The Best American Poetry 2013 (30 page)

Trinidad writes: “This excerpt is from a ‘haiku epic,'
Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera
. Over the course of three and a half years, I watched all 514 episodes of the infamous 1960s primetime soap opera and wrote a haiku for every one. I'd wanted to watch the series when I was a teenager, but it was considered too ‘adult' and came on past my bedtime. Almost five decades later, watching every minute of the show (sometimes past my bedtime), it was hard to take the fraught relationships, courtroom cliffhangers, and sensational story lines seriously. Writing hundreds of haiku, I learned, can be hazardous to your mental health—long breaks between TV seasons are advised.”

J
EAN
V
ALENTINE
was born in Chicago, earned her BA from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book,
Dream Barker and Other Poems
, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is
Break the Glass
, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010.
Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003
won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Valentine was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

Valentine writes: “1945 was, of course, the last year of World War II. Many of the military all over the world were sent or made their way back to their countries, many (if not all) of them, as in this poem, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

P
AUL
V
IOLI
was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up in Green-lawn, Long Island. He went to Boston University and served in the Peace Corps. He made maps in uncharted regions of northern Nigeria and traveled through Africa, Europe, and Asia. Upon returning to New York he worked for WCBS-TV News and was managing editor of
Architectural Forum
. His books include
In Baltic Circles
(Kulchur Foundation, 1973; rpt. H_NGM_N BKS, 2011),
Splurge
(Sun, 1982),
Likewise
(Hanging Loose Press, 1988),
Breakers
(Coffee House Press, 2000), and
Overnight
(Hanging Loose, 2007).
Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes
, a prose collection, appeared from Hanging Loose in 2002. He taught literature and writing at The New School, at Columbia University, and at New York University. In an interview with Andrew McCarron, Violi said he associated “the pleasure of writing poems” with the transmutation of feelings. “Otherwise where's the challenge? I mean, just writing things down the way they are, you're more of a scribe of your self-absorption as opposed to, say, making something that didn't exist before.” The humor in his poetry is, he said, “based on the contradictory aspects of my own nature as well as the way things happen. Good things happen; great things happen; sad, tragic things happen. I think my humor is tied in with that. And if it's harsh at times, it's because I'm pretty harsh on myself. But if it's benign, that's because I have an
understanding of myself as a mere mortal.” Violi lived with his wife in Putnam Valley, New York. In January 2011 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on April 2, 2011.

D
AVID
W
AGONER
was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. He has published twenty books of poems, most recently
After the Point of No Return
(Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which,
The Escape Artist
, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from
Poetry
, two yearly prizes from
Prairie Schooner
, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. In 2007, his play
First Class
was given forty-three performances at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited
Poetry Northwest
from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 2009
.

Of “Casting Aspersions,” Wagoner writes: “Writers like me who aren't classical scholars become wary of Latin derivatives, especially nouns ending in
ion
because, for us, their roots have no connotations, have little or no figurative effect in poems. So when somebody told me I'd cast aspersions on him, I decided to dig up some roots to help me use concrete images in reply.”

Born in 1977 and raised in Hauppauge, New York, S
TACEY
W
AITE
has published three chapbooks:
Choke
(Thorngate Road Press, 2004),
Love Poem to Androgyny
(Main Street Rag, 2006), and
the lake has no saint
(Tupelo Press, 2010), in addition to one full-length collection of poems entitled
Butch Geography
(Tupelo Press, 2013). Waite has won the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize for Poetry, the 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award, the Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Teaching Award, and a National Society of Arts & Letters Poetry Prize. Waite is assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has also published essays on the teaching of writing in
Writing on the Edge
,
Feminist Teacher
, and
Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy
.

Of “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV,” Waite writes: “Some poems find their origins in our imaginings, and some, like this one, can feel inextricable from experience—the poem began unfolding as soon
as this kid at the DMV made his declaration to his mother. Sometimes I hear or see some possible truth, something so obvious and simple that it had never occurred to me before that moment. This poem begins in a moment like that; it begins with a child's insistence that human beings can actually
be
two seemingly contradictory (or two seemingly mutually exclusive) things at once. For weeks, the child saying, ‘Mommy, that man is a girl' repeated in my mind—not because it was cruel or even erroneous, but because of how true it was. I found myself laughing aloud as I washed the dishes or cut back the hedges. The line just stayed with me. In this sense, some small boy with a big mouth at a DMV in Lincoln, Nebraska, is responsible for this poem. He asked me, as poems often do, to see myself as I am. So the poem is what the experience revealed. The poem is, yes, about me, but it is also about gender, about the stories we tell ourselves (and our children) about what gender is. The poem is about bathing in the light of contradiction and uncertainty.”

R
ICHARD
W
ILBUR
was born in New York City in 1921 and brought up in rural New Jersey. His father was a portrait painter, and his mother came from a long line of journalists. A graduate of Amherst College (class of '42), he served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. Having taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith, he now coteaches once a week at Amherst. With his late wife, Charlotte, he lived year-round in Cummington, Massachusetts (which is still his home), and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. His latest book of verse is
Anterooms
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); his
Collected Poems 1943–2004
appeared from Harcourt in 2004. He has won two Pulitzers. He wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's
Candide
, and his translations from seventeenth-century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely here and abroad.

Wilbur writes: “Whenever possible, I have lived in the country. The late Francis Wells of Cummington, Massachusetts, schooled me in the art of maple-sugaring.”

A
NGELA
V
ERONICA
W
ONG
was born in Texas in 1983. She is the author of one full-length collection of poetry entitled
how to survive a hotel fire
(Coconut Books, 2012) and several chapbooks, including the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship winner,
Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter
.

Of “It Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a Narcissist,” which
she wrote in collaboration with Amy Lawless, Wong writes: “[
cont. from Amy Lawless
] out, how we want. The poem emerges from individual experiences in large cities and the ways we tether to each other, small
i
's to small
you
's.”

W
ENDY
X
U
was born in Shandong, China, in 1987, and raised in Iowa. She is the author of the full-length collection
You Are Not Dead
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and two chapbooks. She teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and is the coeditor/publisher of
iO: A Journal of New American Poetry
/iO Books. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Xu writes: “ ‘Where the Hero Speaks to Others' is from a loose series of ‘hero' poems, a bundle of which were published in 2011 by H_NGM_N as a chapbook titled just that,
The Hero Poems
, and others I still find myself writing now and then. But most were written in 2010, when I had a bedroom window from which I could see my mailbox, and whenever I noticed the little red ‘there is mail in here' flag up I would feel irrationally excited; other days I sat and watched wistfully as the mail truck drove by. I was never waiting for anything ‘important,' but I do think for that year, I thought a lot about correspondence and speaking and distance, so consequently the hero poems did, too. I remember writing this particular poem after watching a movie about people who are getting a divorce, but I don't remember the movie. I also don't remember what I learned about divorce, but I did feel sad, and I did want to give myself permission to explore and complicate that sadness, like maybe it had a lot to teach me. Maybe I also just wanted to confirm that there are no simple, clear feelings, and thank god. Sadness is so relentlessly interesting. It is so close to a weird, uncomfortable joy.”

K
EVIN
Y
OUNG
is the author of seven books of poetry, including
Ardency: A Chronicle of the
Amistad
Rebels
, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and
Jelly Roll: A Blues
, a finalist for the National Book Award, both from Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
, edited with Michael S. Glaser (BOA Editions, 2012) and
The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink
(Bloomsbury, 2012). Young's recent book
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 2011
.

Young writes: “ ‘Wintering' is taken from a series of poems that
The American Scholar
prefaced as ‘a compact daybook of grief.' This seems
exactly, almost intuitively right: ‘Wintering' and its fellow poems chart several seasons of grief since the death of my father; they will soon appear in a volume called
Book of Hours
(Knopf, 2014).

“It was spring, but still chilly—the cruelest month—when he died. Such weather, both literal and emotional, makes its way into the poem. The title is meant to convey winter as not just a time but a process, one of hunkering down yet hoping for a break in the cold. I also wanted to name and even celebrate some part of that process of grief as distinct from a more immediate mourning—whether that means welcoming gray hairs or ‘the long betrothal' that is bereavement.”

M
ATTHEW
Z
APRUDER
is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently
Come On All You Ghosts
(Copper Canyon Press, 2010). He is also, along with historian Radu Ioanid, the cotranslator of
Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu
(Coffee House Press, 2008). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives in Oakland, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR Palm Desert's low-residency MFA program in creative writing. His new book of poems,
Sun Bear
, is forthcoming in 2014.

Of “Albert Einstein,” Zapruder writes: “When as so often is the case I feel totally devoid of inspiration, I will try to think of something so familiar and habitual that it could not possibly be the stuff of poetry, and then begin. In this case it was that ubiquitous absentminded genius, whose name is so familiar to me that I hardly even notice it. It seems like a silly and unpromising subject for a poem, both too grandiose and also somehow too empty. There were many false starts. When at some point I wrote the word ‘relativity' I realized that I did not really understand what it was. I also remembered that my late father used to keep books about Einstein next to his bed, and try to explain relativity to us when we were kids. From there I just followed the poem where it led. It was hard to find the end of the poem, and when it revealed itself as a love poem to my wife, I was surprised, and grateful.”

AGNI
, poetry ed. Lynne Potts. Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215.