The Best American Poetry 2014 (26 page)

Of “Elegy for My Mother,” Lindsay writes: “I write many of my best poems in what I think of as a state of ecstasy. This, certainly, is far from unique among poets. Ecstatic pieces tend to announce their arrival at times when the act of writing is utterly inconvenient: in the shower, walking the dog, any circumstance in which I am without paper and pen. ‘Elegy for My Mother' is one of these. I have only a few minutes to capture these poems, and getting them down requires nothing short of blind trust. I don't have time to question a word, a phrase, or a line.
I have to write fast. I often abbreviate words or scribbled graphic symbols. Usually, I revise them only a little or not at all.

“In order to write this way, one has to listen, surrender, and then just plain take dictation. The lines and images may be overtly relevant to one another or not (often the less relevant, the better). What binds them at first is merely the speed and certainty with which they arrive, and sometimes this remains the primary commonality; sometimes this connective tissue was nothing more than filaments. So much the better: the writer is left with a poem that is illuminated by just the right madness.”

P
ATRICIA
L
OCKWOOD
was born in a trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1982, and grew up in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the poetry collections
Balloon Pop Outlaw Black
(Octopus Books, 2012) and
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
(Penguin Books, 2014).

Lockwood writes: “I wrote ‘Rape Joke' because I wanted to know if it was possible. (Most poems are not possible, and this one seemed even less possible than usual.) When the conceit presented itself to me, I saw that if I did it correctly, I could write a poem that was personal, true, appalling, and even occasionally funny. If I did it correctly, it would speak straight out of the mouth of the event but still be recognizable as a poem. It seemed like a high-wire act. I wanted to know if I could do it.”

N
ATHANIEL
M
ACKEY
was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which are
Splay Anthem
(New Directions, 2006) and
Nod House
(New Directions, 2011); an ongoing prose work,
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate
, whose fourth and most recent volume is
Bass Cathedral
(New Directions, 2008) and whose first three volumes have been published together as
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1–3
(New Directions, 2010); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is
Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine
Hambone
and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology
Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose
(Coffee House Press, 1993). He received a Whiting Writers' Award in 1993, was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001, won the National Book Award in poetry for
Splay Anthem
in 2006 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.

C
ATE
M
ARVIN
was born in Washington, DC, in 1969. She is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where she has taught creative writing since 2003.
World's Tallest Disaster
(2001), her first book, was selected by Robert Pinsky for Sarabande Books' Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and went on to receive the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is coeditor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology
Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century
(Sarabande, 2006). Her second book of poems,
Fragment of the Head of a Queen
, appeared from Sarabande in 2007. A Whiting Award recipient, Marvin has a third book of poems,
Oracle
, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2015. She is a cofounder, with Erin Belieu, of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization that seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women.

Of “An Etiquette for Eyes,” Marvin writes: “I like to think the voice of this poem goes off the rails in a manner similar to that of the French Surrealist poet Louis Aragon in his ‘Poem to Shout in the Ruins.' Ultimately, ‘An Etiquette for Eyes' advocates for the plain. Anyone with brown eyes knows the drill. The majority of people the world over have brown eyes, yet there exists an insufferable number of people with ‘blue,' ‘green,' and ‘hazel' eyes who love to elaborate upon the changeability of the varying colors, hues, and shades of their respective irises. Being on the listening end of this species of self-appraisal can be pretty tedious when one's own eyes can only be described as ‘brown.' In this sense, ‘An Etiquette for Eyes' is quite simple. It's an argument for being ordinary, launched against an individual the poem's speaker once regarded as extraordinary.”

J
AMAAL
M
AY
was born in 1982 in Detroit, Michigan, where he has taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His first book,
Hum
, received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Of “Masticated Light,” May writes: “When I was a member of the 2012 NYC louderARTS Poetry Slam Team I wrote a collaborative poem with a young poet named Mokgethi Thinane. We told stories to each other until several bridges were welded between us. Turns out we both have screwed-up eyes and that led to a poem about sight in its various meanings and registers. After the National Poetry Slam concluded, I sat with the pieces of the poem that were mine and was pleasantly disturbed by some of what was there. Working through the
subject matter alongside Mokgethi had allowed me to tap into something I couldn't reach on my own. The difficulty of collaboration as a framework, combined with my terror of it, contributed to what broke me open. With those pieces to start with, I constructed the last poem to be added to
Hum
.”

S
HARA
M
C
C
ALLUM
was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972. She is the author of four books:
The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems
(Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011);
This Strange Land
(Alice James Books, 2011);
Song of Thieves
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); and
The Water Between Us
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. She received the 2013 Witter Bynner Fellowship. She is director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

McCallum writes: “In ‘Parasol,' images from childhood and fairy tales led me to mull over the idea that metaphor, storytelling, and memory are entwined. They seem to be ways we can suspend and widen time in order to revisit other moments and selves we've been. This process is an act of the imagination, not the same as lived experience, and the poem registers the paradox that what might ‘console' us is often that which we cannot hold onto. Poems about the past run the risk of becoming sentimental. At the time I wrote this poem I didn't consider point of view consciously. Now, on looking at it again, I imagine that the direct address to a ‘you,' who I think is fairly obviously the poet-speaker, might also create a distance between speaker and subject that complicates the tone, helping the poem avoid diving headfirst into nostalgia.

“Lastly, rhyme played a significant part in the writing of this poem. I like to write from my ear, and with ‘Parasol' associations of sound were particularly instructive, directing several turns and guiding the poem's insights.”

M
ARTY
M
C
C
ONNELL
was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1973. She currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, where she works in fundraising and strategic planning for a youth and family center. Her first full-length collection,
wine for a shotgun
, was published in 2012 by EM Press. She cofounded the louderARTS Project in New York City and returned to Chicago in 2009 to create Vox Ferus, an organization dedicated to connecting individuals and communities through the written and spoken word.

Of “vivisection (you're going to break my heart),” McConnell writes: “I'm forever in pursuit of never writing another break-up poem, and here it is in
Best American
: a break-up poem. Appropriate, then, that this poem should actually deal with that very thing: the desire to be done with love and heartache, and the knowledge that given my nature, I'm unlikely ever to be done with it entirely. My first year in high school, we had to dissect a frog, and often when I am split open painfully by love, what flashes across my interior vision is that image, a creature so neatly dead and arrayed to be educational, useful, purposed. The whole thing is so delicate and gruesome, and simultaneously so absolutely ordinary.”

V
ALZHYNA
M
ORT
was born in Minsk, Belarus (then part of the former Soviet Union), in 1981. She moved to the United States in 2005. Her two American collections, both published by Copper Canyon Press, are
Factory of Tears
(2008) and
Collected Body
(2011). She has received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from
Poetry
. She is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

Of “Sylt I,” Mort writes: “This poem was written on the island of Sylt, in the North of Germany, a two-hour boat ride south of Copenhagen. Sylt has been a nudist destination for decades.”

H
ARRYETTE
M
ULLEN'S
poetry collections include
Recyclopedia
(Graywolf Press, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and
Sleeping with the Dictionary
(University of California Press, 2002). She teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. A collection of her essays and interviews,
The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be
, was published in 2012 by University of Alabama Press. Her most recent poetry collection,
Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
, was published by Graywolf Press in 2013.

Of “Selection from Tanka Diary,” Mullen wrote in the
Harvard Review
: “My tanka diary began with a wish to incorporate into my life a daily practice of walking and writing poetry. Usually I go for short walks in various parts of Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica, or longer hikes in the canyons with friends. I also regularly lead student poets on ‘tanka walks' in the Mildred Mathias Botanical Garden on the campus of UCLA. At other times I stroll through unfamiliar neighborhoods as I travel. These poems are my adaptation of a traditional Japanese form of syllabic poetry. Usually a tanka is thirty-one syllables, often written in five lines.”

Asked to elaborate, Mullen adds the following under the heading “Urban Tumbleweed & the spirit of tanka”: “The spirit of tanka interests me more than following rigid conventions. Succeeding generations rediscover and renew the form so that it retains its vitality. With
Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
, my intention was not to write waka in a different language, not to replicate Japanese tanka, or translate the technicalities of that traditional form into a language with a different structure. Tanka is well suited for diary writing. It's a concise and efficient form of creative note-taking for sharpening daily observation and capturing the fleeting moment.

“I wanted to be attentive to moments that usually pass without notice. I wanted to preserve a fragment of each day. I was interested in what might be unique or idiosyncratic, but also in what is cyclical and what might be timeless.

“My aim for this project was to get myself moving. Tying the act of writing to a daily habit of walking was the impetus for this project. It gave me a little push to get past my inertia, to start the momentum of walking and writing.

“To walk in Los Angeles is to go against the way the city is constructed, with long blocks and wide streets built for cars and drivers, not pedestrians. Yet there are wonderful places for walking, on the beaches, in the canyons, and in neighborhoods where yards are planted with roses, lavender, hibiscus, and bird-of-paradise blooming year-round, along with abundant avocado, lemon, persimmon, apricot, and fig trees. Even the freeways are landscaped with oleander and bougainvillea.”

E
ILEEN
M
YLES
was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 1949, and generally occupies herself by writing and traveling and sometimes teaching at NYU and Columbia. She is the author of eighteen books of poetry (most recently
Snowflake/different streets
from Wave Books, 2012), fiction, and nonfiction.

Myles writes: “Certainly this poem was born at dinner when we were talking about conditions in the building we were dining in and the social ecology of women who could probably practically hear us talking about them. There was a painter who could pretty much lift any painting style; do anything. Thus the title, which seemed like a really generous way she could use her super powers. I think I also read about a famous male author who didn't like to hear about dreams at breakfast. What else is breakfast for? I definitely feel like this poem is about relatedness. In time
and
space.”

D. N
URKSE
was born in New York City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently
A Night in Brooklyn
,
The Border Kingdom
,
Burnt Island
, and
The Fall
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 2008, 2005, and 2002).
Voices over Water
, an earlier book, was reprinted by CB Editions in the United Kingdom and shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Prize. He has received a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.