The Best American Poetry 2014 (25 page)

T
ONY
H
OAGLAND
was born in North Carolina in 1953. His books of poems include
What Narcissism Means to Me
,
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
, and
Donkey Gospel
. His work has received the Mark Twain Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. His second book of prose essays,
Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays
, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2014. Several years ago he founded
FivePowersPoetry.com
, a short-form program for coaching high school teachers in the teaching of poetry in the classroom. He teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

Of “Write Whiter,” Hoagland writes: “Categories of perception are always shifting, shrinking, and expanding, and they are always reductive, and they are inevitable. That doesn't mean that they are comfortable. And what time-honored opportunities they have provided for malice, persecution, and control.

“To play with such categories, to mock and acknowledge them at the same time, is a mode of struggle, and a way of keeping clear of the traps they construct for us. The playful and iconoclastic deftness of poetry is meant for tasks like this. The soul can't be trapped, and yet it is. That paradox is the instinct from which this writing came. It's a lament, but it's also an anti-Prohibition poem. I don't consider ‘Write Whiter' a great poem, nor an exceptional example of TH's volcanic talent. Someone else easily could have written it. However, it defines, like a station of the cross, a place in the conversation we are having; its ticket needed to be punched, and so I punched it.”

M
AJOR
J
ACKSON
is the author of three collections of poetry:
Holding Company
,
Hoops
, and
Leaving Saturn
. He is the editor of Library of America's
Countee Cullen: Collected Poems
and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Writers' Award. A core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is the Richard A. Dennis University Professor at the University of Vermont. He divides his time between Florida and Vermont.

Of “OK Cupid,” Jackson writes: “Lately, I have been fascinated with the tradition of American poems that create their own logic and systems of meaning, that are explicitly and deliberately constructed out of a strong sense of inventiveness, play, and chance, what some have been labeling ‘procedural,' which also incidentally (and hilarious to me) described my series of ‘dates' while I was briefly on a few online dating websites. Initially, I found the battery of questions designed to feed into an algorithm of answers that ostensibly would spit out an instant list of potential life partners absolutely appalling, even while I morosely answered every question to completeness. Putting my ire and pessimism aside, I commenced to writing a long poem using the generative phrase ‘Dating a _____ is like dating a _____.' As each line came to me, mocking the whole enterprise of Internet matchmaking, I loved the associative spirit of what was emerging as well as the freedom to go wherever I wanted, which was unlike the word analogy problems my middle school teacher doled out, that seemed fixed, easily formulated, and too logical. The poem started as a parody and critique of the social order, but emerged with greater aesthetic outcomes: whimsy and flight. The poem contracts between the uproarious and the serious. It turned out my subconscious didn't want to condemn dating websites after all, but to simply have fun. And thus, I now regret having written the disclaimer that is published with my biography in
Tin House
.”

A
MAUD
J
AMAUL
J
OHNSON
was born in Compton, California, in 1972. Educated at Howard University and Cornell University, he is the author of two poetry collections,
Darktown Follies
(Tupelo Press, 2013) and
Red Summer
(Tupelo, 2006), which Carl Phillips selected as winner of the Dorset Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Cave Canem Fellow, he teaches in the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Of “L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83,” Johnson writes: “Los Angeles in the mid-1980s seemed near-apocalyptic. There was fire and brimstone in the pulpit, addiction, gang violence, and police brutality on the corner, and nuclear war on the screen. Magic Johnson deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for his ‘no look alley-oop,' because without the Lakers, the city might have burned five years before the 1992 riots. I happened across the headline of Daryl Gates's passing a few years ago, and I was caught off guard by my emotional response. I wanted to blame him for all the evils of that decade. Of course, blaming the dead is a form of failure. The dead are defenseless. The dead can't plead forgiveness. Punishment and pity are tools for the living.”

D
OUGLAS
K
EARNEY
is a poet, performer, and librettist. His second full-length collection of poetry,
The Black Automaton
(Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner's selection for the National Poetry Series. Red Hen Press published Kearney's third collection,
Patter
, in 2014. He has received fellowships at Cave Canem, Idyllwild, and elsewhere. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including
Poetry
,
nocturnes
,
Pleiades
,
Callaloo
,
Ninth Letter
. His produced operas include
Sucktion
,
Mordake
, and
Crescent City.
Raised in Altadena, California, he lives with his family in California's Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts, where he received his MFA in Writing in 2004.

Of “The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,” Kearney writes: “I tend to be series-oriented in my writing. Having the time and space to develop a number of ideas and images around a central one allows me to unsettle my own expectations around what poems can yield. For several years, I wanted to work with the Labors of Herakles. It would be great: there were twelve, so I had a positive constraint for, say, a twelve-poem series. But I never figured out a useful entry point for trotting out some more Greek mythology.

“Then, the saloon doors opened and in walked Stagger Lee.

“It occurred to me that I could take these two infamous badmen—Stagger
and Herakles—and conflate them somehow. Both versions say interesting things to their respective cultures about the nature of violence, suffering, and the heroic. Thus, acting like some new jack Eurystheus, I sent Stagger Lee on his own version of Herakles' labors. Of course, Herakles took on his work—many say—because he killed his family. The work Stagger puts in, in my series,
is
the killing of his ‘brother' (see the language of Black uplift), Billy Lyons.

“In ‘The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,' we see Stagger and a fractalized kind of Erymanthian Boar. Yet, as is the case in the labors of antiquity, the pig can come to signify some culturally specific notions. I think they're apparent here.

“Oh! Last thing. At one point, this poem was, itself, divided into two sections. ‘Rooter' and ‘Tooter'—a nod to an old expression about how much of the hog hungry black folks would eat. The ‘Tooter' section lost track of Stagger completely and started riffing on Herakles and ‘That Scene' from
Deliverance
. It was a jazz to write, but it jumped the shark. Utterly. I had clutched to it, unwilling to admit it wasn't working. A chat with poet Jericho Brown helped cinch its excision.”

Y
USEF
K
OMUNYAKAA'S
books of poetry include
Taboo
,
Dien Cai Dau
,
Neon Vernacular
(for which he received the Pulitzer Prize),
The Chameleon Couch
, and
Testimony
:
A Tribute to Charlie Parker
. He has received numerous awards, including the William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally, and include
Slipknot
,
Wakonda's Dream
,
Nine Bridges Back
,
Saturnalia
,
Testimony
,
The Mercy Suite
, and
Gilgamesh
:
A Verse Play
(with Chad Gracia). He teaches at New York University. He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 2003.

Komunyakaa writes: “ ‘Negritude' is an improvised meditation on the term. In
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
(1939), Aimé Césaire defines negritude as ‘the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.' It was, however, Wole Soyinka who said, ‘A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey.'

“Perhaps this poem, through a composite of images, underscores these vagaries within a state of being; perhaps we are, intellectually and spiritually, the summation of the inherited metaphors we can't help but live by. The speaker seems to have been shaped by the basic
rituals of earthy existence—the blues, hard work, dance, folklore, love, time, nature, and even gratitude; the sum total of his life has been a full-blown beckoning and a reckoning. This poem—in celebration of Césaire's centennial—challenges his definition by suggesting that ‘negritude' is not a decision, but a condition of the soul.”

H
AILEY
L
EITHAUSER
was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1954. She is the author of
Swoop
, which was published by Graywolf in 2013. Her work was selected for
The Best American Poetry 2010
. She teaches at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Of “In My Last Past Life,” Leithauser writes: “I don't remember much about how I came to write this poem except that the first line was buzzing around in my brain for several years, and that I always thought of it as a good line to open a villanelle. I do remember that I tried a few times to write it as a sort of humorous fairy tale, but those attempts never quite fell into place. It wasn't until this last version, when the sea began returning in each stanza, that the poem developed the elegiac tone that was apparently the speaker's proper voice.”

L
ARRY
L
EVIS
(1946–1996) published five collections of poetry during his lifetime.
Elegy
, a posthumous volume edited by Philip Levine, appeared in 1997, and
Selected Levis
, edited by David St. John, was published in 2000.

David St. John writes: “ ‘Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It' is, in effect, the title poem of Larry Levis's
The Darkening Trapeze: The Uncollected Poems of Larry Levis
, forthcoming from Graywolf Press, which I edited. These ‘last' poems were written almost entirely during the same time frame as those in his posthumous book,
Elegy
(1997). Many of the poems are longer, even operatic pieces that reflect Larry's dramatic—and elaborate—narrative braiding, which became the poetic signature for much of his later work. Larry Levis died in May 1996, and what
The Darkening Trapeze
makes clear is that his poetry remains some of the most lyrically complex and consistently powerful work being published in this country.”

G
ARY
C
OPELAND
L
ILLEY
, a North Carolina native, lives and teaches in Winston-Salem. He received the 1996 and 2000 DC Commission for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, and earned his MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. He is a member of the Black Rooster Collective, is a Cave Canem fellow, and has taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College, and in the
Great Smokies writing program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. He has been a faculty poet at the Port Townsend Writers Conference and a visiting writer at Colby College, the University of Arizona, Goddard College, and the Institute of American Indian Art. His books include
High Water Everywhere
(Willow Books of Aquarius Press, 2013),
Alpha Zulu
(Ausable Press, 2008), and
The Subsequent Blues
(Four Way Books, 2004).

Of “Sermon of the Dreadnaught,” Lilley writes: “I love the blues, and blues people. They've always been around me, and a few years ago a friend put a guitar in my hands. I play every day, both secular and sacred blues. I am a devotee, most happy when I am creating music and fueling my writing. I play on the streets in small towns, cities, churches, bars, and homes of inviting folks. I wanted this poem to capture some of that energy, some of the deep resonance of the dreadnaught-style acoustic guitar, and some images of the blues-people terrain. And yes, there were tunes running through my head when I was developing the poem. Old-time gospel songs that are starting to disappear even from the song lists of black churches, the songs of my grandmothers, and all the old people from the rural North Carolina community in which I grew up. I call them foundation songs. That dreadnaught guitar brought those songs back to me, and gave me the poem.”

F
RANNIE
L
INDSAY
was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1949. Her four volumes of poetry are
Our Vanishing
(Red Hen Press, 2014),
Mayweed
(The Word Works, 2010),
Lamb
(Perugia Press, 2006), and
Where She Always Was
(Utah State University Press, 2004). She has won the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Washington Prize, the Perugia Prize, and the May Swenson Award. In 2008 she was chosen as the winner of
The Missouri Review
Prize in poetry. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a classical pianist. Over the last twenty years, she has rescued seven greyhounds. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts.