration measure of 2010, which among other things gives Arizona law-enforcement officials license to stop a person they deem suspicious and demand proof that he or she is in America legally. Somehow, though, I couldn't while writing develop my antipathy to the law in a way interesting to me, so instead of sticking with the subject I let the poem meander, and it eventually meandered to the maternity ward where my son was born. What he says at the end, from the epigraph to Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, gave me the idea for the title, which is also from the Ode. I was happy when I finished the poem because I felt I had found a new (for me) way to assimilate political subject matter, though I guess it could just as easily be read as a way to avoid, rather than address, the central issue.”

P
ETER
J
AY
S
HIPPY
was born in Niagara Falls in 1961 and was raised on his family's apple farm. A graduate of Emerson College and the University of Iowa, he is the author of
Thieves' Latin
(University of Iowa Press, 2003),
Alphaville
(BlazeVOX Books, 2006),
How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic
(Rose Metal Press, 2007), and
A Spell of Songs
(Saturnalia Books, 2013). He has received fellowships in drama and poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and in poetry from the National
Endowment for the Arts. He teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachussetts, with his wife, Charlotte, and their daughters, Beatrix and Stella.

Of “Western Civilization,” Shippy writes: “At home, my office window offers a view of my neighbors' backyards. Because I live in Boston, most have replaced their grass with parking spaces. A few years ago, after a winter nor'easter, I looked out to see a white lea—all the cars were buried. A silhouette hovered on the snow: a parka, a man perched on the roof of what I knew was a green Fiat, smoking a cigar.

“Was it his car? I hope not.

“It wasn't hard to compare this floater to a castaway, the Mariner or Crusoe (or Ballard's Maitland) or a misadventurer angling for a kingdom to steal as his or her own.

“My poem, ‘Western Civilization,' wasn't written that day. But I kept gnawing at that image, a figure on top of a car, at sea, a sea of snow, a sea of sand, and Cheetos dust, with Keith Moon and Li Po, of course.”

M
ITCH
S
ISSKIND
was born in Chicago in 1945. He has published two books of short stories,
Visitations
(1984) and
Dog Man Stories
(1993). His poem “Like a Monkey” appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2009
. He lives in Los Angeles.

Sisskind writes: “ ‘Joe Adamczyk' was inspired first by memories of street corner taverns on the Northwest Side of Chicago: the pinball machines, the television sets, the beers—Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Old Milwaukee. There was a man who, after retiring from the post office, read Jeffrey Archer's
Kane and Abel
and began to have opinions on topics that had not previously interested him, and he also took up paint-by-numbers. I tried to imagine how this man's life would change if he went from painting to philosophy and just didn't stop. In the last stanza of the poem I tried to copy the final paragraph of
Crime and Punishment
, which (in my translation) refers to a ‘hitherto undreamed of reality' and to another story that has not yet been written, but will be.”

A
ARON
S
MITH
was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1974. His full-length poetry collections are
Appetite
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and
Blue on Blue Ground
(Pittsburgh, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. His chapbooks are
Men in Groups
and
What's Required
. A 2007 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he is the poetry editor of the literary journal
BLOOM
and assistant professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Of “What It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith,” Smith writes: “Avoiding the personal has become the new cliché in contemporary poetry. I wanted to write a hyperautobiographical poem that basically said ‘fuck you' to the voices that tell writers to keep the personal out of poems. Our bodies exist in public spaces, but the language about them, the openness toward what can be said about them, is often met with resistance or anxiety. I started the poem with the title and worked to capture Aaron Smith physically moving through New York City while also mentally moving through the landscape of his head. I wanted readers to feel like they were part of an immediate, uncensored thinking. The stuff that goes through my head is weird, and I imagine (hope) others are as weird as I am. Poems can contain all aspects of human experience. Any thoughts I felt myself resisting, I followed as far as I could. I deliberately wrote the poem in second person, taking the ‘I' out, to show that even the removal of the ‘I' doesn't mean a removal of the personal. In the end, the poem became an
ars poetica
about self-censorship. Why choose to write about trees when you can choose pubic hair?”

S
TEPHANIE
S
TRICKLAND
was born in Detroit in 1942. She is the author of six books of print poetry, most recently
Zone : Zero
, and seven electronic poems, most recently
Sea and Spar Between
, a poetry generator written with Nick Montfort using the words of Emily Dickinson and
Moby-Dick
. Her works include
V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una
—soon to reappear with a new mobile app—
True North
,
The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil
, and
The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.
Her seventh book,
Dragon Logic
, will be published by Ahsahta in 2013. A member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, Strickland coedited
Electronic Literature Collection/1
(2006). She has taught at many colleges and universities and now lives in New York City.

Of “Introductions,” Strickland writes: “I find it hard to introduce myself because what I do, what I love, and what I write are all over the map. In this little poem, I touch on location (location, location, location: I am so at home in NYC), on the constraints of extended care for a child who cannot recover, and on childhood adventure with my co-conspirator grandmother.”

A
DRIENNE
S
U
, born in Atlanta in 1967, is the author of three books of poems:
Having None of It
(Manic D Press, 2009),
Sanctuary
(Manic D Press, 2006), and
Middle Kingdom
(Alice James Books, 1997). Her
awards include a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She teaches at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she is poet-in-residence.

Of “On Writing,” Su writes: “When I started assembling my newest manuscript,
The House Unburned
, I found it to be suffering from structural gaps and an excess of grief and regret. I'd anticipated the gaps, as I've always had to do some strategic writing to make a manuscript cohere, but I hadn't foreseen the central emotions. Although the writing of the collection had begun in the wake of a tragedy, I had imagined the poems as a whole to be more affirmative than despairing.

“To round it out, I needed to come up with some poems of happiness, or at least the absence of unhappiness. This presented a problem, since, as I'm always telling students, successful poems are born of uncertainty, interior conflict, the modes of struggle that lack clear solutions. I went back and forth between two selves: the editor, whose vision for the collection required some happier poems, and the poet, who raged against the affront of an assignment so lacking in ambiguity. How, argued the poet, can happiness, gratification, or success be complex enough to give life to a poem?

“Eventually, the answer came with a shift in setting. If the poem could be about writing, conflict would be inherent in the question. So I gave myself permission to write about writing. Now that I had a conflict, the road to the poem appeared.”

J
AMES
T
ATE
was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. His newest book is
The Ghost Soldiers
(Ecco/HarperCollins, 2008). He teaches in the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. An interviewer once asked him whether he had any advice for young writers starting out. “No,” he answered, “if a writer is going to get anywhere, he doesn't listen to anybody.” He has also said, “Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” Tate was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 1997
.

E
MMA
T
RELLES
was born in Mercy Hospital, Miami, Florida, where she grew up with her brother and Cuban immigrant parents. She is the author of
Tropicalia
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2011)—winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for
ForeWord
Reviews
' Book of the Year Award in poetry—and the chapbook
Little Spells
(GOSS183, 2008). She received an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University in 1999 and has worked since as an arts journalist, a writing instructor, and an editor. She has been a featured reader at the Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC, the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Miami Book Fair International, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. In 2013, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. She lives with her husband in the state with the prettiest name.

Of “Florida Poem,” Trelles writes: “The natural world images in this poem come from my childhood, when I had time to watch plants shoot out of the ground or tiny creatures settle in the mesh of our screen door. I wonder now if they were looking for a cool place to pause, just like the rest of us. Many years later, some friends gave me a Devil Girl Choco-Bar, basically a candy bar but with a wrapper illustrated by R. Crumb in lurid purples and reds and a savagely sexy woman on the front claiming, ‘It's bad for you!' I liked the drawing so much I never ate the chocolate and just let it disintegrate on the kitchen shelf so I could look at the artwork every day. That grinning girl floated around my brain for a while, and then, through the inexplicable alchemy of poem writing, she became the face of Florida's summer heat. It, too, is part seduction, part wrath.”

D
AVID
T
RINIDAD
was born in Los Angeles in 1953.
Dear Prudence
, a volume of new and selected poems, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2011.
Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera
was published by Turtle Point in 2013. He is the editor of
A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos
(Nightboat Books, 2011). He lives in Chicago, teaches at Columbia College, and coedits the journal
Court Green
.