The Best American Poetry 2012 (33 page)

S
ARAH
L
INDSAY
was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1958. A Paracollege graduate of St. Olaf College, she holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her books are
Primate Behavior
(Grove Press, 1997),
Mount Clutter
(Grove Press, 2002), and
Twigs and Knucklebones
(Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She plays the cello with a regularly nonperforming group and has worked for more than twenty years as a copy editor for Pace Communications in Greensboro, where she lives with her spouse.

Of “Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra,” Lindsay writes: “For domesticated Asian elephants, it's hard to find gainful employment. In preserves that save their lives and give them space and water to bathe in, some have been taught to paint, and some made recordings as the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The instruments modified for elephants are mostly percussive—bells, gongs, drums—but the harmonica works well, too, and the occasional vocal ad lib. Given the apparatus, the players' thumps and jangles and gongs are not exactly instinctive behavior, but they follow an elephant's sense of the beat and the tone, not ours; and every ‘piece' has an unresolved otherness like whale song.”

A
MIT
M
AJMUDAR
was born in New York City in 1979. Having earned his MD in 2003, he works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Dublin, Ohio. His books of poetry are
0°, 0°
(TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2009) and
Heaven and Earth
(Story Line Press), which received the 2011 Donald Justice Award. His novels are
Partitions
(Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) and
The Abundance
(forthcoming from Holt/Metropolitan).

Of “The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim,” Majmudar writes: “Khwaja Mustasim is an elderly Afghan schoolteacher, Mustasim Mujahid Rahman. He currently lives in Herat, which Word's spell-check function insists on switching to ‘Heart.' Mustasim's (Sufi Muslim) name happens to be an uncanny near-rearrangement of my own (Hindu) full name, Amit Himanshu Majmudar. (The extra ‘s' is the serpent in the garden.) Mustasim likes to joke about this anagrammatical connection between us—he calls me his ‘infidel amanuensis.' I call him my ‘dapple-dawn-drawn doppelganger.' We are good friends, Mustasim and I.

“Khwaja Mustasim dictated his ‘Autobiography' to me in a form derived either from the Holy Qur'an or the Book of Taliesin. To this day I am uncertain which. I notice that he tells his life
as a series of past lives,
though he does not, as a Muslim, believe in rebirth—while
I,
as a Hindu, do. Might this ‘Autobiography' be a kind of metaphysical joke? And if so, at whose expense?

“I tried to pin old Mustasim down on this question, and he explained to me (in Sanskrit, no less) that a man of faith embodies his faith—and the whole history of his faith. ‘So when anyone, martyr or murderer, speaks Islam, he speaks me,' said Mustasim. ‘I figured I should fight back like your long-lined poet Whitman: By singing myself.'”

D
AVID
M
ASON
was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1954. He is professor of English and creative writing at the Colorado College, and he serves as poet laureate of Colorado. A critic and opera librettist as well as a poet, Mason has written words for Lori Laitman's oratorio,
Vedem,
which is now out on CD from Naxos, and also for her opera
The Scarlet Letter,
which will have its professional premiere at Opera Colorado in May 2013. Mason's most recent books are
The Scarlet Libretto
(Red Hen Press, 2012),
Two Minds of a Western Poet
(essays; University of Michigan Press, 2011), and a memoir,
News from the Village
(Red Hen Press, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including
Twentieth-Century American Poetry
(with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke; McGraw-Hill, 2003) and
Contemporary American Poems
for the General Administration for Press and Publication of the People's Republic of China (GAPP), 2011, a project of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Of “Mrs. Mason and the Poets,” Mason writes: “There's something wonderful about being out of date, and also about reading books that are no longer current. When by chance I found Edmund Blunden's biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley at Henderson Books in my home town of Bellingham, Washington, I immediately thought two things: I don't know much about Shelley, and I know next to nothing about Blunden. I bought the book and devoured it. Blunden wrote with eccentric panache and the sympathetic authority of a real poet. Rather than trying to be exhaustive, he elucidated only the stuff that really interested him.

“When I stumbled on a few details about Lady Mount Cashell, the Irish aristocrat living in sin with a Mr. Tighe, and learned they had assumed the name Mason to protect themselves against scandal at home, I knew at once I would write something about them. I did not
know I would adopt Mrs. Mason's voice. Nor did I know I would make use of Shelley's death by drowning in the poem, though dying young is a theme that has often arrested my attention.

“As for the rest, it's all imagination and empathy.”

K
ERRIN
M
C
C
ADDEN
was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1966. She teaches English and creative writing at Montpelier High School and poetry at the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont.

Of “Becca,” McCadden writes: “I like collisions. I like to bang things together inside a poem and use a tangle of rubber bands to hold it together. In this poem, there is a clear story, and, I believe, a clear understory, but there are also a pile of antique bird books, Kafka, geography, my standing love of etymology and fonts, Mary Oliver, and the terror and thrill of letting children go. There is something in the gathering storm of wide and disparate reading that charges me for writing. I am fond of a coming-of-age poem that leans on Kafka, of a wish for a beautiful life that leans on tattooing, of a man who creates beauty all day by inking people's skin but does not know what a stanza is—who thinks it's a kind of bird.

“This poem is also an homage to a young poet whom I admire, Becca Starr. I bet she will outwrite me. Let this little paragraph be a gauntlet on the floor.”

H
ONOR
M
OORE
was born in 1945 in New York City, where she returned to live in September 2011, after years in the countryside of northwestern Connecticut. She is the author of three collections of poems:
Red Shoes
(W. W. Norton, 2005),
Darling
(Grove Press, 2001), and
Memoir
(Chicory Blue Press, 1988). She has also written
The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
(Viking, 1996) and
The Bishop's Daughter
(W. W. Norton, 2008), a memoir. She has edited
Poems from the Women's Movement
(Library of America, 2009),
The New Women's Theatre
(Vintage Books, 1977), and
Amy Lowell: Selected Poems
(Library of America, 2004). She is on the graduate writing faculty at the New School and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Richmond (2011) and the University of Iowa (2010 and 2012).

Moore writes: “ ‘Song' began as many pages (yellow legal pad, handwritten in blue ink and pencil) that came late one Sunday afternoon when I allowed myself to imagine freely a night of lovemaking with the
proviso that I use the physical world to render my delight and desire. I never throw away a draft, and this one, over years of revision, took no form, getting shorter and shorter as time went on. Finally, I thought, why don't you try to make it a sonnet? And so it has ended up as an eccentrically tetrameter example of that daunting form. I hoped the title might encourage readers to take the poem on its simple, almost fairy-tale terms, entering its music, indulging its alliteration.”

M
ICHAEL
M
ORSE
was born in New York City in 1966, grew up in Roslyn, New York, and attended Oberlin College and the University of Iowa. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the Gotham Writers' Workshop.