The Best American Poetry 2012 (4 page)

So far you'd have no reason to think this essay an introduction to an anthology. This is a deliberate choice. The twenty-four distinguished poets who've edited one of these collections before have done a bang-up job of introducing them, and there's little for me to add that's specific to the project itself.

But a few things must be said.

First, the seventy-five poems I've placed before you here are the ones that engaged me most during a year of reading a great many poems. “Best” is problematic, if unavoidable; poetry is not an Olympic competition in which there are a few coveted places at the top. Differences in the range of modes, the means of speaking, are fundamentally of value, and a wide and various field of activity is much to be preferred over a pyramidal scheme in which only a few examples can shine at the pinnacle. And even if I believed in such a thing, how would I know? The clouded vision of the present will shift, in time, whether toward clarity or toward some other kind of cloudedness. History will, inevitably, make choices among the poems of our moment, and history will revise those choices in time, if indeed there's anyone around to read or construct canons in a few hundred years. Meanwhile, I'm happy that a range of voices is included here, as well as poems that appeared in trade magazines and in online-only journals, publications with legions of readers or a handful. Hooray for that. And the poets here are well
known indeed or just setting out, or somewhere in between; they have umpteen books or no book at all.

Second, I should acknowledge the obvious, that I read (and read and read) through the filters of my own taste, which a project like this inevitably foregrounds. Anthology-making is, at least on one level, a form of self-portraiture. This book might well be called
Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes,
but who'd buy that? And “likes” is too slight—believes in? Wishes to keep, to dwell within? It's plain that I favor a certain disciplined richness of language, a considered relation between restraint and gorgeousness. And I'm drawn to poems that push against the boundaries of what is accepted as real, reaching into the life of the spirit, past the boundaries of the known and acknowledged toward what's harder to name. I'll side with Whitman, as Robert Hass does in his poem “Consciousness”:

 . . . not interested, he said, in

the people who need to say that we all die and life is a suck

and a sell and two plus two is four and nothing left over.

Let the poem's allegiance be to what's hardest to name.

Third, I want to publicly take off my hat to David Lehman, who has energetically and efficiently (now I know just
how
efficiently) guided the series he initiated through twenty-five years of publication. A quarter century of editorship and advocacy represents serious literary heroism, a profound commitment to the art—and David has been remarkably catholic in his practices, choosing a range of guest editors, pointing them quietly toward his own favorites but also getting out of his guests' way while managing to gently shepherd us along when we linger by the side of the path. This collection represents a labor of love for me (I read more literary magazines more systematically than I ever have before, enjoying the feeling of pouring myself into what flooded my mailbox) and a huge amount of work for David, his publisher, and their supporting staff. To sustain this all this time, without showing any signs of fatigue or flagging interest—well, it's an extraordinary contribution to the art, and to our understanding of what American poetry is at this moment.

We could also say that phantom who appears to the poet, summoning words, is some premonition or anticipation of the reader—who turns to poetry in order to find some music that echoes what we can't say,
to read the inscription of our common lot, to be challenged and engaged, to be less alone, to be startled awake.

All right, I hope you'll say, opening this book, sing me something.

(A note of gratitude to Alex Duym, for material concerning Caedmon and his context. And to Alexander Hadel, for practically everything else.)

SHERMAN ALEXIE

Terminal Nostalgia

The music of my youth was much better

Than the music of yours. So was the weather.

Before Columbus came, eagle feathers

Detached themselves for us. So did the weather.

During war, the country fought together

Against all evil. So did the weather.

The cattle were happy to be leather

And made shoes that fit. So did the weather.

Before Columbus came, eagle feathers

Were larger than eagles. So was the weather.

Every ball game was a double-header.

Mickey Mantle was sober. So was the weather.

Before Adam and Eve, an Irish Setter

Played fetch with God. So did the weather.

Before Columbus came, eagle feathers

Married Indians. So did the weather.

Indians were neither loaners nor debtors.

Salmon was our money. So was the weather.

Back then, people wrote gorgeous letters

And read more poetry. So did the weather.

On all issues, there was only one dissenter,

But we loved him, too. So did the weather.

Before Columbus came, eagle feathers

Gave birth to eagles. So did the weather.

We all apprenticed to wise old mentors

And meditated for days. So did the weather.

We were guitar-players and inventors

Of minor chords and antibiotics. So was the weather.

Every person lived near the city center

And had the same income. So did the weather.

Before Columbus, eagle feathers

Lived in the moment. So did the weather.

from
Green Mountains Review

KAREN LEONA ANDERSON

Receipt: Midway Entertainment Presents

Two kinds of fair: carnie and perambulator

of the local: shiny peppers on paper plates

and buttercream silk goats: Lizabet & Hope

among the floral displays gone south:

please enter again, this was very strong,

next year.
A staged race of pigs in felt coats:

picked out in red, green, blue around a track,

shivering a ring of fat kids used to this

easy choice: commercial, delicious

fries or the sad white bread of the VFW barbeque.

Right among the sloe-eyed dirty cow hose-down,

a tired show horse to pet. Sort of oversold

at the 5 buck K9 demonstration; 4H got a thousand

for a rough old hog in red second-place satin.

Dad explains:
Claire's photos won because

Claire's photos were best.
It's that fair, the big gray

hair of a tufted chicken, the mascaraed rabbit that

no one gets are supposed to mold you from the fantastic

to the rational:
I would like to thank God for this medal.

Down at the midway end past the chainsaw bears,

the Old People Tap Dance Show, and the bee man

in the ag tent, madly pointing at the holes

in his rigged up hive, Mom inspects busted latches

and the blanks between boards and wires,

the scuffed blue of the Tilt-A-Whirl's shelf; on which

is the kind of fair you could get used to;

all places being equal to the blast of bad rock

and the rust metal floor; a flat coke no one would want;

ordinary; just one boy's or one girl's sweaty hands

on offer, unspecial.

from
Seneca Review

RAE ARMANTROUT

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