Best of the Best American Poetry

25th Anniversary Edition

David Lehman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781451658897
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Robert Pinsky, distinguished poet and man of letters, selects the top 100 poems from twenty-five years of The Best American Poetry This special edition celebrates twenty-five years of the Best American Poetry series, which has become an institution. From its inception in 1988, it has been hotly debated, keenly monitored, ardently advocated (or denounced), and obsessively scrutinized. Each volume consists of seventy-five poems chosen by a major American poet acting as guest editor—from John Ashbery in 1988 to Mark Doty in 2012, with stops along the way for such poets as Charles Simic, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Billy Collins, Heather McHugh, and Kevin Young. Out of the 1, 875 poems that have appeared in The Best American Poetry, here are 100 that Robert Pinsky, the distinguished poet and man of letters, has chosen for this milestone edition.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

SHERMAN ALEXIE was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne / Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals. His most recent books are the poetry collection Face, from Hanging Loose Press, and War Dances, a volume of stories and poems from Grove Press. He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.

Of “Terminal Nostalgia,” Alexie writes: “For such a young country, the United States is intensely nostalgic. And Internet culture—with its endless remixes of pop culture—is even more nostalgic. As for the particular brand of nostalgia that afflicts Native Americans? Well, it has a lot to do with romanticizing pre-Columbian culture. Thinking about all this, I thought I’d write a ghazal (a seventh-century Arabic poetic form) that combined American pop culture nostalgia with Native American cultural nostalgia. The result is, I believe, funny and sad at the same time, although, when I’ve performed it live, it seems that people are afraid to laugh.”

A. R. AMMONS was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, in 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U.S. 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), which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; A Coast of Trees (1981), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Sphere (1974), which was awarded the Bollingen Prize; and Collected Poems 1951–1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award. He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the year the award was established. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. He died on February 25, 2001.

“I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption,” Ammons told his Paris Review interviewer. “I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy my admission to others by engaging their interests and feelings, doing the least possible damage to my feelings and interests but changing theirs a bit. I think I was not aware early on of those things. I wrote early on because it was there to do and because if anything good happened in the poem I felt good. Poems are experiences as well as whatever else they are, and for me now, nothing, not respect, honor, money, seems as supportive as just having produced a body of work, which I hope is, all considered, good.”

One day in 1987, Archie and his wife, Phyllis, were driving north on the I-95 in Florida when a gigantic mound of rubble came into view. The sight hit Ammons like an epiphany: “I thought maybe that was the sacred image of our time,” he said. In The Best American Poetry 1993, Ammons commented: “I wrote ‘Garbage’ in the late spring of 1989. Because of some medical problems that developed soon after the poem was written, I didn’t send it anywhere for a long time. The American Poetry Review very generously accepted it but because of a backlog had to delay publication for a while. By Capote’s view, the poem is typing, not writing. I wrote it for my own distraction, improvisationally: I used a wide roll of adding machine tape and tore off the sections in lengths of a foot or more. The whole poem is over eighty pages long, so I sent only the first five sections to APR. Norton will publish the whole poem as a book in 1993. I’ve gone over and over my shorter poems to try to get them right, but alternating with work on short poems, I have since the sixties also tried to get some kind of rightness into improvisations.

“The arrogance implied by getting something right the first time is incredible, but no matter how much an ice skater practices, when she hits the ice it’s all a one-time event: there are falls, of course, but, when it’s right, it seems to have been right itself.”

RAE ARMANTROUT was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947. She teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego. Just Saying, her latest book of poems, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2013. “Soft Money” is from her collection Money Shot (Wesleyan, 2011). Her previous book, Versed, also from Wesleyan, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

Armantrout writes: “I started ‘Soft Money’ after hearing an old Duran Duran song, called either ‘Rio’ or ‘Rio Dancer,’ on the radio. Some of the verses I could make out were, ‘Rio, Rio dancer ’cross the Rio Grande,’ and ‘She don’t need to understand.’ The poem spins out of that standard depiction of an exoticized erotic object. It proceeds to run some changes on the always complex relationship between sex and power.”

JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007) won the 2008 Griffin International Prize for Poetry. The Landscapist, his collected translations of the poetry of Pierre Martory, was published in 2008 by Sheep Meadow Press in the United States and by Carcanet in the United Kingdom. The Library of America published the first volume of his Collected Poems in fall 2008; his most recent collections are Quick Question (2012) and Planisphere (2009), both from Ecco, and a new translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (W. W. Norton, 2011). In 2006, the City Council of New York declared April 7 to be John Ashbery Day in perpetuity in the five boroughs that constitute New York City. “Wakefulness,” the poem selected for this volume, is the title poem of Ashbery’s seventeenth book, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998.

In 1973, Elizabeth Bishop read Ashbery’s Three Poems and wrote to the book’s author: “At first I felt extremely baffled—only a sense of ‘motion’ and the extremely good writing led me on—but now after many re-readings I think I am getting to understand them better—especially ‘The Recital’—and some of ‘The System.’ Actually, when I do enjoy passages or pages most, they remind me very oddly of Kierkegaard (whose name I don’t remember how to spell right, I think). Although no theologian, probably no Christian, I’ve always been able to read him with the greatest pleasure—and your THREE POEMS have now begun to give me the same sort of pleasure. I hope you don’t mind my saying this—that I shd. be saying something like they remind me of Yeats! Whatever—you have really arrived at a personal, purely logical, and deep—as well as beautiful way of saying things. I’m not a critic and have difficulties expressing myself about poems—but I’m sure this book is very important—as they say all the time, of course—but really, as well.” Ashbery was the guest editor of the inaugural volume in this series, The Best American Poetry 1988.

MARGARET ATWOOD was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. She was educated at Victoria College, the University of Toronto, Radcliffe College, and Harvard University. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her novels include The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000; The Robber Bride (Doubleday, 1993); and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter. The film was directed by Volker Schlöndorff and released in 1990. Oryx and Crake, a dystopic novel, was published in 2003. Both The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. An alliterative children’s book, Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, a paean to a particular letter, was published by Workman in 1995. Atwood has edited The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982), The Best American Short Stories (1989), and The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986). She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Of “Bored,” Atwood writes: “This is one of a series of poems on my father and his death—published in Morning in the Burned House. The details are from my assistant wood-sawing, house-building, etc., as a child in northern Quebec.”

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, and a chapbook, Music Like Dirt (2002). Desire received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Bidart is the coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. His long poem “The Second Hour of the Night” appeared in the 1998 edition of The Best American Poetry. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Bidart writes: “Think of ‘Injunction’ as the injunction heard by an artist faced with the forever warring elements of the world that proceed from the forever unreconciled elements of our nature. It is not meant to stand alone, but to be part of the tapestry of Music Like Dirt.”

STEPHANIE BROWN was born in 1961 in Pasadena, California, and grew up in Newport Beach. She has degrees from Boston University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two books of poetry, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review (including covers in 1996 and 2005), Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, and other print and online journals. She was a curator of the Casa Romantica Reading Series for poets and fiction writers in San Clemente, California, from 2004 to 2010. She has taught creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Redlands, but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager. She is currently a regional branch manager for Orange County Public Libraries in Southern California. She is a book review editor for the online journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and poetry editor for the Zócalo Public Square website.

Of “Feminine Intuition,” Brown writes: “A couple of notes: The three parts of the poem are meant to suggest the three parts (Kore, Demeter, Hecate) of the female life story. ‘A Woman Clothed with the Sun’ is another name for the Virgin Mary. The more I try to write about this poem, the more it resists me . . . so I’ll leave it at that.”

CHARLES BUKOWSKI was born in Andernach, Germany, in 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. He gave up writing in favor of drinking in 1946. After a ten-year binge, he developed a bleeding ulcer and decided to take up writing again. “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink,” he wrote in Women. “If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including mail carrier and postal clerk, dishwasher, guard, elevator operator, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, and shipping clerk. His first story appeared when he was twenty-four. At the age of thirty-five he began writing poetry. He wrote, he once said, for “the defeated, the demented, and the damned.” His first book of poetry was published in 1959. He went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including The Last Night of the Earth Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1992), Post Office (Black Sparrow, 1980), Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems (Ecco, 2003), and Come On In! (HarperCollins, 2006). Bukowski’s poems swagger and boast—they are “in your face” with boozy breath and unabashed braggadocio; they win you over with their feigned artlessness and candor that conceal artistry and calculation. According to unofficial bookstore records, shoplifters favor Bukowski over any other writer. He died of leukemia on March 9, 1994.

Bukowski wrote: “The more said about a poem, the less it becomes.”

ANNE CARSON was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950. She teaches ancient Greek at various places, now at New York University. Her most recent books are NOX (New Directions, 2011) and Red Doc> (Knopf, 2013).

Of “The Life of Towns,” Carson writes: “The poem is part of an ongoing war with punctuation; we fought to a standstill here.”

HENRI COLE was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Middle Earth. He has received the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Award. His most recent collection is Touch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in Boston.

Cole writes: “I wrote ‘Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting’ over a period of a year while living in Rome. I saw many paintings during this time, most of them religious and violent. My goal was not so much to put pictures into words, but to take something of their naked realism and project it into the realm of the abstract, where the lyric poem exists. Yet it was in the secular Pompeian wall paintings (200 BC–100 AD) that I found the simplest trope for autobiography. At first I saw the four styles as chronological representations of four stages in my life. But as I began to write and scrutinize myself, the four styles became mixed up and seemed to coexist metaphorically in me.

“In the first style there are vivid stucco reliefs made to look like Greek mortar and drafted blocks; it is more a plastic than a painted style; there is rarely a presence of figures. The second style substituted stucco work with illusionistic representations of architectural elements, colonnades, podia, views of gardens and landscapes. The third style abandoned perspective and flattened out into unified fields with inserted f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Foreword by David Lehman
• Introduction: The Centrality of Poetry by Robert Pinsky
• Sherman Alexie, “Terminal Nostalgia”
• A. R. Ammons, “Garbage”
• Rae Armantrout, “Soft Money”
• John Ashbery, “Wakefulness”
• Margaret Atwood, “Bored”
• Frank Bidart, “Injunction”
• Stephanie Brown, “Feminine Intuition”
• Charles Bukowski, “Three Oranges”
• Anne Carson, “The Life of Towns”
• Henri Cole, “Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting”
• Billy Collins, “Dharma”
• Robert Creeley, “En Famille”
• Olena Kalytiak Davis, “You Art A Scholar, Horatio, Speak To It”
• Carl Dennis, “Our Generation”
• Susan Dickman, “Skin”
• Stephen Dobyns, “Desire”
• Mark Doty, “Difference”
• Rita Dove, “All Souls’ ”
• Denise Duhamel, “How It Will End”
• Stephen Dunn, “The Imagined”
• Alice Fulton, “Powers of Congress”
• Allen Ginsberg, “Salutations to Fernando Pessoa”
• Louise Glück, “Landscape”
• Jorie Graham, “Manifest Destiny”
• Linda Gregerson, “Safe”
• Linda Gregg, “The War”
• Thom Gunn, “Cafeteria in Boston”
• Donald Hall, “Prophecy”
• Mark Halliday, “The Opaque”
• Robert Hass, “Bush’s War”
• Terrance Hayes, “A House Is Not a Home”
• Lyn Hejinian, “The Polar Circle”
• Bob Hicok, “Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry”
• Brenda Hillman, “Phone Booth”
• Edward Hirsch, “Man on a Fire Escape”
• Jane Hirshfield, “In Praise of Coldness”
• Tony Hoagland, “In a Quiet Town by the Sea”
• John Hollander, “The See-Saw”
• Richard Howard, “Like Most Revelations”
• Fanny Howe, “9-11-01”
• Marie Howe, “Magdalene—The Seven Devils”
• Major Jackson, From “Urban Renewal”
• Rodney Jones, “Plea for Forgiveness”
• Lawrence Joseph, “So Where Are We?”
• Jane Kenyon, “Reading Aloud to My Father”
• Kenneth Koch, “Proverb”
• John Koethe, “Sally’s Hair”
• Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
• Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me”
• David Lehman, “Operation Memory”
• Philip Levine, “The Return”
• Amit Majmudar, “The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim”
• Sarah Manguso, “Hell”
• J. D. McClatchy, “My Mammogram”
• Heather McHugh, “Past All Understanding”
• James McMichael, From “The Person She Is”
• James Merrill, “The ‘Ring’ Cycle”
• W. S. Merwin, “The Stranger”
• Thylias Moss, “There Will Be Animals”
• Paul Muldoon, “The Loaf”
• Harryette Mullen, From “Muse & Drudge”
• Carol Muske-Dukes, “Hate Mail”
• Sharon Olds, “Q”
• Meghan O’Rourke, “The Window at Arles”
• Michael Palmer, “I Do Not”
• Carl Phillips, “Fretwork”
• Robert Pinsky, “Samurai Song”
• Claudia Rankine, “A short narrative of breasts and wombs in service of Plot entitled”
• Adrienne Rich, “Ends of the Earth”
• David Rivard, “The Rev. Larry Love Is Dead”
• J. Allyn Rosser, “Discounting Lynn”
• Mary Ruefle, “Middle School”
• Kay Ryan, “Outsider Art”
• Michael Ryan, “Switchblade”
• James Schuyler, “Let’s All Hear It for Mildred Bailey!”
• Lloyd Schwartz, “Pornography”
• Frederick Seidel, “The Death of the Shah”
• Alan Shapiro, “Country Western Singer”
• Charles Simic, “Country Fair”
• Tom Sleigh, “At the Pool”
• Gary Snyder, “Building”
• A. E. Stallings, “Asphodel”
• Ruth Stone, “The Latest Hotel Guest Walks Over Particles That Revolve in Seven Other Dimensions Controlling Latticed Space”
• Mark Strand, From “Dark Harbor”
• Pamela Sutton, “Forty”
• James Tate, “Bounden Duty”
• Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy”
• Paul Violi, “Counterman”
• Rosanna Warren, “Necrophiliac”
• Rachel Wetzsteon, “Time Pieces”
• Susan Wheeler, “A Filial Republic”
• Richard Wilbur, “This Pleasing Anxious Being”
• C. K. Williams, “A Hundred Bones”
• Anne Winters, “The Mill-Race”
• Charles Wright, “American Twilight”
• Franz Wright, “A Happy Thought”
• Robert Wrigley, “Religion”
• C. Dale Young, “Vespers”
• Dean Young, “No Forgiveness Ode”
• Kevin Young, “Lime Light Blues”
• Contributors’ Notes and Comments
• Acknowledgments
• About Robert Pinsky and David Lehman
• Copyright