The Best American Poetry 2014 (24 page)

Of “Fallen,” Francis writes: “My work often explores the ways in which we are limited or reduced by received notions concerning aesthetics. The frames we deny we are in or fear breaking even when we are aware of them. ‘Fallen' ultimately rose from my own longing to be ‘seen' on my own terms, not those of family/clan or culture. It begins a personal exploration of the
various
ways one might be rendered invisible. What is ‘ugly'? Why? What does it mean to be a daughter outside of the framework/s of Beauty? What does it mean to be a poet who is a woman but is neither muse nor maternal, and does not seek such currency, but feels the loss and bears the indignities of not having such currency?”

R
OSS
G
AY
was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1974. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of
Against Which
(CavanKerry, 2006) and
Bringing the Shovel Down
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and coauthor, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook
Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens
(Organic Weapon Arts, 2014). He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue and an editor and cofounder, with Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine
Some Call It Ballin'
. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.

Of “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” Gay writes: “This poem was, more or less, given to me by the event I tell about, most of which, give or take, happened on a beautiful day in early fall, when this particular variety of fig (I'd speculate either a Brown Turkey or Chicago Hardy, given the color of the flesh and the hardiness) was ripening. I
was on my way to eat breakfast alone at Sabrina's, a damn good restaurant right across Christian Street (vegetarian cheese-steak hold the cheese, and French fries, best in town). I was stuck, as I often am, in my head. And on my way I noticed this woman sweeping the sidewalk, sweating some, half cursing her work, though smiling, too, and shaking her head, as if to say, ‘Can you believe this thing?' and actually saying, ‘Please eat some,' pointing up into the tree and down at the sidewalk. And, just as in the poem, soon enough there was a little gathering of strangers, mild-mannered yellow jackets included, shooting the breeze about figs (‘growing all the way up here?!'), getting on our tippy toes to pick them and pass them around, all of us making the noises of people enjoying food together, which are close cousins to other noises, you know.

“I've been lucky enough to work with a public community orchard in Bloomington, Indiana, where I teach, for the last few years. We have planted nearly one hundred trees, and part of the magic of the project is knowing that, if all goes well, people you can't have imagined will eat fruit from trees you helped plant. We have a fig tree at the Bloomington Community Orchard, too, and it's about my height, and came from a cutting from the man I mention in the poem, a dear friend's father, who gave me my first fresh figs. He dug it up kind of roughly with a hoe and threw it in a bucket of water. ‘Keep it wet,' is all he said, and made a motion with his hand that seemed to mean something like, ‘Now scram.' That wet stick made it to Indiana and became a tree. Now people come to the orchard and gasp when they see we have figs, and they faint when they eat them, especially if they're sun-warmed. We keep smelling salts and lavender water in a spray bottle for when it happens, which is more often than you'd think. I love to imagine my friend's father seeing us savoring those figs, seeing the way something he nurtured makes us glad, makes us stand in a circle and listen to one another. Much as I like to imagine whoever planted that tree on 9th and Christian listening to us, or watching.”

E
UGENE
G
LORIA
was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1957. His family immigrated to San Francisco, California, when he was eight years old. He earned an undergraduate degree at San Francisco State University and graduate degrees at Miami University of Ohio and the University of Oregon. He now lives in Greencastle, Indiana, where he is a professor of English literature and creative writing at DePauw University. He was recently the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Visiting Writer at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is the author of
Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
(Penguin Books, 2000),
Hoodlum Birds
(Penguin, 2006), and
My Favorite Warlord
(Penguin, 2012), which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for poetry in 2013.

Of “Liner Notes for Monk,” Gloria writes: “For those in the post-vinyl era, ‘liner notes' were mini essays on the origins of the music and some background material on the musicians, usually written by the album's producer and printed on the album's back cover. As for the ‘liner notes' on my poem, I drew inspiration in part from the legendary Riverside Recordings of Thelonius Monk with John Coltrane in 1957, but more from Eddie Jefferson and what he's done by singing his own lyrics to such iconic instrumental classics as ‘Body and Soul' by Coleman Hawkins and ‘So What' by Miles Davis. While I was working on this poem, I was finishing
My Favorite Warlord
, a collection of poems exploring, among other things, the haibun, a hybrid form linking travel sketches and the haiku, a form invented by the great Buddhist monk poet, Bashō. So in some way, ‘the lyrics' I devised were personal travel sketches from my time living in Kyoto. Thelonius Monk's music is easy to love, but not easy to explain. So I assumed the task of explaining his music to myself by way of recalling my solitary nights living in Kyoto several years ago.”

R
AY
G
ONZALEZ
was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1952. He is a professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including six from BOA Editions, the most recent being
Cool Auditor
(2009) and the forthcoming
Beautiful Wall
(2015). He was awarded the Minnesota Book Award in poetry for
Turtle Pictures
(University of Arizona Press, 2000) and for
The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
(BOA, 2002). He has written three books of nonfiction, including
The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape
(Arizona, 2002). He has edited twelve anthologies and coedited
Sudden Fiction Latino
(W. W. Norton, 2010) with Robert Shapard and James Thomas. He received a 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association.

Of “One El Paso, Two El Paso,” Gonzalez writes: “The U.S.–Mexican border and its conflicts are in the news all the time, though, growing up in the El Paso–Juarez, Mexico area, I have always found peace and freedom in the vast and quiet landscapes of the Chihuahuan Desert. These mountains, canyons, and arroyos were key influences in my becoming a poet. While immigration has been an issue on the invisible border for
generations, the area became one of the most dangerous in the world during the recent drug cartel wars across the Rio Grande in Juarez, Mexico. Ironically, El Paso was named the safest city in the United States from 2008 through 2010, proving my theory that there are two rival border narratives centering on two similar cities and ways of life, the two mountain ranges surrounding them, and the idea that one active poem comes from daily life and treks across the desert while the other mythical poem of the region's past lies somewhere under the historic dust of the desert. Each time I return to my hometown, the desert has changed, and each visit leads to a fresh source of often sobering inspiration.”

K
ATHLEEN
G
RABER
was born in Cape May Court House, New Jersey, in 1959. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of two collections of poetry,
Correspondence
(Saturnalia Books, 2006) and
The Eternal City
(Princeton University Press, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Graber writes: “ ‘The River Twice' takes its title from a fragment attributed to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus:
No man can step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.
Heraclitus is perhaps the most alluring, complex, and mystical of the early Greek thinkers, and his assertion that both the world and our identities are in constant ‘flux' seems shockingly contemporary. Constant change is, however, only one aspect of the system we see hinted at in the passages that have survived, for this fluid-like change is balanced against an originating fiery force he refers to as
logos
, a word that in Greek connotes both reason and language, a stroke of linguistic confluence not unworthy of Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Bertrand Russell.

“This poem, however, simply attempts to deliver an experience of how it feels to live in the destabilized modern world in which flux can be—as it has always been—dramatic and potentially deadly, and the figures in the poem have very little control over, or protection against, that which is changing economically and environmentally around them. There is also a little nod to Keats and the stasis art sometimes affords. Simultaneously, this is also a poem about many varieties of causality and agency and our fairly limited existential understanding of both. I think most of us inhabit a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance in which we posit that we are both responsible and not responsible for many of the defining circumstances of our lives. Most of us might accept that
we have at least been unwitting contributors. The question of how much power we have over the powers that have power over us is largely unanswerable. It is, nevertheless, a question that informs our sense of our relationships to our governments, our financial institutions, our geographies, our bodies, our parents, and our gods. I did NOT sit down to write this poem thinking about any of this. I simply sat down to write about wandering around in a thrift store on a rainy day.”

R
OSEMARY
G
RIGGS
was born in Oak Lawn, Illinois, in 1973. She received her BA from the University of Iowa and MFA from San Francisco State University.
Sky Girl
, her book of poems, won the 2003 Alberta Prize and was published by Fence Books. She supports herself working as a flight attendant, a job that permits her to meander the earth and encounter different cultures. She lives in Oakland, California.

On “SCRIPT POEM,” Griggs writes: “I find the screenplay format poetic in its attention to imagery, spacing, and economy of words. This poem is about my mailman in San Francisco who was in the reserves and got called in for a tour of duty. I have never shared the poem with him but I will now and I think it's going to make him happy—which makes me happy. With filmmaker Tor Hansen and composer David Rhodes, I collaborated on a short film of one of my poems, which can be found at
http://vimeo.com/48717613
.”

A
DAM
H
AMMER
was born in 1948 in New Jersey. He studied at Emerson College, the University of Massachusetts, the University of California Santa Barbara, Colorado State University, and Bowling Green State University, from which he received a PhD in popular culture. His books are
On a Train Sleeping
(Barn Dream Press/Pym-Randall Press, 1970),
Déjà Everything
(Lynx House Press, 1979), and
No Time for Dancing
(Willow Spring Editions, 2010, edited by Christopher Howell). With Yusef Komunyakaa, he was cofounder of the literary journal
Gumbo
, which he edited for several years in the late 1970s. He died in a head-on collision with a truck outside Pensacola, Florida, in 1984. He was, Christopher Howell writes in
Pleiades
, “six foot one and lanky, with a long jaw and a great mop of black hair that sometimes resembled dreadlocks. He was left-handed and, in spite of his frequent abuse of every substance worth abusing, was a fabulous ball player and could throw a marshmallow through a brick wall.” He embraced French surrealism and wrote about subjects ranging from the death of Hubert Humphrey to nurses, intellectuals, hockey, Belgium, and Africa.

B
OB
H
ICOK'S
seventh book is
Elegy Owed
(Copper Canyon, 2013). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, as well as the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He lives in Virginia.

Of “Blue prints,” Hicok writes: “A lot of things, once they happen, seem inevitable. Poems often feel like shapes that were there but unnoticed until touched. Love too—as soon as I saw the woman who'd become my wife, it seemed she'd always been there. Wouldn't it be weird if she had—if we'd been walking around sort of back to back without realizing, without turning toward the other? Cool scary. I hope builders don't think this poem is trying to put them out of work.”

L
E
H
INTON
was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1952. He received his BA from Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia and is currently the editor of the journal
Fledgling Rag.
He is the author of five collections of poetry:
Waiting for Brion
(2004),
Status Post Hope
(2006),
Black on Most Days
(2008),
The God of Our Dreams
(2010), and
The Language of Moisture and Light
(2014), all published by Iris G. Press. His poem “Our Ballpark” was incorporated into Derek Parker's sculpture
Common Thread
and installed at Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he has lived for the past thirty-one years.

Hinton writes: “ ‘No Doubt About It (I Gotta Get Another Hat)' is an elegy for the Baltimore poet Chris Toll and is infused with his spirit. As to the ‘Vincent' in the poem's first line: in the 1960s the actor Vincent Price sold original art for Sears. For an assignment in high school, I wrote to him and asked, ‘What is art?' It is a question I continue to ask.”