The Best American Poetry 2015 (25 page)

“That said, individual persistence has to count for something. Of the recording sessions that led to the release of the Stones' ‘(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,' the band knocked out the greatest rock song ever without even trying because, as Jackson says, they were always trying. ‘Is Spot in Heaven?' marks my sixth appearance in the
Best American Poetry
series, yet my first poem didn't appear there till I was fifty-four years old. So hang in there, you poets.”

A
NDREW
K
OZMA
was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1976. He lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches technical writing at the University of Houston. His book of poems,
City of Regret
(Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

Of “Ode to the Common Housefly,” Kozma writes: “I guess there are two things at work here: the form and the subject. The subject is easy. I've always been fascinated by insects, and a few years ago I decided to write a series of odes in celebration of those insects that most people (except entomologists, I suppose) would not celebrate. The form is my attempting to mix earnestness with pomposity, the ornate with the mundane, trying to pack so much into the poem (sonically and linguistically) that it bleeds outside its own lines, finally transforming
into the honest appreciation of a housefly couched in a psalm-like prayer.”

H
AILEY
L
EITHAUSER
was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1954 and grew up in Florida and Maryland. She is the author of
Swoop
(Graywolf, 2013). Her work appears in
Copper Nickel
,
The Gettysburg Review
,
Poetry
,
The Yale Review
, and
The Best American Poetry 2010
and
2014
. She has lived up and down the East Coast and has had too many jobs to count, her last full-time gig as the senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy. She now teaches occasionally at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Of “The Pickpocket Song,” Leithauser writes: “ ‘Pickpocket' came to be when I was muttering around one day last winter, whining online about a terminal lack of inspiration, and possibly to shut me up, Amy Beeder devised an exercise for us to try in which she sent me a line from a draft she was toying with to use anywhere within a poem of my own. I was then to send her a line from my draft for her to incorporate, so that each poem would end up sharing the two lines.

“Neither of us knew what the other person's title or subject matter was beforehand so there was much joy and long-distance clinking of glasses when the lines actually ended up playing quite well off one another and we both got a nice poem out of the deal. (If you want to find out which were the borrowed lines, you can read both poems in the 2014 summer issue of
32 Poems
. As to who wrote which line, I'll never tell.) We liked the exercise so much that now we're talking about putting together an anthology as soon as we can come up with a dozen or so like-minded writers to pair off and a snappy title.”

D
ANA
L
EVIN
was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1965 and grew up in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of three books of poetry:
In the Surgical Theatre
(Copper Canyon Press, 1999),
Wedding Day
(Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and
Sky Burial
(Copper Canyon Press, 2011). A recipient of awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. This is her first appearance in
The Best American Poetry
.

Of “Watching the Sea Go,” Levin writes: “I was staying on a beloved part of the Northern California coast intending to write, but all I kept doing was taking thirty-second videos of the sea. It seemed like such an absurd activity (the sea was right there!), but I was compelled. On the page I'd
been troubling our environmental future; perhaps the videos were little stays against the End.”

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

Of “See a Furious Waterfall Without Water,” Lockwood writes: “In 1969, they drained Niagara Falls. In 2010, I was messing around on my computer, and I saw a headline enjoining me to look at ‘a waterfall without water.' I clicked through and found a photoset of empty Niagara. It had not occurred to me that a waterfall could be conditional, like a lap. The character, all of a sudden, stood there quite solidly, fixing his cuffs and looking generally dissipated, needing nothing so much as a drink. It was apparent he had a wedding to go to.”

D
ORA
M
ALECH
was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1981 and grew up in Maryland. She earned degrees at Yale University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Poetry Award, a Writer's Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. The Waywiser Press published her first full-length collection of poems,
Shore Ordered Ocean
, in 2009, and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center published her second collection,
Say So
, in 2011. Her poetry has been adapted into short films for the Motionpoems series, and it has been featured in a musical collaboration with composer Jacob Cooper in his song cycle
Silver Threads
(Nonesuch Records, 2014). Malech lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she joined the faculty of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of poetry in 2014.

Of “Party Games,” Malech writes: “After piñatas made appearances at a friend's baby shower a few years ago and another friend's bachelorette party this past year, my childhood fascination was revived. Watching some of the kindest, gentlest women I knew beating a papier-mâché animal with a stick got me thinking about the complicated role of play, especially violent play, in childhood and adulthood. Not all of this thinking made its way into the poem, and there are numerous cultural and religious traditions and a rich global history of the piñata that didn't make
their way explicitly into the scene. I focused in on specific visual memories: the moment when the stick we were using to hit the piñata (actually just an ancient wooden-handled ice-scraper from my car) broke under the force of the blows, the smile beneath the blindfold, the two-fisted grip, and so forth. In revising the poem, I chose to specify the pronouns ‘she' and ‘we,' but never to specify the age of the participants, so the poem could be read as a child's game, as I had witnessed and experienced many times. It felt important to me on a personal level that the poem functioned as a palimpsest, with adult violence enacted in a child's game and a child's sense of play revived in adulthood.”

D
ONNA
M
ASINI
was born in Brooklyn in 1954 and has lived in New York ever since. She is the author of two collections of poems—
Turning to Fiction
(W. W. Norton, 2004) and
That Kind of Danger
(Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet's Prize—and a novel,
About Yvonne
(Norton, 1998). She is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, where she teaches in the MFA creative writing program. She has recently finished
The Good Enough Mother
, a novel.

Of “Anxieties,” Masini writes: “After finishing a novel, I was in that drifting place, scribbling, slowly collecting drafts toward a new book I'm calling
4:30 Movie
. Terrance Hayes gave me the idea of the ‘word scramble poem'—a form he'd ‘invented.' As with any prompt, it might or might not lead somewhere, but there's always a surprise (once you find ‘orgasm' imbedded in ‘smorgasbord' it starts you off somewhere unexpected) and my first attempt ended up as a couple of lines in another poem: ‘If you think in anagrams, / parades and drapes, diapers, rape, despair and aspire / all come out of paradise.' In these poems I'll give myself different formal conditions, but every line must end (and in some poems begin) with one of the words that comes out of the scramble. Sometimes I use it to ‘warm up.' Here's the thing: I've always loved watching words nesting or recombining inside other words. As a kid I'd look at a street sign or Corn Flakes box and see how many words I could find inside a word or phrase. I think it calmed me down. So this process feels deeply familiar. Sometimes I try it when I'm anxious about writing—a sort of ‘meditation meets Boggle'—hence the title of this poem.”

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1972, A
IREA
D. M
ATTHEWS
is a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow. She is a lecturer of English at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA. She is the co–executive editor of
The Offing.

Matthews writes: “ ‘If My Late Grandmother Were Gertrude Stein' started as a Facebook status shortly after I read Stein's
Tender Buttons
. I began to consider the ways in which my grandmother, a fifth-grade dropout during the Great Depression, grasped at language to share her fractured narratives. She didn't have any direct experience with modernism as a formal construct. However, I noticed a relationship between Gertrude Stein and my grandmother's disparate lives and identities. The poem serves as a seemingly impossible bridge between the three of us.”

J
AMAAL
M
AY
writes and records poetry, music, and short films. He is the author of
Hum
and founder of Organic Weapon Arts, which he codirects with his partner, Tarfia Faizullah.

Of “There Are Birds Here,” May writes: “I wanted to throw my half cent into the national conversation about Detroit. A deluge of thoughtless speaking on the subject drove me to reach for craft elements that would help me argue for attention to the space between shadow and light—the space we all actually exist in. The bird figuration came in when I jokingly said, ‘Hey, there are birds in there, too,' after I noticed that reviewers latched on to the metal in
Hum
but usually overlooked the feathers. They also show up because I'm obsessed with the hypothesis that context is more important than object. Birds were among the pet objects I heard writers express their ire for seeing in ‘too many poems' (too many for what, I wonder). The layer beneath is ‘I'm tired of birds appearing in the same context.' But since we don't invent a new language for every book anyway, are we ever really doing much more than looking for a new context when we decide to put this word next to that one? So if I can make a plain, old bird do real work in a poem, I get to start the conversation about limited thinking right there. I cribbed the negation move from Alan Dugan's ‘Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli.' He never lets the metaphor rest, even though he knows it can't be taken back after we've seen it. It's a great way to show complexity rather than beg others to acknowledge it. My closing lines got worked and reworked until the music and sense synced with the enjambments. It creates a tension between sentence and line that puts ambivalence in the reader's body, which can't be achieved by simply saying ‘this is complicated.' Michael Bazzett, an excellent poet and high school teacher, told me he and his students call this a ‘pump fake,' a
basketball move in which you quickly pretend to shoot so that the defender flinches or jumps to block you, making it easy to just go around them.

“At the time of the first draft, the bankruptcy was a lead story. If it wasn't the media talking about my city like no one lived here (we do) and no one thrives here (I do), then it was the lazy art. Everyone in Brooklyn thought they were the first to photograph decay porn. Our own glowing send-ups to Motown and one-sided rants about how awesome we are, while encouraging, began to feel as thoughtless as the doom-saying. I wanted to share something about the complexity of this place in a way that a young student could understand, in a way that any reader could memorize, and still have layers for the advanced lit-heads to peel back. None of these pleasures are either pretentious or trivial. Since publication, ‘There Are Birds Here' has been republished by the
New York Times
Learning Network and translated into other languages. It receives thousands of reads a day online, and an ACLU chapter vice president recently used the poem to explain why a housing class action lawsuit was important. The poem has left me encouraged in this belief: When I flatly state my opinion, all you can do is agree or fight me. When I artfully present my interior, you have to take the third option, the one you've always had: think.”

L
AURA
M
C
C
ULLOUGH
was born in 1960. Her most recent books include
Rigger Death & Hoist Another
(poems, Black Lawrence Press, 2013),
Ripple & Snap
(prose poem hybrid, ELP Press, 2014),
Shutters: Voices: Wind
(dramatic monologues, ELP Press, 2014), and
The Smashing House
(short fiction, ELP Press, 2014). She has edited two anthologies,
The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn
(University of Syracuse Press, 2014) and
A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race
(University of Georgia Press, 2015). She teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-residency MFA. She is the founding editor of
Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations
.