Best American Poetry 2016

David Lehman, Edward Hirsch

• Verlag: Scribner
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501127571
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Poesie

The premier anthology of contemporary American poetry continues—guest edited this year by award-winning poet Edward Hirsch, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the president of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Best American Poetry series is "a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh and memorable" (Robert Pinsky); a guiding light for the mood and shape of modern American poetry. Each year, this series presents essential American verse and the poets who create it. Truly the "best" American poetry has appeared in this venerable collection for over twenty-five years.A poet of decided brilliance since his 1981 debut collection, For the Sleepwalkers, Edward Hirsch curates a thoughtful selection of poetry for 2016 and an Introduction to be savored. Jumpha Lahiri said of Hirsch, "The trademarks of his poems are…to be intimate but restrained, to be tender without being sentimental, to witness life without flinching, and above all, to isolate and preserve those details of our existence so often overlooked, so easily forgotten, so essential to our souls." Hirsch's choices for this collection reflect the soul of poetry in America. As ever, series editor David Lehman opens this year's edition with an insider's guide and a thoughtful contemplation of poetry today.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

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CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967. He is the author of three books of poetry: Eternity & Oranges (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016), Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow, 2006), and After Greece (Truman State University Press, 2001). He has also written a book of travel writing, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press, 2013), and he is cotranslator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (Truman State UP, 2006). A former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest, he teaches at Allegheny College and is director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.

Of “Sentence,” Bakken writes: “This poem was written during a very cold night at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. An ice storm arrived during my residency and the power went out—so we had no heat. I could see my breath inside my little studio, but words were coming to me and so I stayed put, layering on every item of clothing I had with me, and writing by flashlight at night. I’d been thinking about Greece, as I almost always am, specifically about the winters there, when tourists depart, and the rhythms of life and labor slow almost to a halt, and the Greeks are left to themselves.

“The encounter described in the poem was in part remembered from the winter of 1993, when I lived in Thessaloniki, a beautiful, haunted city, in the final decade of a brutal century—one that had brought to Thessaloniki the devastations of the Holocaust, not to mention more recent outbursts of xenophobia and violence. Just a few hours north, war was raging in a place that had once been called Yugoslavia.

“As the poem’s long, single sentence gathered momentum, bringing new things to bear upon the scene, the frozen priest arrived and I let him thaw.”

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CATHERINE BARNETT is the author of The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004). She teaches at New York University, is a visiting professor in the Hunter College MFA program, and works as an independent editor. She has degrees from Princeton University, where she has taught in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has received a James Laughlin Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Barnett writes: “Although I often think things are heading in the wrong direction, underneath I am what some people have called an enigmatic optimist. (‘Chronically hopeful,’ someone once said.) ‘O Esperanza!’ is a revision of several actual and imagined facts. I wrote the poem right after having had the good fortune to attend a three-hour clown class (who knew such a thing existed?) with the spectacular Sarah French. I’d been told that Sarah would simply lay a rope down on the floor and all we’d have to do to become a clown was step over it. I wanted to try it because I wanted to perform without performing. Something to do with Being and Time, I imagine. It was one of the most difficult classes I’ve attended, which made me think of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s afternoon lectures, difficult in mostly very different ways. I was thrilled to discover his quote and wished I’d been able to understand more of what he was saying while he was standing right before my eyes. Like so many other poets, I’ve been well nourished on confusion and hope, both. And I have a habit of counting syllables (12 or 285 or 308, depending where you start and/or end).”

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RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines in 1969. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), and Chord (2015). He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He is the poetry editor of New England Review.

Barot writes: “I came across the story recounted in ‘Whitman, 1841’ in David S. Reynolds’s terrific book, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Did the incident actually happen? Reynolds presents some riveting evidence that says so.”

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JILL BIALOSKY was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her BA from Ohio University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has written three novels: House Under Snow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), The Life Room (Harcourt, 2007), and The Prize (Counterpoint Press, 2015). Her four volumes of poetry are The End of Desire (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), Subterranean (Knopf, 2007), Intruder (Knopf, 2010), and The Players (Knopf, 2015). She is the author of a memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (Atria Books, 2011). She is coeditor, with Helen Schulman, of Wanting a Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). She lives in New York City.

Of “Daylight Savings,” Bialosky writes: “This poem was inspired by the first November afternoon after we’ve turned back the clocks and leave our offices to the shock of darkness. I began to ponder the idea of time passing and what is lost in that hour and of course, what we cherish.”

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PAULA BOHINCE was born in Pennsylvania in 1976. Her three poetry collections are from Sarabande Books: Swallows and Waves (2016), The Children (2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008). She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America and the United Kingdom National Poetry Competition. She lives with her husband in Pennsylvania.

Bohince writes: “When I lived in Paris, I went on long walks and filled my eyes and notebooks with images from art and everyday life. The ones in ‘Fruits de Mer’ rested in mind for several years before they rose to the surface in a low-key castle in Scotland, the poem then revised with good suggestions from Herbert Leibowitz, editor of Parnassus. The imagined feast in Hemingway’s La Closerie des Lilas seemed more crucial each time I visited it: the ambivalence in the luxurious meal against lines that hold so much death. The Le Monde headline translates to ‘Justice is served.’ This poem, in its push-pull of war and hope, to me seems mostly about the power of images and imagination, wedding the visible and invisible.”

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MICHELLE BOISSEAU was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1955. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she is senior editor of BkMk Press and a contributing editor of New Letters. She won the Tampa Review Prize for her fifth book of poems, Among the Gorgons (Tampa Review Press, 2016). A Sunday in God-Years (University of Arkansas Press, 2009) examines her paternal ancestors’ slave-holding past in Virginia into the seventeenth century. Other titles include Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press, 2003), Understory (Northeastern University Press, 1996), and No Private Life (Vanderbilt University Press, 1990). The eighth edition of her textbook, Writing Poems (Longman Publishing Group), was written collaboratively with Hadara Bar-Nadav. Boisseau has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Boisseau writes: “Over the past several years, as I worked on the poems that became Among the Gorgons, I have been exploring the double helix of the beautiful and the monstrous. As I was thinking about an incident between two of the giants of literature, ‘Ugglig’ came to be.”

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MARIANNE BORUCH, a native of Chicago, passed through its parish schools, then the University of Illinois at Urbana, and finally the University of Massachusetts, where she received her MFA in 1979. Her eighth poetry collection, Cadaver, Speak, came out in 2014 from Copper Canyon Press, which will publish her Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing in 2016. The Book of Hours (2011), from the same publisher, won the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her prose includes two essay collections on poetry, Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995) and In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity University Press, 2005), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she was a 2012 Fulbright/Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College.

Of “I Get to Float Invisible,” Boruch writes: “A lot of time is spent overhearing things. Shards and hesitations and curious claims. I stumbled into this fractured real story by accident, the brother of the woman in question arguing how impressive his sister’s poems about adultery were. Adultery! I was a stranger. No matter. But words mean and follow you.

“And images haunt: her brother’s blithe retelling in public, the young woman drinking alone, writing such things as her world breaks around her. Maybe I was merely picking up the soundtrack of what it is to live with so little privacy now, taking in intimacies we have no right to know, engaged in an empathy strange and compelling, often out of the nowhere of subway cars and elevators and grocery lines. People move, hold forth, rage and love and shrug while we let a world fall through us. And some of it catches.”

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DAVID BOTTOMS was born in Canton, Georgia, in 1949. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His most recent book of poems, We Almost Disappear, was released in fall 2011 by Copper Canyon Press. He has held appointments at the University of Montana, Mercer University, Johns Hopkins University, and Georgia Tech, and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writing Seminars. He served for twelve years as poet laureate of Georgia. He is a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and a founding editor of Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.

Of “Hubert Blankenship,” Bottoms writes: “For a little more than fifty years, my grandfather ran a country store in Canton, Georgia. He sold mostly canned goods, but also an assortment of things ranging from horse feed to fishing lures. Most of his customers were very much like Hubert Blankenship, poor but proud. They were hardworking dirt farmers and cotton mill hands.”

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JOSEPH CHAPMAN was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1982. He studied English, philosophy, and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went on to earn an MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. His work was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2012. He is currently in the first year of a master of divinity program at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Of “32 Fantasy Football Teams,” Chapman writes: “It may seem bold to start off an artist’s statement with self-congratulations, but rereading this poem I’m struck by just how plain funny and alive it is. That probably shouldn’t have been the case. When George David Clark, a good friend from my MFA days and the editor of 32 Poems, solicited a list poem from me, I knew I needed to collaborate with someone if I was going to write anything resembling humorous poetry. The thing is, I didn’t feel up to writing a playful poem on my own—my own poems were stalled, I felt stalled at my desk job—and so I selfishly got in touch with someone whose energy would be catching. Laura Eve [Engel], with whom I co-taught at the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia and who is also one of the funniest people I know, agreed to collaborate with me. It took only one or two emails to settle on our title. The puns came pretty quickly after that, as did the last line. It was a blast to write. In ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ Robert Frost famously cautions poets, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.’ However, this collaborative poem reminded me of the simple delight of wordplay. It reminded me that if I’m not having fun then the reader probably isn’t either.”

See Laura Eve Engel, coauthor of “32 Fantasy Football Teams,” in these Contributors’ Notes.

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MICHAEL COLLIER was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953. His two most recent collections of poetry are Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and An Individual History (W. W. Norton, 2012). He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Of “Last Morning with Steve Orlen,” Collier writes: “A few days before Steve Orlen passed away, on November 16, 2010, a little less than three weeks after having been diagnosed with lung cancer, he told his wife, Gail, that he’d never been happier in his life. He had spent the afternoon in his backyard, stretched out on a bed in full pasha mode, visiting with friends, talking about poetry and art, gossiping, telling stories, and offering up semi-oracular statements. Although he hadn’t eaten for several days, when a friend showed up with a loaf of homemade challah, Steve ate hunks of it slathered with butter and fig jam. I was fortunate to be there, among his friends, and he did seem truly happy. He was also fearless, and the way he faced death inspired and encouraged those who were with him. It’s not surprising that he was happy; friendship was one of the most abiding forces in his life.

“I met Steve in 1975 through John Murphy, my closest high school friend from Phoenix, who was taking undergraduate creative writing classes from him at the University of Arizona. Two years later, I entered the MFA program at Arizona, where I spent two important years studying with Steve. Not only did he have tremendous influence on the way I wrote poems, but his generosity and openness as a person were a model of affectionate friendship. He was also wonderfully irreverent and loved letting the air out of pretentious behavior, real or perceived. One of his missions with me was to wear off what he thought was a sheen I had picked up by going east to Connecticut College, where I had been a student of William Meredith’s. This is how he chided me about my woeful condition, in a 1976 letter: ‘Tho you do have some polish & a bit of manners, you’re still just a regular asshole from Phoenix, and your poetry stuff should reflect it.’

“In 1999, a few weeks before we were to teach together at Warren Wilson College, Steve sent me a letter in which he described the importance of having ‘at least one “intimate” friend to pal around with’ during the residency, so that ‘every once in a while’ they could ‘get deeper into friendship.’ He offered this as an example of that ‘deeper friendship’: ‘One late night, last residency with Tony [Hoagland], and I’m in my chair and he’s sitting cross-legged on my bed in his long johns, on his head, a bright yellow T-shirt tied up to stay put, not like an Arab headdress, but like a—what?—a clown hat, or something. I laughed at him, and he said in his defining, factual, defend...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Foreword by David Lehman
• Introduction by Edward Hirsch
• Christopher Bakken, “Sentence”
• Catherine Barnett, “O Esperanza!”
• Rick Barot, “Whitman, 1841”
• Jill Bialosky, “Daylight Savings”
• Paula Bohince, “Fruits de Mer”
• Michelle Boisseau, “Ugglig”
• Marianne Boruch, “I Get to Float Invisible”
• David Bottoms, “Hubert Blankenship”
• Joseph Chapman and Laura Eve Engel, “32 Fantasy Football Teams”
• Michael Collier, “Last Morning with Steve Orlen”
• Allison Davis, “The Heart of It All + A Free Beer”
• Olena Kalytiak Davis, “On the Certainty of Bryan”
• Natalie Diaz, “How the Milky Way Was Made”
• Denise Duhamel, “Humanity 101”
• Lynn Emanuel, “My Life”
• Claudia Emerson, “Cyst”
• Martín Espada, “Here I Am”
• Peter Everwine, “The Kiskiminetas River”
• Alexis Rhone Fancher, “When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:”
• Charles Fort, “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing”
• Emily Fragos, “The Sadness of Clothes”
• Amy Gerstler, “A Drop of Seawater Under the Microscope”
• Dana Gioia, “Meet Me at the Lighthouse”
• Jorie Graham, “Reading to My Father”
• Juliana Gray, “The Lady Responds”
• Linda Gregerson, “Font”
• Jennifer Grotz, “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City”
• Mark Halliday, “Doctor Scheef”
• Jeffrey Harrison, “Afterword”
• Terrance Hayes, “Barberism”
• Tony Hoagland, “Bible Study”
• Cynthia Hogue, “The Unwritten Volume”
• Garrett Hongo, “I Got Heaven . . .”
• Erin Hoover, “Girls”
• Richard Howard, “85 Off & On”
• T. R. Hummer, “Minutiae”
• Ishion Hutchinson, “Morning Tableau”
• Major Jackson, “Aubade”
• Lawrence Joseph, “Visions of Labor”
• Julie Kane, “As If”
• Suji Kwock Kim, “Return of the Native”
• Loretta Collins Klobah, “Tissue Gallery”
• John Koethe, “The Swimmer”
• Yusef Komunyakaa, “The Fool”
• Keetje Kuipers, “We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,”
• Deborah Landau, “Solitaire”
• Li-Young Lee, “Folding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet”
• Philip Levine, “More Than You Gave”
• Larry Levis, “If He Came & Diminished Me & Mapped My Way”
• Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
• Thomas Lux, “Ode While Awaiting Execution”
• Paul Mariani, “Psalm for the Lost”
• Debra Marquart, “Lament”
• Cate Marvin, “High School in Schuzou”
• Morgan Parker, “Everything Will Be Taken Away”
• Hai-Dang Phan, “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981)”
• Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “The First Last Light in the Sky”
• Stanley Plumly, “Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Five Flights Up’”
• James Richardson, “Late Aubade”
• Patrick Rosal, “At the Tribunals”
• David St. John, “Vineyard”
• Brenda Shaughnessy, “But I’m the Only One”
• Anya Silver, “Maid Maleen”
• Taije Silverman, “Grief”
• Tom Sleigh, “Prayer for Recovery”
• A. E. Stallings, “Alice, Bewildered”
• Frank Stanford, “Cotton You Lose in the Field”
• Susan Stewart, “What Piranesi Knew”
• Nomi Stone, “Drones: An Exercise in Awe-Terror”
• Adrienne Su, “Peaches”
• James Tate, “Dome of the Hidden Temple”
• Lee Upton, “The Apology”
• C. K. Williams, “Hog”
• Eleanor Wilner, “To Think of How Cold”
• Al Young, “The Drummer Omar: Poet of Percussion”
• Contributors’ Notes and Comments
• Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
• Acknowledgments
• About David Lehman and Edward Hirsch
• Copyright