The Best American Poetry 2013 (3 page)

1
. In “Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City,” later retitled “The Revolt of Islam,” Shelley's longest poem, an epic of twelve cantos in Spenserian stanzas.

2
. In a chorus in “Hellas,” often printed separately and identified by its first line, “The world's great age begins anew.”

3
. In “Epipsychidion.”

4
. Petri's post appeared on the
Washington Post
's blog on January 22, 2013.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/01/22/is-poetry-dead/

5
. John Deming's “open letter” appeared in
Coldfront
on Tuesday, January 22, 2013.
http://coldfrontmag.com/news/open-letter-to-alexandra-petri

6
. “Qatari Poet Sentenced to Life in Prison for Writing,”
npr.org
, December 4, 2012.
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/04/166519644/qatari-poet-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-writing

Denise Duhamel was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961. Her books of poetry include
Blowout
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013),
Ka-Ching!
(Pittsburgh, 2009),
Two and Two
(Pittsburgh, 2005),
Mille et un sentiments
(Firewheel Editions, 2005),
Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
(Pittsburgh, 2001), and
The Star-Spangled Banner
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series for Poetry. She has collaborated with numerous poets, composers, and visual artists, and is coeditor (with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad) of
Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry
. Her work has appeared in
The Best American Poetry
nine times in all, beginning with Louise Glück's selection of her poem “Feminism” for the 1993 volume. Her books published abroad include
Afortunada de mí
(translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David González) by Bartleby Editores in Madrid in 2008 and
Barbieland
(translated into German by Ron Winkler) by SuKulTuR Press in Berlin in 2005. A professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater. An Off-Off-Broadway production of a theater piece,
How the Sky Fell
(based on her chapbook of the same name), ran in 1997;
American Doll
(based on her book
Kinky
) has been produced from 1993 onward at various venues in New York City and Washington, D.C., and several colleges including Iowa State University, Penn State University, Alfred University, and Lycoming College. She has been awarded residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide, Italy), Fundación Valparaíso (Almeria, Spain), and Le Château de Lavigny, Maison d'écrivains (Lausanne, Switzerland). She lives in Hollywood, Florida.

If you are reading this, you are not dead. The world has not ended in 2012 as some had predicted, using the Mayan calendar as their guide. You are somewhere holding a book or reading these words on a screen.

“If you are reading this, you are not dead,” writes Megan Amram in her Tumblr post “Anniversary” on September 11, 2011. So I begin my introduction to
The Best American Poetry 2013
, borrowing her sentence and her sentiment. In her manifesto decidedly for “epiphany” and in opposition to a “chic backlash against passion,” Amram argues “that closing your mind to sincerity and praise and appreciation might be the first step in squandering the fucking awesome human condition you possess.”

I hope you find the poems you are about to read very much alive and “fucking awesome.” Because of the alphabet or because of divine fate (the title of Kim Addonizio's poem suggests both), the first three poems in this volume contain the word “fuck.” Two of the first three poems also contain the word “mayonnaise.” Go figure.

Like the twenty-five guest editors who preceded me, I was asked to come up with the “best” seventy-five poems from the hundreds of literary magazines published the previous year. I read with enthusiasm, and this mandatory reading was a pleasure. I felt a kinship with the editors of the magazines, whose hard work brought poets to readers, me being one of them. The task may have strained my eyes to the point where I am now a certified wearer of reading glasses, but it also made me very much present and engaged. In his lecture at Ohio University's Spring Literary Festival in 2012, Richard Rodriguez (echoing the syntax of St. Augustine's “Those who sing pray twice”) said, “Those who write live twice.” I would add that those who
read
also live twice.

The poets included in this volume create with unabashed energy and verve, and doubles abound. For the first time in the series, a collaborative poem appears. In “It Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a
Narcissist,” Angela Veronica Wong and Amy Lawless blend their voices into a flawlessly sassy narrative about the push and pull of romance. Twins appear in both Louise Glück's and Sherman Alexie's poems. Included are two poets with the last name Collins—Billy and Martha—whose poems serve as counterpoints to each other. Billy Collins's poem “Foundling” ends with an abandoned infant catching “a large, pristine snowflake much like any other” on his tongue. The snowflake dissolves into the next poem, “[white paper 24],” Martha Collins's discomforting and sonically fascinating poem about race. In “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV,” Stacey Waite writes about the rigidity of gender expectations (a double in itself), and in an earlier poem, Sally Wen Mao's “XX,” the speaker's mother is “half-asleep in her gender.” Two poets, Traci Brimhall and Elizabeth Hazen, invoke the benevolent spirit Thanatos, the Greek personification of death. There are two poems about the aftermath of suicide, one by Lauren Jensen and another by Maureen Seaton. The cops who are “all so young” in Mary Ruefle's prose poem “Little Golf Pencil” seem to stroll into the next prose poem, Seaton's “Chelsea/Suicide,” where they “come to her window and tap, telling her it wasn't safe for a woman alone in the middle of the day in a car near the river in a world like this one.”

Elsewhere also the alphabet provides lucky happenstance. The two most direct and celebratory love poems (Dorianne Laux's “Song” and Amy Lemmon's “I take your T-shirt to bed again . . .”) are side by side. Later, a trio of poems about mortality are linked by authors' last names. D. Nurkse's “Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes” serves as a preparation for death, the metaphor rooted in childhood with a father who “carried [him] from the car up the tacked carpet / to the white bed.” Immediately following is Ed Ochester's “New Year,” in which the speaker gets “a phone call from [his] mother / who died in April.” Paisley Rekdal's “Birthday Poem” starts with the sobering line “It's important to remember that you will die”—which makes the birthday that much more poignant, reminding readers of their aliveness.

—

Some previous guest editors of
The Best American Poetry
found the word “best” problematic, and others wrestled with the slippery definitions of “poetry.” I found I struggled most with the word “American.” I understood the basic concept—I was to choose work written by poets living in or from America, most likely from magazines published in the United States, though I was able to consider American poets published abroad. How was I able to get in as much of America as possible? How
was I to make America relevant to the rest of the world, should anyone beyond these borders show interest in these poems?

When Philip Roth won the Booker International Prize in 2010, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, complained that “the U.S. is too isolated” and we “don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” In
The Huffington Post
, Anis Shivani characterizes Roth's work as “literary tricks hiding behind layers and layers of self-protecting irony, which means—what to the reader in some other country?” Although Shivani pointed the finger of blame at Roth, others have directed their discontent at contemporary American poets.

When Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) won the1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy in its citation praised her for writing “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” So when does irony open up a text to a reader rather than shut her out? I kept this question in mind as I read this past year and hope that the poems I've collected here—poems about heartbreak, birth, aging, death, learning, history, sex, myth, family, friendship, the interior life—speak not only to America but to a larger audience. While David Hernandez's “All-American” is as American as you can imagine, the poet is not waving the Stars and Stripes, but rather waiving the Stars and Stripes, refraining from expected slogans to examine in an inclusive way who we are:

No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down

the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise,

but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers.

Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully

steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.

In “The Statue of Responsibility,” Stephen Dunn presents a first-person American speaker, aware of and unsettled by his role in the world, visiting the insides of a theoretical monument “regularly, taking the elevator up / to its chest area where I'd feel something / was asked of me.” Looking outward, Lawrence Joseph's “Syria” is almost unbearable in its detail, yet this witness goes where neither “the Red Crescent / nor journalists are permitted entry.” Mark Jarman's “George W. Bush” is an unnervingly complex look at our former president.

Other poets in this volume confront America's legacy of war and its consequences. Sherman Alexie's 101-line list poem “Pachyderm” interweaves members of a family that includes a paraplegic father who
served in Vietnam and one of his sons who was killed by an IED in Iraq. Alexie chooses the remaining son to hold much of the grief in this poem and remarks on their childhood game of playing war: “They never once pretended to be killed by an Improvised Explosive Device.” In Jean Valentine's poem “1945,” a menacing father “comes in at the kitchen door, waving like a pistol / a living branch in his hand.” Victoria Kelly imagines an alternate reality for families in “When the Men Go Off to War,” in which women

float off,

the houses tucked neatly inside our purses, and the children

tumbling gleefully after us,

and beneath us the base has disappeared

Anna Maria Hong's “A Parable” examines the complacency of the members of her allegorical Class E who are given “the opportunity to bless / the day's carnage.”

These poets bring so much subtlety, nuance, and resourcefulness to their work that readers never feel as though we are being held hostage to an agenda. As Robert Frost wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” There are many ways to enter and connect to these poems in which we, as readers, can sense poets making decisions on the page, rather than having mapped out a strategy beforehand. Sharon Olds has referred to the poem that “may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.” Each poem's purposefulness is its unique reasoning and the sounds it makes, the spirit in which it reaches into the world.

Poetry mustn't try to compete with the sound bites of politics or the breezy vapidity of pop culture. Rather it should serve as an antidote for them. (An exception might be made for Elinor Lipman, who tweeted an entertaining, quirky political poem each day from June 27, 2011, until the election in November 2012, for a total of more than five hundred poems.) Poetry brings with it freshness and delight, a sweeping-out of the mind. In the nineteenth century, long before television and Facebook and our many other distractions, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, “It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” In 1963, delivering a speech in honor of the late Robert Frost, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy noted, “When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” The
poems collected here are personal and cultural expressions of thinking and being, full of images not selling anything tangible, language seducing only the reader's intellect and emotion, utterances free of commodity.

As a graduate student living in New York City, I flirted with the idea of working in advertising. I freelanced as a low-level assistant for a marketing research group that was conducting focus groups for teeth-whitening products. (This was the mid-1980s, a decade and a half before Crest Whitestrips.) My job was to collect the responses of people who were questioned about the brightness of their smiles. In the first group of interviewees, no one cared so much about the color of their enamel; the people in the second group, who were given dime-sized bright white plastic discs to hold against their own front teeth, were a bit concerned and started doubting that their smiles were up to par; the people in the third group, who were given that same bright white disc and shown a film about the psychological power of celebrity teeth, all said that they would indeed buy a tray with bleaching gel and dutifully put it into their mouths if they could afford to do so. And how could they not? I worked on a similar campaign to sell running shoes (which the first focus group found terribly ugly) to women who would soon be wearing them, carrying their heels in a bag to work. The running shoes didn't change to fit the desires of women—the focus group questions changed to fit the fears of the women who would eventually buy the sneakers. How could they run if an attacker came after them? Weren't they wearing out their expensive pumps on unforgiving, cracked pavements? What about mud and puddles?