Best American Poetry 2018

David Lehman, Dana Gioia

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501127816
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

The 2018 edition of the Best American Poetry —"a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title" ( Chicago Tribune )—collects the most significant poems of the year, chosen by Poet Laureate of California Dana Gioia. The guest editor for 2018, Dana Gioia, has an unconventional poetic background. Gioia has published five volumes of poetry, served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently sits as the Poet Laureate of California, but he is also a graduate of Stanford Business School and was once a Vice President at General Foods. He has studied opera and is a published librettist, in addition to his prolific work in critical essay writing and editing literary anthologies. Having lived several lives, Gioia brings an insightful, varied, eclectic eye to this year's Best American Poetry. With his classic essay "Can Poetry Matter?", originally run in The Atlantic in 1991, Gioia considered whether there is a place for poetry to be a part of modern American mainstream culture. Decades later, the debate continues, but Best American Poetry 2018 stands as evidence that poetry is very much present, relevant, and finding new readers.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

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ALLISON ADAIR was born in Pittsburgh in 1977 and grew up in Gettysburg and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She studied at Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Boston College.

Adair writes: “Though I continued to read and study poetry intensely after graduate school, I didn’t write for several years, until one day I had to. During my first pregnancy, I was vacuuming one of two antique Persian rugs, bought online, when suddenly I felt that something was wrong. Something small, wordless. By the following week, the pregnancy had ended. Around that time, moths began to swarm my apartment. I rolled up the edge of the rug I’d been tending to find it threaded through with larvae—they’d been there all along.

“Months later, I was pregnant again. Pregnancy was reconnecting me, physically, to poetry, especially in terms of metaphor: as transfer, and as a paradox wherein the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the unfamiliar familiar. This strange time is the occasion of ‘Miscarriage.’ After the second pregnancy ended, I sat down, exhausted, and wrote, from somewhere underneath craft. The poem is decidedly spare—straightforward and bereft. The rug is described literally; the title refuses any play. The only technique I allowed myself, really, comes in the line breaks, which are annotated both in meaning and in sound. But I also couldn’t help reflecting on the hands that might have woven that rug, on where the women in the pattern might have existed before arriving in my apartment, on all they’d seen, all their terrible wisdom.”

KAVEH AKBAR was born in Tehran, Iran. Calling a Wolf a Wolf, his first book, was published in 2017 by Alice James Books in the United States and by Penguin in the United Kingdom. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

Of “Against Dying,” Akbar writes: “In the summer of 2013, in the throes of one of many rock bottoms, my body began giving up. I was getting sicker and sicker, closer and closer to a Rubicon that, once crossed, could never be crossed back again. One day, grace of graces, I crawled my way toward help and (very) long story short, I slowly began getting better. The poem asks: ‘how shall I live now / in the unexpected present?’ It was a kind of rebirth. To whom do you submit your gratitude, your bewilderment at being given a second chance? And what to do with a body ravaged by its previous occupant? Roethke said, ‘The serious problems in life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.’ This poem is deeply invested in that promise.”

JULIA ALVAREZ was born in New York City in 1950, and grew up in her parents’ native country of the Dominican Republic. She recently retired as a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In addition to poetry, she has written fiction, nonfiction, and books for young readers; titles include: Homecoming (Plume, 1996), The Other Side/El Otro Lado (Plume, 1996), and The Woman I Kept to Myself (A Shannon Ravenel Book, 2011). She received a 2013 National Medal of the Arts and is a founder of Border of Lights, an annual gathering of activists, artists, educators at the border of Haiti and the DR. Visit her at juliaalvarez.com.

Of “American Dreams,” Alvarez writes: “When we arrived in New York in 1960, refugees from the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, my parents kept telling my sisters and me that this was the land of freedom where we had the opportunity to become whatever we wanted to be. They believed in the American Dream. I wish I could say that I shared their high-mindedness. But I was a kid, and my American Dream was all about candy. I couldn’t get enough of it. In Queens where we lived there was a whole store dedicated to candy, owned by an immigrant mother and her son, earlier-generation versions of us. I roamed the aisles, pronouncing the alluring names under my breath, the son watching me in a way that unsettled me. (Now, I wonder if he was just worried about shoplifting, not interested in my skinny—despite all that sugar—prepubescent body.) During those early years of my sweets-fixation, Martin Luther King was marching; demonstrators were being attacked by dogs, getting jailed, lynched; girls my age were dying in bombed churches. I’m astonished that those scenes on the news didn’t register. Or maybe I was subliminally aware, and that’s why I didn’t buy the un-nuanced version of the American Dream. The violence on TV was not unlike the violence of the regime we had escaped. The American Dream was not equally accessible to all. The Land of Good and Plenty was still just the name of a candy.”

A. R. AMMONS was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, in 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a US Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific in World War II. After his discharge, “Archie”—everyone who knew him called him Archie—attended Wake Forest University, where he studied the sciences. He took a class in Spanish, married the teacher, and went on to work as an executive in his father-in-law’s biological glass company before he began teaching poetry at Cornell University in 1964. Ammons wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, many published by W. W. Norton, including Glare (1997), Garbage (1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), and Sphere (1974). His posthumous books include Bosh and Flapdoodle (Norton, 2005), Selected Poems (Library of America, 2006), and a two-volume set of his collected poems from Norton in 2017. A longtime and greatly beloved professor at Cornell University, Archie was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. He died on February 25, 2001, a week after turning seventy-five.

DAVID BARBER is the author of two collections of poems published by Northwestern University Press: Wonder Cabinet (2006) and The Spirit Level (1995), which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books. “Sherpa Song” is included in his forthcoming collection, Secret History, to be published by Northwestern in 2019. He is the poetry editor of The Atlantic and teaches in the Harvard Writing Program.

Of “Sherpa Song,” Barber writes: “Mountaineering is known to be a spiritual pursuit and a technical feat. So, too, poems, at least the ones that move mountains. ‘Sherpa Song’ is one of a series of numbers in my forthcoming collection Secret History cast in a stringent nonce form: five stanzas of five lines, all lashed together in a cat’s cradle of slant rhymes. The gambit is to grapple with syntax and cadence in tight quarters to get to a vantage point that would otherwise remain out of reach. In this case, hitching my gear to the double-edged cognomen ‘sherpa’—both the ancestral and occupational collective term for the storied alpine guides of the Himalayas—was a way of groping toward a rough sympathetic magic that might turn formal stricture into lyric resonance. If pressed on why the form has gotten under my skin, I’d have to echo George Mallory’s gnomic rationale for his assaults on Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’ ”

ANDREW BERTAINA was born in Merced, California, in 1980. He was raised in Chico, California, and lives in Washington, DC. He works at American University in the library and as an adjunct in the department of literature. His work is available at andrewbertaina.com.

Bertaina writes: “When I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ I had been reading essays about translation, and thinking about the process and about many of the great writers that I’ve read only in translation. In these essays about translation, particularly with, say, War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, I kept reading arguments as to why one translation or another was more artful or precise than what had come before. It seemed, at least to me, that an argument could be made that every book deserved a thousand translations to try and capture all of the nuances of language and thought of the original.

“From there, I thought about the immense amount of importance we attach to meeting a writer, as though in their presence, some of their true essence is distilled, and the residual effects attach themselves to the person witnessing them like dust around stars. With those intertwining notions of translation and authorship in mind, I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ as though merely seeing a writer and the way he bent to talk to a woman somehow superseded the boundaries of language.”

FRANK BIDART was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939. In 1957 he entered the University of California, Riverside. In 1962 he began graduate work at Harvard, where he studied with Reuben Brower and Robert Lowell. His books include Star Dust (2005) and Desire (1997), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Desire received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 (FSG) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2018. Bidart is the coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (FSG, 2003). He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BRUCE BOND was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954 and is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Five books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020). He is a regents professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Of “Anthem,” Bond writes: “This sonnet, as part of a book-length sequence entitled Black Anthem, appears in the final section, where the book reflects upon its choices. Why a book of sonnets? Why that form—that intimate space so associated with autonomy and closure—that has, for many, reached the status of the political? Doubtless, it is for this reason, in part, that I wanted to use it, to subvert an ironically rigid reading of form, to illuminate more precisely our relationship to beauty and perception—to music, in particular, whose play of echo and disorder bear associations without becoming identical to them. So odd an age that shed so much light on how language works and does not work seemed so quick to regard the semiotics of certain forms as fixed—not only unrealistic in terms of the way signs work, but also revelatory of a psychology of critical and political engagement. Music, in particular the anthem, seemed a good place to explore this shared psychology, since the anthem resists our projections even as it gives them flesh, and the stakes of musical persuasion can be so high. What I stumbled on, in writing the poem, is how music’s resistance can likewise be ‘read.’ It resonates, not only as the rhetoric that inspires commitment, but also as the extinction of that rhetoric. Music’s pulse is made of singular beats, like bodies, lost in time to the equally ephemeral whole. The resistance of form to meaning thus occasions a surprising return to meaning, to a reimagined affirmation and resistance to beauty as a space apart, a veteran’s park, a haunted absence at the heart of each, anxious to believe.”

GEORGE BRADLEY was born in Roslyn, New York, in 1953 and was educated at Yale University and the University of Virginia. He is the editor of The Yale Younger Poets Anthology and the author of five books of verse: one from Yale University Press, three from Knopf, and most recently a volume from Waywiser Press (A Few of Her Secrets, 2011). A short story of his was included in the 2010 PEN/O. Henry award anthology. He has worked as a construction foreman, a sommelier, a copywriter, and an editor. Currently, he imports olive oil from a property outside of Florence. He can often be found in Chester, Connecticut.

Of “Those Were the Days,” Bradley writes: “The poem chosen for this year’s BAP depends on a reader’s passing familiarity with some of the proverbs and idioms one hears every day, and it progresses—methodically, implacably—by giving each saying a twist. Prior to composition, the idea for the piece floated around in the back of my mind for some time, in part because our culture’s old saws so often struck me as at once trenchant and stupid. That is, they contain the wisdom of generations, but it is the conventional wisdom, and while they are food for thought, they are often uttered in lieu of thinking. The more I pondered these sayings, the more they took on ominous overtones. Or perhaps, as I hope the poem suggests, it is the passage of time that alters one’s view of such expressions. Contemplating a language is like gazing at stars. You view the past through the lens of the present, and what you see necessarily depends on where you stand.”

JOYCE CLEMENT was born in Upstate New York in 1961. In 1986, after a brief stint as a high school English teacher, she moved to central Connecticut where she still lives and works as a sales and marketing systems manager. Her book Beyond My View (Endionpress, 2011) received a Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. She was also a 2014 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award winner. Since 2011, she has served as a director of The Haiku Circle, an annual gathering of haiku poets held each June in Northfield, Massachusetts. From 2016 through 2018 she was coeditor of The Haiku Society of America’s Frogpond journal.

Clement writes: “The haiku sequence ‘Birds Punctuate the Days’ arose over the course of a year, primarily during writing sessions consisting largely of not-writing. Pen and keyboard were neglected as my thoughts drifted somewhere behind, ahead, and away from me. Then there would occur a sudden flutter of light or startle of sound—a bird moment—that instantly returned me to the present. In this way birds punctuated my days.

“In haiku, the writer is asked to avoid direct metaphor or personification. Instead two images, a fragment and a phrase, are typically placed next to one another, allowing the resulting associations to push, pull, or vibrate between them. Good haiku often offer levels of association, a touch point and then variants that ripple away from the central moment.

“My intent when writing ‘Birds’ was to present a visual or aural resemblance between bird moment and punctuation mark that would create an immediate and satisfying connection. Beyond that, I wanted to encapsulate the function of the mark through the moment. Beyond that, I wanted to consider the feeling of the mark, to think about how the marks absorb or enhance the essence of what proceeds and follows them. And then, how does the choice of bird species, their known habits and characteristics, shape the feeling and meaning of mark and poem? Then what other natural pauses, shifts in direction, stillnesses, patterns do we encounter in the flow of thought or day that serve as unwritten punctuat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Allison Adair, “Miscarriage”
• Kaveh Akbar, “Against Dying”
• Julia Alvarez, “American Dreams”
• A. R. Ammons, “Finishing Up”
• David Barber, “Sherpa Song”
• Andrew Bertaina, “A Translator’s Note”
• Frank Bidart, “Mourning What We Thought We Were”
• Bruce Bond, “Anthem”
• George Bradley, “Those Were the Days”
• Joyce Clement, “Birds Punctuate the Days”
• Brendan Constantine, “The Opposites Game”
• Maryann Corbett, “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers”
• Robert Cording, “Toast to My Dead Parents”
• Cynthia Cruz, “Artaud”
• Dick Davis, “A Personal Sonnet”
• Warren Decker, “Today’s Special”
• Susan de Sola, “The Wives of the Poets”
• Dante Di Stefano, “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen”
• Nausheen Eusuf, “Pied Beauty”
• Jonathan Galassi, “Orient Epithalamion”
• Jessica Goodfellow, “Test”
• Sonia Greenfield, “Ghost Ship”
• Joy Harjo, “An American Sunrise”
• Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
• Ernest Hilbert, “Mars Ultor”
• R. Nemo Hill, “The View from The Bar”
• Tony Hoagland, “Into the Mystery”
• Anna Maria Hong, “Yonder, a Rental”
• Paul Hoover, “I Am the Size of What I See”
• Marie Howe, “Walking Home”
• Mandy Kahn, “Ives”
• Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War”
• Stephen Kampa, “The Quiet Boy”
• Donika Kelly, “Love Poem: Chimera”
• Suji Kwock Kim, “Sono”
• Karl Kirchwey, “Palazzo Maldura”
• Nate Klug, “Aconite”
• Robin Coste Lewis, “Using Black to Paint Light”
• David Mason, “First Christmas in the Village”
• Robert Morgan, “Window”
• Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Invitation”
• Hieu Minh Nguyen, “B.F.F.”
• Alfred Nicol, “Addendum”
• Nkosi Nkululeko, “Skin Deep”
• Sheana Ochoa, “Hands”
• Sharon Olds, “Silver Spoon Ode”
• Jacqueline Osherow, “Tilia cordata”
• Mike Owens, “Sad Math”
• Elise Paschen, “The Week Before She Died”
• Jessica Piazza, “Bells’ Knells”
• Aaron Poochigian, “Happy Birthday, Herod”
• Ruben Quesada, “Angels in the Sun”
• Alexandra Lytton Regalado, “La Mano”
• Paisley Rekdal, “Philomela”
• Michael Robbins, “Walkman”
• J. Allyn Rosser, “Personae Who Got Loose”
• Mary Ruefle, “Genesis”
• Kay Ryan, “Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless”
• Mary Jo Salter, “We’ll Always Have Parents”
• Jason Schneiderman, “Voxel”
• Nicole Sealey, “A Violence”
• Michael Shewmaker, “Advent”
• Carmen Giménez Smith, “Dispatch from Midlife”
• Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story”
• Gary Snyder, “Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany”
• A. E. Stallings, “Pencil”
• Anne Stevenson, “How Poems Arrive”
• Adrienne Su, “Substitutions”
• Natasha Trethewey, “Shooting Wild”
• Agnieszka Tworek, “Grief Runs Untamed”
• G. C. Waldrep, “Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,”
• Wang Ping, “老家—Lao Jia”
• James Matthew Wilson, “On a Palm”
• Ryan Wilson, “Face It”
• Christian Wiman, “Assembly”
• Contributors’ Notes and Comments
• Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• Copyright