The Best American Poetry 2013 (25 page)

Goldberg writes: “ ‘Henry's Song' was not supposed to be about Henry and writing this poem was a reminder that writing is sometimes an act of trust rather than clear purpose. The poem began from a few lines I wrote down after sitting in my friend's backyard among the tall whispering trees, the piles of dead autumn leaves, one evening. There was a kind of loneliness—one with which, I think, most people are familiar—being outside in the dark but able to turn and see the lit kitchen window and its view inside. And I had the sense of being in an alien landscape, for the landscape familiar to me was not this one but the desert, the wide-open spaces and a clear view of the stars.

“A couple of weeks later I came across the lines and began the poem, not knowing where I wanted to go. When I began writing about the cat I was sure I'd taken a wrong turn—a detour—and I tried several times to go somewhere else. Finally, for the sake of moving on, I kept the cat, figuring that once I got past it and the poem became clearer to me, I could cut the passage. That was the plan. But the poem had other ideas. The poem was smarter than I was. And, as it took shape, the cat came back again. This time, I just went with it. The title came last, though I resisted it, too. But the song had been Henry's all along, carrying the music of the poem as I groped my way.”

T
ERRANCE
H
AYES
was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He won the 2010 National Book Award in poetry for
Lighthead
(Penguin). His other books are
Wind in a Box
(Penguin, 2006),
Muscular Music
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006), and
Hip Logic
(Penguin, 2002). He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a USA Zell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Of “New Jersey Poem,” Hayes writes: “States and the states of mind those states evoke . . . I foolishly toyed with a fifty-states poem project akin to Sufjan Stevens's fifty-state album project. But just as Stevens only got two (great) albums in, I only got to New York and this New Jersey poem before my interests shifted/drifted. I'm still writing poems about the weirdness of place. That's what ‘New Jersey Poem' seems to be: a poem of surreal realism, of doppelgangers and grief and recovery. But I've come to find titling the poems ‘Ohio Poem' or ‘South Carolina Poem' a shade boring. . . . Each time I look over this poem part of me hopes the Willie at its heart recognizes it as a gift to him. Part of me hopes he never recognizes any of it.”

R
EBECCA
H
AZELTON
was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1978. She is the author of
Fair Copy
(Ohio State University Press, 2012), winner of the 2011 Ohio State University Press/
The Journal
Award in Poetry, and
Vow
(Cleveland State University Press, 2013). She was the 2010–2011 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Creative Writing Institute and winner of the “Discovery”/
Boston Review
2012 Poetry Contest. She teaches creative writing at Oklahoma State University.

Hazelton writes: “ ‘Book of Forget' is from a series of poems inspired by Sei Sh
ō
nagon's
The Pillow Book
and by Peter Greenaway's movie of the same name. The poem reflects my fascination with burlesque, with vaudeville shows, and with theater and theatricality in general, the actions we perform willingly and unwillingly, and people's assumptions about women's talents based on their appearance. I'm fascinated by the power dynamic between performer and audience, between a woman on display and the people who watch her.”

E
LIZABETH
H
AZEN
was born in Washington, DC, in 1978. She received a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches high school English.

Of “Thanatosis,” Hazen writes: “In reading about the principle of ‘fight or flight,' I came across a third defense—tonic immobility. Having long been intrigued by the idea that silence and invisibility are forms of power, I thought about what it means to play dead, and this exploration triggered memories of childhood games of hide-and-seek. A strict form seemed fitting.”

J
OHN
H
ENNESSY
was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and grew up in New Jersey. He went to Princeton University on a Cane Scholarship and received graduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas. He is the author of two collections,
Bridge and Tunnel
(Turning Point Books, 2007) and
Coney Island Pilgrims
(Ashland Poetry Press, 2013). He was a contributing editor of
Fulcrum
and is the poetry editor of
The Common
, a new print magazine based at Amherst College. In 2007–2008 he held the Resident Fellowship for Poetry at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst. “Green Man, Blue Pill” won the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from
Southwest Review
.

Of “Green Man, Blue Pill,” Hennessy writes: “The term ‘Green Man' usually refers to a foliate head or a face made of leaves, a sculpture most commonly found in medieval Christian cathedrals. No one knows for certain what these sculptures are or what they signify, but some claim they descend from various pagan figures of fertility or nature spirits—the horned god of the woods, the lover of a forest-dwelling goddess. The figure in cathedrals may be a symbol of rebirth representing the cycle of renewed growth each spring—a mirror to the spiritual cycle marked by the Christian celebration of Easter, Christ's death and resurrection.

“ ‘Green Man' is a recent name—it comes from Lady Raglan's 1939 article in
The Folklore Journal
—but the carved heads have appeared all over the world and for several millennia: in representations of the god Okeanos in Anatolia, the Roman Sylvanus, the Celtic Cernunnos, and even the Islamic tutor of the Prophets, Al-Khidr or Hizir, a Sufi figure whose name means ‘the Green One' or ‘Green Forever.'

“Likewise, ‘blue pill' signifies a host of pharmaceutical and figurative pick-me-ups. Living near the woods in Amherst, Massachusetts, keeps me close to my Greens now, thank God, but I remember where I come from: Rahway, New Jersey, a couple of blocks from the brick chimneys of the Merck plant, where they kept it rising.”

D
AVID
H
ERNANDEZ
was born in Burbank, California, in 1971. His collections include
Hoodwinked
(Sarabande Books, 2011),
Always Danger
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), and
A House Waiting for Music
(Tupelo Press, 2003). A recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship in poetry, he teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and University of California, Irvine.

Of “All-American,” Hernandez writes: “Around the time that I had
written this poem, I was reading and rereading Elizabeth Bishop's ‘In the Waiting Room.' I was, for some reason or other, enthralled with the poem. I even went so far as to obtain a copy of the
National Geographic
(my only eBay purchase) that the poem references. It's that transcendent moment, the near-evaporation of the speaker's identity that mesmerized me: ‘you are an
I
, / you are an
Elizabeth
, / you are one of
them.
/
Why
should you be one, too?' With ‘All-American,' I was aiming for a full-evaporation of the speaker—a collective ‘we' who is a citizen of this country—which allowed me the freedom to say things that I vehemently oppose and wholeheartedly support, oftentimes in the same breath.

“This poem owes a debt to the sprawling landscape of Modest Mouse's
The Lonesome Crowded West
, as well as the population list of American cities that I found online. There are numerous cities and towns that sound like flowers, several that didn't make it into the final cut of the poem. O, Abilene, you were so close!”

T
ONY
H
OAGLAND
was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1953. After teaching in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, New Mexico, and Maine, he moved to Houston in 2002 to teach in the University of Houston graduate writing program. His work has received the Mark Twain Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. His most recent books of poems are
What Narcissism Means to Me
(Graywolf Press, 2004) and
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
(Gray-wolf, 2010). He is interested in theater and has started Five Powers Poetry, a program for coaching high school teachers in the teaching of poetry in the classroom.

Of “Wrong Question,” Hoagland writes: “Certainly I believe that innumerable poems are hiding, concealed, camouflaged, in our daily lives and conversation, and I suppose this poem would be an example of those poetry-mayflies that swarm right at the surface. ‘Look at your hand,' said the poet. ‘These are the kinds of facts / that habit leaves in the dark.' Long tendrils of neurosis lead down into the not-so-dark of the subterranean human core. It's so ordinary and so humorous. It is paradoxical that most of what passes for consciousness is repetitious trash and garbage, but that the very garbage surrounding us in social life is rich with ore. I imagine most people recognize that being asked the question ‘Are you all right?' is both a gracious gesture on the part of the asker, and an opportunity for endless self-indulgence. So often when being asked that question (and I seem to invite it), I feel troubled by the implications (that I seem to invite it).

“Of course, as everyone knows, in writing it is important to keep leaning on a poem until it gives up its last secret, the one drop of whale oil at its core. In this case, that drop is clearly in the last handful of lines. That is what pays the poem's rent, by which I mean the rent of a reader's attention. I used to feel (and I still do) that if the poem hasn't cost the writer something real—if the poem has not broken up a little of the ego-crust, has not hurt a little in the making—it is probably not a real poem. This is an arguable contention, of course—there are many kinds of poems—but I like poems on which the blood is wet.”

A
NNA
M
ARIA
H
ONG
was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1966. The 2010–2011 Bunting Fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University and an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the editor of
Growing Up Asian American
, an anthology of fiction and memoir published by William Morrow and Avon Books (1994). She has had residencies at A Room of Her Own Foundation, Yaddo, Djerassi, Fundación Valparaíso, and Kunstnarhuset Messen. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington and Eastern Michigan University and currently teaches poetry writing at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

Hong writes: “I wrote ‘A Parable' toward the end of a seven-year run of writing sonnets, which culminated in my recently completed collection
The Glass Age: Sonnets
. Not a sonnet, the poem wanted to be longer, more narrative than lyric, and in tercets. When I drafted it, I was working with overrhyming—using excessive internal rhyme to deliberately torque the sonnet, giving the form more of what it demands—and that technique manifests in this poem, too.

“ ‘A Parable' conveys an overt moral, assimilating the patterns of fairy tales and myths, which I had been working with throughout
The Glass Age
. I had also been thinking and writing about the relations between personal greed and societal failure and how easily even those with the most sensitive proclivities can be conscripted by a little bullying, assorted threats, and blandishments.”

M
AJOR
J
ACKSON
is the author of three collections of poetry:
Holding Company
(2010) and
Hoops
(2006), both from W. W. Norton, and
Leaving Saturn
(University of Georgia Press, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner
Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the poetry editor of
Harvard Review
.

Major Jackson offers this “Why I Write Poetry” statement:

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this

mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to

writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries

and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through

the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to

stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The

kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and

reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative

pleasure and contentment. Other people's poems afford me the greatest

pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike

that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being

startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up