The Best American Poetry 2015 (28 page)

Of “Memo to the Former Child Prodigy,” Terris writes: “As a child, I desperately wanted to be a prodigy, though at that time I would have used the word ‘star.' I was a dancer, a competitive swimmer, a wanna-be actress, a curious student, and I had already had a story published in a national teenage magazine. My parents rejected the prodigy notion, telling me calmly, ‘Too public. We don't do things that way.' And if I asked them if I was smart, they'd reply, ‘Of course you are. You're our daughter.' Years later, when I had children of my own, I understood their logic better. Still, I remained fascinated by the idea of the truly amazing prodigy (which I never, even with parental encouragement, would have been)—an Alexander Pope, a Shirley Temple, a Mozart. Isaac Stern, the famous violinist who was
not
a prodigy, held the notion that musical prodigies had to retrain in their twenties, ridding themselves of their childish behavioral tics to be a success in the adult world. That notion has become mine, too—only I extend it to all prodigies, not just musical ones. Running through this poem are a few snatches of the lyrics from
The Mikado
of ‘The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring'—a kind of paean to innocence and joy. My notion of retraining for any prodigy is to stop focusing on past triumphs and start over at ‘one'—at innocence and joy, to learn to be a whole person, a non-solipsistic adult.”

M
ICHAEL
T
YRELL
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1974. He is the author of the poetry collection
The Wanted
(The National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited
Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn
(NYU Press, 2007). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he teaches at New York University.

Of “Delicatessen,” Tyrell writes: “I've always been fascinated by how documentaries can make the quotidian seem mythic, and after taking in so many stories on social and other media about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, I found myself writing in a quasi-documentary style, taking stock of my own minor daily routines and the imagined lives of people I saw or encountered in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As the poem took shape, other figures emerged, one being Hyacinth Thrash—a survivor of the tragedy in Jonestown in 1978. Her story, which I heard recounted in a documentary, has haunted me for years. I hope I've done her justice.”

W
ENDY
V
IDELOCK
was born in Ohio and raised in Tucson, Arizona, where she graduated from the University of Arizona. She now lives in western Colorado, where she writes, paints, and teaches. Her books,
Nevertheless
(2011),
The Dark Gnu
(2013), and
Slingshots and Love Plums
(2015), have been published by Able Muse Press.

S
IDNEY
W
ADE
's sixth collection of poems,
Straits & Narrows
, was published by Persea Books in 2013. Her translations from the Turkish,
Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday
, won the Meral Divitci Prize and will be published in October 2015. She has served as president of Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and secretary/treasurer of the American Literary Translators' Association. She teaches workshops in poetry and translation at the University of Florida's MFA@FLA program. She is the poetry editor of
Subtropics.

C
ODY
W
ALKER
was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1967. He is the author of
Shuffle and Breakdown
(Waywiser Press, 2008) and coeditor of
Alive at the Center: An Anthology of Poems from the Pacific Northwest
(Ooligan Press, 2013). He lives in Ann Arbor and teaches English at the University of Michigan. His second poetry collection,
The Self-Styled No-Child
, will be published by Waywiser in 2016.

Of “Trades I Would Make,” Walker writes: “Several summers ago, I started going to an Ann Arbor café called Mighty Good. My first daughter had been born the previous fall; I'd written almost nothing
in the intervening months. So my partner and I hired a babysitter, which allowed us to escape to Mighty Good on Sunday afternoons and feel like writers again. I joked that the title for my next book would be
These Poems Are Costing Me Ten Dollars an Hour
. (These days, with two kids, the poems cost thirteen dollars an hour.) ‘Trades I Would Make' emerged from those carefree afternoons.”

L
A
W
ANDA
W
ALTERS
was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949. Her poems have appeared in
The Antioch Review
,
The Cincinnati Review
,
The Georgia Review
,
The Laurel Review
,
North American Review
,
Ploughshares
,
Shenandoah
, and
Southern Poetry Review.
She received an MA in literature from California State University at Humboldt and an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives in Cincinnati.

Of “Goodness in Mississippi,” Walters writes: “My poem is a double elegy, in which I mourn and try to reconcile the early deaths of two people in very different circumstances. On the surface the poem speaks mostly about my first best friend, who amazed me with her early maturity and natural kindness and was my first role model. But the poem is also—and primarily—my acknowledgment of the near-miraculous mystery when someone chooses to be good in a place and time that makes that choice impossible. In a state that was proudest of its two Miss Mississippis, only the beautiful and the white were acknowledged. It was a hollow, superficial existence, and the spectrum of its cruelty extended from a lonely white kid with pimples and a long nose to someone who identified himself as black, like Vernon Dahmer, who lived in Hattiesburg, just as we did, and was a successful businessman, the owner of acres of farmland and a logging business. I believe that both my friend and Mr. Dahmer died because they were the ‘good' in Mississippi, a place that did not hand out awards for substance, just appearance. Let me be clear that my friend did not die out of her own vanity. She genuinely cared about other people but was secretly mean to herself. So I make the leap from my friend, who was too kind, to someone neither of us knew, a man who owned a store in a separate part of town and was concerned enough about his friends, who had not managed to get past the racist registrar at the Hattiesburg Courthouse, to keep a ledger in his store for people to sign up to vote, to pay the poll taxes for those who could not afford that travesty, and to speak on a radio show (the morning before his murder) announcing the venue of his store as a safe place for people to come and sign up to vote.

“I was able to write this poem—in which I try to speak of Dahmer's sacrifice for the good of others—when I tried Terrance Hayes's ‘golden shovel' form, which he invented in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks's ‘We Real Cool.' I feel so grateful for that form and for the opportunity to express my white girl's humility and awe toward a heroism for which all of us can never be grateful enough.

“A longer backstory about the poem's genesis, ‘Mississippi Daze,' appears on the
Georgia Review
website:
garev.uga.edu/wordpress/index.php/2014/04/mississippi-daze/
.”

Born in 1951, A
FAA
M
ICHAEL
W
EAVER
was the firstborn of five children of black working-class parents who came north to Baltimore, Maryland, from the family homeland in Brunswick County, Virginia, and Northampton County, North Carolina. Encouraged by his parents, he skipped the eighth grade and entered the University of Maryland's main campus at College Park in 1968 when he was sixteen years old. After completing two years in good standing there, he returned to Baltimore and worked in factories from 1970 to 1985, during which time he wrote poetry, short fiction, and newspaper articles. During those years he also founded 7th Son Press and published the journal
Blind Alleys
. He left factory life in 1985 with an NEA fellowship in poetry and a contract for his first book,
Water Song
(Callaloo). He completed his BA (1986) at the State University of New York and did his graduate work (1985–1987) at Brown. He has published thirteen more collections of poetry, most recently
A Hard Summation
(Central Square Press, 2014) and
City of Eternal Spring
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). His twelfth collection,
The Government of Nature
, received the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has a first-degree black sash in Taijiquan and is a Dao disciple in the Tien Shan Pai Association. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He adapted his birth name, Michael Schan Weaver, in 1998 when he used “Afaa” for his sixth poetry collection,
Talisman
(Tia Chucha). His websites are afaaweaver.net and
plumflowertrilogy.org
.

Weaver writes: “ ‘City of Eternal Spring' is the title poem from my most recent collection of poetry, the book that completes my Plum Flower Trilogy that began with
The Plum Flower Dance
and includes
The Government of Nature
. This title poem from
City of Eternal Spring
takes as its subject the Daoist strategy of working toward emptiness in sitting meditation and in the application of new consciousness acquired in meditation toward the business of daily living and the exploration of self and experience.

“ ‘City of Eternal Spring' also refers to the heart, which in Chinese is represented by the character xin
and also means ‘mind.' In Daoist contemplative life, the realization of the heart and mind as one is preliminary to working toward emptiness. In that way the poem celebrates release from the entanglement of trauma and trauma repetition, a victory in that my life is no longer so deeply circumscribed by the trauma and by its effects.

“The poem establishes imagery of the mind as architectural structure, one that is both filled and transformed by the process of healing from childhood sexual abuse through healing contexts established in intersections with Chinese culture. The mind as architectural structure with consciousness formed in light and the tiniest specks of electromagnetic energy driven by the body's considerable electricity have formed a central metaphor for my work over the last ten years. It emerges from my Daoist studies and a foundation in math, science, architecture, and engineering I received early in life.”

C
ANDACE
G. W
ILEY
is cofounder and codirector of The Watering Hole, an online community dedicated to poets of color. She was born in 1985 and raised between small towns in rural South Carolina, where there were more cattle than people and no need for stoplights. She received her BA from Bowie State University (the first Maryland HBCU), her MA from Clemson University, and her MFA at the University of South Carolina. She has served as the creative writing director for a production of the musical revue
Jacques Brel: Alive and Well and Living in Paris
, which was a benefit performance for Haiti, and she has written dialogues and poetry for the prototype of Ghosts of South Carolina College, an iPhone app that shows the enslaved people who built and maintained antebellum USC. She has recently returned to the United States after conducting research in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, as a Fulbright Fellow. Palenque is one of the many towns founded by escaped slaves in the 1600s—and the only one that still exists in Colombia. The people have their own language as well as customs that trace back to the Bantu and Kikongo in West Africa. She teaches in South Carolina.

On “Dear Black Barbie,” Wiley writes: “While in the process of going through Denise Duhamel's
Kinky
, I needed to add bits of my own childhood perception of Barbie to the conversation. Although I grew up well loved by my African American community, saw many of its members as beautiful and handsome, and had a healthy sense of self, I still had a very complex relationship to skin. Later, as an
undergraduate student at Bowie State University, a Historically Black University, I met many other young women who were willing to admit shameful childhood propensities toward whiteness as the standard of beauty—shameful because we were young, revolutionary, decidedly black, and millennial—although we still had to reassert and re-remind ourselves, and each other, of our own inherent beauty. This state of unrecognized beauty worked with the hypersexualization of Barbie to the extent that it opened a young girl, who did not fully know that sex existed, to create her own childhood lesbian erotica following the idea that if Ken couldn't love Barbie, someone had to.

“With this poem, I was able to take a real childhood memory and pair it with my own adult commentary about the very historical lightening and blond-ing of African American women whose beauty is to be admired as it is and the masculinization of those who do not fit the aforementioned categories of the ‘beautiful.' Each is a ticket that costs something. This poem asks: Have African American women earned the right to ‘womanhood' and have we really progressed?”