The Best American Poetry 2014 (5 page)

but some of the women tear off their clothes

fall down on their backs and open their legs

as far as they can and scream “Fuck me,”

and some of the little boys drop their pants,

bend over and spread their cheeks

and yell “Do me! Mister, do me!”

                They say

that I have wings to fly me away from all

this obscenity, and that

they are either on my organ or on my back,

but this is a myth or not,

so come to the towns of northern Greece

or bloody Macedonia on your vacation,

    and find out.

CK: The little boys yell, “Do me, Mister”?

TH: It's a ballsy poem, right? You know who Priapus was? He was the minor god with the big—

CK: Yes, yes, I know who Priapus was! Let us change the subject. There are a few diagrams and illustrations in your introduction. The poem by Michael Earl Craig, for example, is accompanied by what looks like an ornate map of roads around a hat-shaped city. Take a look at this diagram by Jacques Maritain from his chapter, “The Internalization of Music” in
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
:

Maritain describes this as an illustration of creative intuition in search of expression in modern poetry. Can you offer some thoughts regarding your own diagrams?

TH: I hope my drawings aren't quite that complicated. I admire Maritain's effort to demystify poetry. Words fail, so he resorts to
diagrams. Ironically, things remain bewildering even drawn out. What does he mean by “process of spiritual production” and the “structure of the work of words,” for example?

CK: “The creative process is free to start developing in the nest of dynamic unity of image and thought where the music of intuitive pulsions takes place, and where emotion and nascent images are pregnant with virtual intelligibility,” Maritain says. The diagram makes this quite clear.

TH: The diagrams in my introduction are sort of tongue-in-cheek. When I realized I couldn't explain what makes a poem great, I thought I'd try illustrating it. “Show don't tell.” Something like that.

CK: You have picked several poems written in ad hoc forms. I am thinking of Rosemary Griggs's “SCRIPT POEM,” Anne Carson's “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated 6 Ways,” and Sherman Alexie's subversive “Sonnet, with Pride.” But there are poems in “pre-established forms” as well. Linda Bierds's “On Reflection” is a pantoum, Hailey Leithauser's “In My Last Past Life” is a villanelle. Philip Dacey's “Juilliard Cento Sonnet” is both cento and sonnet. If I ask you to explain this, I am sure you will say, “A good poem is a good poem,” or some such platitude.

TH: A good poem
is
a good poem.

CK: Instead I would like you to address the diversity that seems more than anything to have guided your decisions. A formal poem here, an experimental poem there, a poem by a “person of color” here, a poem by an old white guy there—how is anyone to really understand the essence of “American Poetry” if it amounts to a
gumbo
and
get-along
of choices?

TH: Some might say memory is the soul of imagination; that we seldom can imagine something before we have remembered an experience of it, a sense of it.

CK: Who says that?

TH [ignoring the question]: But let's consider diversity as possibly the soul of imagination. I'm not ashamed to say I wanted a diverse mix. In my introduction I describe my poetic tastes as something like a yard with a fence I cannot see. If I leave my porch and walk over a few hills, cross a few rivers, I suspect I will find my border: the place where I say
this is a poem, this is not
. But ultimately, I want my yard to be bigger not smaller, and this editing process made that possible. Still, I'm sure you can find styles or schools I left out.

CK: Some of your choices could be construed as political. I am
reminded of Harold Bloom's pugnacious introduction to
The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997
wherein—

TH: Where while decrying political poetry, Bloom writes one of the most political introductions in the series—

CK: Is that how you read his introduction?

TH: I'll stick with my fenced yard analogy. Bloom's fence comes right up to his door. Which would be fine if he wasn't such an anxious neighbor—the sort who not only confiscates the balls inadvertently tossed inside his fence, but also means to outlaw any ball games he doesn't recognize.

CK: Bloom's fervor is admirable. Like me, he is one of the few scholars paying attention to contemporary poetry. What, it must be asked, do you think is the function of the critic in an ever-uncritical culture?

TH: I don't mind critics. That's why you're here in advance of the critics and reviewers at the door. But do we really need someone to police the boundaries of poetry? I'm not saying that Adrienne Rich's 1996 volume was, like, the best of the best, but Bloom became narrow and polemical as he accused Rich of being narrow and polemical. It just wasn't a very generous introduction. If there is no generosity toward the arts, there is no Art.

CK: Fine. I happen to think Bloom is invaluable to poets. But enough of that. You have a political cento in your introduction. Let's hear that one before I order another bottle of wine. The Argentinian Malbec?

TH:

POLITICAL CENTO

It takes an American to do really big things. | For just a moment, imagine yourself as an Iraqi living in Baghdad. | dance backward toward town, down the long dirt road | Attack, back off, and then | GO GO GO GO | I believe in life as sure as I believe in death | I know why he is in ache. | How can a piece of knowledge be stupid | It's all Romeo and Juliet—hate crimes, booty calls, political assassinations. | All thumbs. All bicoastal and discreet and masculine and muscular.| so much to be learned and even more to be researched. | I know some readers need to see their lives reflected on the page | I'll spend the rest of the week closing an eye to the world | Let that be true.

CK: Well. I don't know how “political” that is. But you also selected a poem inspired by the Trayvon Martin story: Jon Sands's “Decoded.”

TH: Yes, that's a terrific poem.

CK: Is it not too topical?

TH: It's ingeniously structured. It shows us just how complicated a political poem—I don't think I trust that descriptor—can be. Actually, I think Patricia Lockwood's “Rape Joke” is more controversial.

CK: We should talk about that one.

TH: I'm not sure what to say about it. There's so much to say about it. Which is why it's here speaking for itself.

CK: So we're not going to talk about it?

TH: Listen, a dude can't really cheer for a poem called “Rape Joke.” But what I felt reading it is akin to what I feel reading poems white people sometimes write about race. I'm thinking especially of Eleanor Wilner's “Sowing,” or Tony Hoagland's poem, “Write Whiter.” A reader can call for silence when a poem engages taboo subjects, or a reader can call for conversation. “Rape Joke” calls for conversation.

CK: Soon our opinions will realign, Terrance. I have faith.

TH: It's OK with me if they don't.

CK: Here is the opening sentence of Italo Calvino's essay, “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism”: “Sexuality in literature is a language in which what is not said is more important than what is.” Does this hold true for poetry as well?

TH: Gerhard Richter says something similar: that painting shows what isn't there. So maybe it's a better general statement about the effort of Art to make the immaterial material? Lockwood's poem does that. As does Joseph Ceravolo's “Hidden Bird.” But such big declarations about Art, even when it's Richter or Calvino positing them, are always slippery. Rothko was making fun of rules even as he offered a fairly palatable recipe for Art in his 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute:

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality. . . . Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.

2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.

3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.

4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.

5. Wit and Play . . . for the human element.

6. The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.

7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

It's a pretty good recipe for poetry.

CK: Certainly there are poems preoccupied with death. Mark Doty in “Deep Lane,” Sharon Olds's elegiac “Stanley Kunitz Ode,” Corey Van Landingham's “During the Autopsy.” You have more poems by dead poets than most of the anthologies in this series: Kurt Brown, Joseph Ceravolo, Adam Hammer, Larry Levis, Jake Adam York. Interestingly, all of them are deceased
white male poets
. Is this to suggest the white male poet is a dying breed?

TH [laughing]: Of course not! You really shouldn't be drinking red wine and espresso.

CK: What are we to make of the specter of death in poetry? Seems the hour is always elegiac, the heart cries out.

TH: I remember something the poet John Shade said once. I'm sure you remember because he said it to you: “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

CK: You, Mr. Hayes, are no John Shade. I pray you do not find this fact offensive.

TH: That's cool. Sorry I brought him up. Seems like a good time to read the “Death Cento”:

DEATH CENTO

There is a double heart behind the breast bone. | In particular, there is a rift through everything | You/I take/nurture my/your | I live alone with my life | I have come to believe in loss as a way of knowing | for dying is a song the body is learning | the choir shouts Praise! Stand up and be forgiven | It is customary to hold the dead in your mouth | One must at times learn to ignore the body | I mean, what good are words | they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world | I tell them to imagine me on horseback | It takes a while to sort it out | it kisses me goodbye. I'm dead. (Pause). | How absurd to still have a body

CK: Shall we end there? With death? It is a tad depressing, I think.

TH: We can end with the opposite of death. Something you said once: “I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.” It's akin to the act and ambition of making poems—all Art-making. The desire to change as well as endure.

CK: I am flattered. Let us end, then, with what this interview is not. What this is not, you realize, is your 182-page introduction decorated in graphs, poetic astrologies, recipes, explications, photos, theories on Art and Poetry and America. . . . You implied at the outset that introductions matter little. Doesn't a bit of judgment improve, and if we are lucky, refine the mind? You might be cutting corners, Sir. Poetry like all Art demands a bit of selectivity.

TH: I think I've been selective, Dr. Kinbote. The poems are here as proof. They are a gift to you whom I was thinking of all along the way. How you might, on an overcast day, criticize my choices. How you might, on a well-lit day, salute what I salute, and be transformed as I have been transformed.

Inspired by
Pride of Baghdad
by Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon

1. In 2003, during the Iraq War, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid. 2. Confused, injured, unexpectedly free, the lions roamed the streets searching for food and safety. 3. For just a moment, imagine yourself as an Iraqi living in Baghdad. You are running for cover as the U.S. bombers, like metal pterodactyls, roar overhead. You are running for cover as some of your fellow citizens, armed and angry, fire rifles, rocket launchers, and mortars into the sky. You are running for cover as people are dying all around you. It's war, war, war. And then you turn a corner and see a pride of freaking lions advancing on you. 4. Now, imagine yourself as a lion that has never been on a hunt. That has never walked outside of a cage. That has been coddled and fed all of its life. And now your world is exploding all around you. It's war, war, war. And then you turn a corner and see a pride of freaking tanks advancing on you. 5. It's okay to laugh. It's always okay to laugh at tragedy. If lions are capable of laughter, then I'm positive those Baghdad lions were laughing at their predicament. As they watched the city burn and collapse, I'm sure a lioness turned to a lion and said, “So do you still think you're the King of the Jungle?” 6. I don't know if the lions killed anybody as they roamed through the streets. 7. But I'd guess they were too afraid. I'm sure they could only see humans as zookeepers, not food. 8. In any case, the starving lions were eventually shot and killed by U.S. soldiers on patrol. 9. It's a sad and terrible story, yes, but that is war. And war is everywhere. And everywhere, there are prides of starving lions wandering the streets. There are prides of starving lions wandering inside your hearts. 10. You might also think that I'm using
starving lions as a metaphor for homeless folks, but I'm not. Homeless folks have been used far too often as targets for metaphors. I'm using those starving lions as a simple metaphor for hunger. All of our hunger. 11. Food-hunger. Love-hunger. Faith-hunger. Soul-hunger. 12. Who among us has not been hungry? Who among us has not been vulnerable? Who among us has not been a starving lion? Who among us has not been a prey animal? Who among us has not been a predator? 13. They say God created humans in God's image. But what if God also created lions in God's image? What if God created hunger in God's image? What if God is hunger? Tell me, how do you pray to hunger? How do you ask for hunger's blessing? How will hunger teach you to forgive? How will hunger teach you how to love? 14. Look out the window. It's all hunger and war. Hunger and war. Hunger and war. And the endless pride of lions.