The Best American Poetry 2014 (28 page)

F
REDERICK
S
EIDEL
was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936. He earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1957. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including
Ooga-Booga
(2006), winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize;
The Cosmos Trilogy
(2003); and
Going Fast
(1998), all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

D
IANE
S
EUSS
was born in 1956 in Michigan City, Indiana, and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. Her people are old-school barbers, small-town morticians, telephone operators, nurses, teachers, one-eyed pool players, and furniture salespeople (specializing in the swivel rocker). Her first book,
It Blows You Hollow
, was published by New Issues Press in 1998. Her second collection,
Wolf Lake
,
White Gown Blown Open
, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her third book,
Four-Legged Girl
, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. She is writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Seuss writes: “ ‘Free Beer' represents the crossroads between two seemingly disconnected subjects. I did, as a young child, invite all of the adults in the neighborhood to a puppet show at our home, promising them free beer if they showed up. My father was dying; our family was penniless. We were living on cans of pork and beans delivered in cardboard boxes by the minister of the Fulkerson Park Baptist Church. Needless to say, there was no beer, were no puppets. The show, I guess, was wishful thinking. The intersecting subject that collided with the small narrative of that pocket-sized memory came to me via all of the mass shootings that happened in the United States over the last few years. Did I have the spiritual chops, I wondered, to pray for the bastard perpetrators?

“What happened when the two subjects met in this poem is a mystery I'd prefer not to solve. It's not
about
their intersection, of course, but it's the little song that arose out of their meeting in the puppet theater behind my eyes.”

S
ANDRA
S
IMONDS
was born in Washington, DC, in 1977. She is the author of four books of poetry:
Warsaw Bikini
(Bloof Books, 2009),
Mother Was a Tragic Girl
(Cleveland State University Press, 2012),
The Sonnets
(Bloof, 2014), and
The Glass Box
(forthcoming, Saturnalia Books, 2015). She is assistant professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

Simonds writes: “ ‘I Grade Online Humanities Tests' is a political poem insofar as I tried to write about capitalism, patriarchy, and race without a lot of filter. I wanted to push myself to encounter the limit of the intersection of taboo, autobiography, and art. I wanted to know how much can you say honestly in a poem without your life falling apart? In a sense, this is a response to Auden's assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Is this true for everyone? Is it true for women? Is it true for people with little power in society? I wanted to investigate the undercurrents of political and sexual power that are just below the surface of everyday life. Can a poem get you fired? Can a poem threaten your marriage? I wanted to see how much power a poem can have when it responds to the fictions of the world.”

J
ANE
S
PRINGER
was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, in 1969. Her two collections of poetry are
Dear Blackbird
(which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in 2007) and
Murder Ballad
(Beatrice Hawley Award, 2012). She
has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers' Award. She teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she lives with her husband, her son, and their three dogs, Leisure-Lee, Azalea, and Woofus.

Of “Forties War Widows, Stolen Grain,” Springer writes: “Milton has this remarkable example of epanadiplosis in
Paradise Lost
(Book IV, lines 639–52). I have long admired it, and I wanted to reinvent the technique for the war widows poem by raveling and unraveling synonyms (e.g., spatula becomes utensil), as opposed to repeating words more exactly. My poem also nods to George Herbert's holy ‘Easter Wings'—ironic, since the shape of it is evocative of the SR-71 Blackbird war jet from the Cold War era. I hoped to acknowledge the women (those in my family as well as through the ages) who clean up what they can in the harrowing wake of wars past and present.”

C
OREY
V
AN
L
ANDINGHAM
was born in 1986 in Ashland, Oregon. She is a Wallace C. Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University and is the author of
Antidote
(Ohio State University Press, 2013). She received her MFA from Purdue University, where she was a poetry editor for
Sycamore Review
. She lives in Oakland, California.

Of “During the Autopsy,” Van Landingham writes: “While a student at Purdue University, I had the unusual opportunity to visit the cadaver lab for a project my professor, Marianne Boruch, was undertaking. The medical students walked us through the room, showing us various oddities and, with visible glee, watching our reactions. I had the instant urge to liken what I was seeing to something familiar. The bodies were detached from their persons, resulting in a new vision of the body. As a fact. As a warehouse. The cerebellum reminded me of the imprint of a pine-needle cluster. The brain, in my hands, seemed like some dull putty I had handled as a child. The heart was so
meaty
. I began to think about my reaction: was this something only we writers were doing, foreign as we are to the world of the body, more comfortable in language, in metaphor? I wondered whether the medical students, for whom the sight of cadavers may be tedious, ever transform the experience, in their minds, into the sensational, the strange? And so this poem took root there, in that body-clinging smell of the cadaver lab, where I imagined the enchantment, the wonder that I hoped one might find in the routine. I imagined the magic a body could reveal, and how it could become a fulcrum to this one man's very existence. No, to his multitudinous existences.”

A poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and actor, A
FAA
M
ICHAEL
W
EAVER
(formerly Michael S. Weaver) was born in Baltimore in 1951; he graduated high school and entered the University of Maryland in 1968, when he was sixteen years old. In 1970 he left the university to work in factories for fifteen years. In 1985, he received an NEA fellowship in poetry and the contract for his first book of poems with
Callaloo
at the University of Virginia. In that same year he left factory life to enter Brown University's MFA writing program, where he concentrated on playwriting, and he completed his BA at the University of the State of New York. His thirteen books of poetry include
Water Song
(University Press of Virginia, 1985),
Multitudes
(Sarabande, 2000),
The Plum Flower Dance
(Pittsburgh, 2007),
The Government of Nature
(Pittsburgh, 2013), and
A Hard Summation
(Central Square Press, 2014). He has received a Fulbright appointment (2002) to teach at National Taiwan University and, as a translator, he works with contemporary Chinese poetry. He holds the Alumnae Chair in English at Simmons College and is a visiting faculty member of Drew University's low-residency MFA in poetry and poetry in translation.

Weaver writes: “ ‘Passing Through Indian Territory' is an American sonnet inspired by my visit in fall 2011 to the University of Oklahoma, where I noticed the presence of cowboys in Oklahoma's history. As a young teenager, I learned a great deal about horses from a maternal uncle. He gave me an Appaloosa filly when I was fourteen years old, the subject of a poem in my early book
My Father's Geography.
”

E
LEANOR
W
ILNER
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937. She has published seven books of poetry, including
Tourist in Hell
(University of Chicago Press, 2010),
The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
(Copper Canyon, 2004), and
Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems
(Copper Canyon, 1998). She coedited with Maurice Manning
The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process
(University of Michigan, 2013). Her awards include a MacArthur, National Endowment for the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes. She teaches peripatetically and perennially in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Of “Sowing,” Wilner writes: “My poems tend to emerge from the imagination, which is to say, I make things up. But this one, uncharacteristically, comes direct from a personal memory, called up by the lines from a poem by Maurice Manning, which became the epigraph: ‘I can't make up / a name like Turnipseed, or that // I knew a man who went by such / a goodly name . . . ' And with that name came back, across the
years, a young man, my concern about his fate, and with him, a whole era in American history, the crimes and the unthinkable waste resulting from U.S. intervention in Vietnam's war.

“From that name, Turnipseed, the poem emerged: like the disturbance that, as it moves through water, makes the waves, so one association awakened the next, even as Maurice's description of a turnip seed brought on the incommensurate—the immeasurable value of a young man's life, so expendable to the military machine of empire: ‘a little bit of hardly anything.'

“A word about the poem's final associative move into the Dreamtime of the West in its last stanza, as the ironic ‘bought the farm' expression among soldiers in 'Nam for their dead comrades opened the field to the sowing of a different seed, in the furrow made by the plow of Cadmus in Ovid's retelling of the Greek myths in his
Metamorphoses.

“As Ovid tells it, Cadmus, who was to found the ill-fated dynasty of Thebes, kills the sacred serpent-dragon of the war god Mars, who has destroyed his company of men. On the instructions of his tutelary goddess Athena, Cadmus ploughs the ground and sows it with the teeth of the dragon, and at once, from this dragon seed, spears arise, then helmets, and soon a field of warriors has risen full grown from the earth, and almost at once it becomes a killing field as they attack one another, until, with only five left, Athena intervenes, peace is made, and Thebes, like Rome, has its origin in brother murder and civil war—all under the red eye of Mars.

“And, though I was not conscious of this when writing, it is obvious now that ‘fell like dominoes' refers to the insane justification for the massive carnage, bombing, and defoliation of Vietnam—the theory that if the North Vietnamese won the war, the countries of Southeast Asia would fall to Communism like dominoes. Of course, it was the bodies that fell ‘to join the ranks of headstones,
row on row on row
 . . . '

“It is my fond hope that Carl Turnipseed survived that bloody war, and, as to the flag-draped coffin, I believe its personal meaning for me in the context of this memory, was such a coffin at the funeral of Waters E. Turpin, my elder colleague at Morgan State, a kind and learned man who put up with my ignorance, and who, the year I was born, 1937, had published the first of his three novels,
These Low Grounds
, which, rare for that time in history, told it like it was.”

D
AVID
W
OJAHN
was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953. His eighth collection of poetry,
World Tree
, was published by the University of
Pittsburgh Press in 2011 and was the winner of the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His previous collection of poetry,
Interrogation Palace: Selected Poems 1982–2004
, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2006 and was a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison Award.
From the Valley of Making
, a collection of his essays on poetry, will appear from the University of Michigan Press in 2015. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College.

Of “My Father's Soul Departing,” Wojahn writes: “A few years ago, the poet Michael Waters asked each of a dozen or so poets to translate a work that may be the best known poem of the ancient world, Hadrian's ‘Animula.' Legend has it that it was written by the Roman emperor on his deathbed, and in it he bids farewell to his soul. The poem is a lovely bit of leave-taking to his ‘body's companion and guest.' The various translations that Michael solicited appeared together in a journal,
The Great River Review.
My version of the poem took several liberties with its content, and I later found myself wondering why I'd turned a work of great tenderness into something considerably more saturnine. ‘My Father's Soul Departing' was written in part to answer the question. My father, who died in 1990, was a greatly decent man, but afflicted by many things, not least of which was a lifelong battle with chronic depression and alcoholism. Like so many other children of the depression, he had a difficult childhood, characterized by poverty, an abusive father, a mother afflicted with mental illness, and an education that was cut short in the eighth grade. He served in the army in World War II, and was later employed for many years by the Great Northern Railroad, the creation of the Robber Baron James J. Hill, who nicknamed himself ‘The Empire Builder.' And my father was among the last generation of old style Railroad Men. In 1970, he and many of his coworkers were permanently laid off from their positions, and my father's final two decades were characterized by various mental and economic woes.