The Best American Poetry 2012 (27 page)

R
EGINALD
D
WAYNE
B
ETTS
was born in Oceanside, California, in 1980. He is the author of a memoir,
A Question of Freedom
(Avery/Penguin, 2009), and a poetry collection,
Shahid Reads His Own Palm
(Alice James Books, 2010). He has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Married, the father of two sons, he lives in Clinton, Maryland.

Betts writes: “ ‘At the End of Life, a Secret' started with a story I read about a dying person, weight that was unaccounted for, and a claim that this weight was that of the soul. At the time the Supreme Court was hearing, or had just heard,
Steven Spears v. the United States,
the case that declared unconstitutional the 100:1 disparity in crack-cocaine sentences and powder cocaine sentences. The case had me thinking about the weight of crack, both the physical weight and the weight of its impact on the communities I grew up in and on the American legal system. As I worked on the poem those two things collided—though not until the very end. While the poem might seem the product of a plan, that is a
mirage of hindsight. The end product is always an artifact, implying a logic that the poet composing it did not yet have. Composition, in my experience, is play, is riffing, is taking an image (in this case the man working with the cadaver) and working it over and beyond the idea until I land at a place that I didn't expect.”

F
RANK
B
IDART
was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939. He didn't escape until 1957, when he began to study at the University of California, Riverside. “Escape” is an exaggeration; childhood and youth take too long, perhaps everywhere. He began graduate work at Harvard in 1962, studying with Reuben Brower and Robert Lowell. His books include
Star Dust
(2005) and
Desire
(1997), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the coeditor of Robert Lowell's
Collected Poems
(2003) and has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. Rosanna Warren has called him an “occult Poundian,” adding: “At every level of Bidart's poems—syntactic, prosodic, prepositional—contradiction provides the emotional fuel.” Bidart lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Of “Of His Bones Are Coral Made,” Bidart writes: “I've written little prose about poetry, but can't seem to stop writing poems about poetics. Narrative is the Elephant in the Room when most people discuss poetry. Narrative was never a crucial element in the poetics surrounding the birth of Modernism, though the great works of Modernism, from
The Waste Land
to the
Cantos
to ‘Home Burial,'
Paterson,
and beyond, are built on a brilliant sense of the power of narrative. What Modernism added was the power gained when you know what to leave out. Narrative is the ghost scaffolding that gives spine to the great works that haunt the twentieth century.

“A writer is caught by certain narratives, certain characters, and not by others. Prufrock is relevant to our sense of Eliot. He could be a character in Pound's sequence
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,
but if he were, it would be without the identification, the sympathy and agony. Eliot had to go on to Gerontion and Sweeney and Tiresias, each trailing a ghost narrative. They are as crucial to Eliot's vision as Bloom and Stephen Daedalus are to the vision, the sense of the nature of the world, of Joyce.

“In my poem, ‘
the creature smothered in death clothes
' is Herbert White, the title character in the first poem in my first book; ‘the woman' two stanzas down is Ellen West, from the second.

“Two more allusions. The ‘burning / fountain' refers to this passage in Shelley's poem ‘Adonais,' his elegy for Keats:

He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;

Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.—

Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow

Back to the burning fountain whence it came,

A portion of the Eternal, which must glow

Through time and change, unquenchably the same. . . .

“The ‘burning fountain' is a metaphor for the power that generates, that fuels and animates life. It is the title of a book about the poetic imagination by Philip Wheelwright, who taught me philosophy as an undergraduate (
The Burning Fountain,
Indiana University Press, 1954).

“My poem's title comes from one of Shakespeare's greatest short lyrics, in
The Tempest
:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

    Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

    Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

“My poem is about transformation, the bones of the poet made up out of the materials, the detritus of the world, that he or she has not only gathered but transformed and been transformed by.”

B
RUCE
B
OND
was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954. His collections of poetry include
Choir of the Wells
(a tetralogy of new books; Etruscan Press, 2013),
The Visible
(Louisiana State University Press, 2012),
Peal
(Etruscan Press, 2009),
Blind Rain
(Louisiana State University Press, 2008),
Cinder
(Etruscan Press, 2003),
The Throats of Narcissus
(University of Arkansas Press, 2001),
Radiography
(BOA Editions, 1997),
The Anteroom of Paradise
(QRL, 1991), and
Independence Days
(Woodley Press, 1990). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Institute of the Arts, and the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. He is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and poetry editor for
American Literary Review.
His work has appeared twice previously in
The Best American Poetry.

Of “Pill,” Bond writes: “I recall a particular morning-after, when I was in the shower at Pomona College some thirty-seven years ago. It struck me then that feeling high is highly overrated, largely because it
alters and destabilizes the norm. What if it were the norm? What would people pay for the chance of two minutes of sobriety? What wouldn't they pay? But then this poem is one that I could have written only much later in life. For now sobriety suggests to me that post-midlife turn back to the dailiness of one's world and one's finitude within it. Suffice it to say that I have made my share of mistakes. Join the club, say my mistakes. If, beyond the bare necessities required to survive, anxiety is the fundamental human problem (which I believe it is), then the courage to regard the fullness of one's nature remains its central difficulty. And if conversation with (and transfiguration of) the wounded places is what experience craves, that does not preclude its craving of denial and the grandiosity of the child. To be high is to stand above the real somehow, above others. But to be ground level is to acknowledge a bit more of both our connectivity and our aloneness: as Stevens put it, our ‘island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.' So much depends upon those twin commas after ‘free' and ‘water.' A confession: I have had my problems with sleep. Now, oddly, when I lie down, I say the word ‘nothing' in my head. That's where I came from, where I'm headed. It's OK. I say. Nothing. And then I feel a little gratitude. And then I fall.”

S
TEPHANIE
B
ROWN
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 at 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 has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. 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 OC Public Libraries in Southern California. She is also a book review editor of the online journal
Connotation Press: An Online Artifact
and poetry editor of the
Zócalo Public Square
website.

Of “Notre Dame,” Brown writes: “I'm always looking for ways to make myself write. The first draft is the hardest. One year I placed a random list of A–Z words in my Outlook reminder box at work, to have a daily prompt pop up for twenty-six workdays. On the third
day, the word was ‘cathedral,' and this was the poem I wrote from that prompt. This poem wrote itself very much as it exists now on the page. The moment of discovery in the writing was when I got to the line that begins, ‘It was a terrible summer.' Until that point, I was writing the poem as if angels were its subject, but then I saw that it was meant to go in a different direction and I let it go there. I didn't do much revision, though I took out some stage-setting lines at the beginning. The title came last. I couldn't call it ‘Cathedral' because that made me think of Raymond Carver's seminal book of short stories,
Cathedral.
I toyed with the idea of calling it ‘Paris' but ultimately chose ‘Notre Dame,' because the poem is about faith more than anything else, and Notre Dame stands as a symbol of faith. I do love the ‘thoughtful gargoyle' at the top, who rests his chin in his hand and contemplates the city spread out before him. When I think of Notre Dame, I think of the rose window, the candles burning, the beautiful façade, and that gargoyle.”