The Best American Poetry 2012 (31 page)

B
RENDA
H
ILLMAN
is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are
Cascadia
(2001) and
Pieces of Air in the Epic
(2005), which received the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and
Practical Water
(2009). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited
The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood
(Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, where she is Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry.

Of “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump,” Hillman writes: “Poets and others can engage their powerful imaginations both in their writing and in direct action protests. These actions can be ceaselessly inventive, since authority knows how to respond to predictable behaviors, but the unpredictable cannot be tamed. Since the BP disaster, the oil companies have posted the largest profits in history. Not only must we cut our use of gas and find alternative energy, but surely we can also invent more anarchic protest actions against the destructive extraction of petroleum—actions that include discomfort and embarrassment outdoors. I decided it is a good form of street theater to moan audibly when pumping gas; tonally anarchic, the action is funny but includes tragedy and horror. I chose a prose-poem form because it conveys the feeling of an irreverent political tract. At the urging of Laura Mullen, I included some lines from a previous poem written after the first Gulf
War, ‘Cheap Gas' (from
Loose Sugar,
Wesleyan University Press, 1997), as well as a transcription of the vowel-moan itself.

“At the time I was writing and revising the poem, I was engaged with several poets—Nick Flynn, Dorianne Laux, Fred Marchant, Laura Mullen, and Patricia Smith—in a dialogue about the tragedy for the magazine
Gulf Coast.
The epigraph comes from a beautiful essay by Nicole Loraux from
The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy,
in which she notes that open mourning was prohibited for a while in ancient Greece because it was regarded as threatening. Jonathan Skinner reprinted the piece in
Interim
as part of his eco-activism issue; he encouraged poets to visit their representatives to protest offshore drilling.”

J
ANE
H
IRSHFIELD
was born in New York City in 1953 and has lived in Northern California since 1974. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is
Come, Thief
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).
The Heart of Haiku
(Amazon Kindle Single, 2011) is an introduction to Basho¯ and haiku. Earlier books include
After
(HarperCollins, 2006) and
Given Sugar, Given Salt
(HarperCollins, 2001). She is the author of a book of essays,
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
(HarperCollins, 1997) and four books collecting and co-translating the work of poets from the past. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy and given the third annual Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Poetry Award. This is her seventh appearance in
The Best American Poetry.

Of “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed,” Hirshfield writes: “I am interested in wick and fuel. Jane Brox's nonfiction book
Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
holds a description of early torches as irresistible to my jackdaw muse as a list of the Chinese names for jade once gathered from a dentist office's
National Geographic
or the painters' term
bonnarding,
learned from a friend. Each of these windfall images was mentally pocketed, held for some certain but unknowable future poem.

“There are times when something noticed provokes writing at once. So it was when I walked into a kitchen unmistakably fragrant. The mushrooms were gone—found, cleaned, carried elsewhere by a friend. The friend was gone, too. But I knew with surety something about the invisible past, and this raised in me a happiness somewhere between that of a truffle pig and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

“The poem started by this perception drew into itself the implausible sources for lamplight. Wild-found mushrooms are the opposite
of torches: subterranean, secretive, damp. Shy of surface, their sense-realm is not the visual. Yet like any who traffic in the realms of existence and propagation, of eating and being eaten, they make themselves known—in this instance, by scent. I have long loved D. W. Winnicott's description of childhood: ‘It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.' This poem began in outer facts, events, and observation, but its doorknob is to be found in the third stanza.”

R
ICHARD
H
OWARD
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. He teaches in the writing division of Columbia University's School of the Arts, and continues against all odds to translate works of literature from the French. The most recent of his fifteen books of poems,
Without Saying,
was published in 2008 by Turtle Point Press. He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 1995.
“A Proposed Curriculum Change” will be published by Turtle Point Press in his forthcoming book,
Progressive Education.
“Arthur Englander's Back in School,” an earlier poem in the sequence, appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2009.

Of “A Proposed Curriculum Change,” Howard writes: “
Progressive Education
is a series of communications from the twelve members of the fifth-grade class of Park School in Sandusky, Ohio. In this case, the communication is a letter to the school principal, Mrs. Masters. The students at Park School, even or perhaps particularly those in the fifth-grade, are evidently proud of their vocabulary and their mastery of grown-up English.”

M
ARIE
H
OWE
was born in Rochester, New York, in 1950. Her books of poetry are
The Good Thief
(Persea Books, 1988),
What the Living Do
(W. W. Norton, 1997), and
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
(W. W. Norton, 2008). She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. She lives in New York City.

Of “Magdalene—The Seven Devils,” Howe writes: “It occurred to me, walking through the city one day, that Mary Magdalene, who has been so often depicted and characterized by men, was a woman bedeviled—and then a woman clarified, integrated. What might have been the seven devils she was said to have been possessed by? And then, what are the devils we are possessed by? Then the poem began to speak.”

A
MORAK
H
UEY
was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1969, and grew up outside Birmingham, Alabama. A decade ago he wound up back
in Michigan, where he lives with his wife and two children. He spent fifteen years as a reporter and editor before leaving the newspaper business in 2008. He is now an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, teaching creative and professional writing. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, and he blogs at his website,
www.amorakhuey.net
.

Of “Memphis,” Huey writes: “I have been working on a collection of poems about blues music and musicians, about the South, about rivers. When I visited Memphis, all of those themes collided in one place. The whole place felt like a crossroads. The ghazal form seemed a great way to explore my fascination with this city. This poem is about longing, and temporariness, and being a tourist: the sense that we never entirely belong to any place or time. At least, I hope it's about those things. And music. Always music.”

J
ENNY
J
OHNSON
was born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1979. After earning a master of teaching degree from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in the Bay Area. She then earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Currently, she is a visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh.

Of “Aria,” Johnson writes: “As a record collector and a fan of all sorts of music, I love thinking about the relationships between sounds and bodies. One way to think about ‘Aria' is as seven meditations on this theme. In the opening sections, I was thinking about the music that arises out of the body. I also thought about plural pronouns, the turn toward a ‘you,' the use of ‘we' to capture what theorist Ann Cvetkovich calls ‘public feelings.' When I refer to ‘dance interludes' in sections 6 and 7, I am interested in music's ability to rattle bodies in public spaces, too. Specifically, I drew inspiration from Cvetkovich's
An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures,
a book that opens with a personal experience of a Le Tigre concert, a space where Cvetkovich felt a vital queer and lesbian subculture had formed in response to trauma. Having seen this band live, I knew what she meant and tried to write into this sensation.

“I also decided while working on ‘Aria' that metrically I did not want to prioritize unity over disjunction. Rather, what I was most interested in was playing with the sounds and restraints that emerge from a queer body, the sounds that emerge from a queer collective, a body or voice that has the potential to be unified by its disjunctions.”