Best American Poetry 2017 Read online

  To be stopped at security

  for sobbing.

  For something wrapped in foil.

  For the soul finding its face.

  For liquid.

  I don’t know if I forget

  my dreams or life more.

  To smudge out the features.

  To endure blasted.

  To drown in a raindrop.

  To nestle in a dark place

  inside the floodlight.

  To contain multitudes.

  To calm the hurt animal.

  To be inside another.

  To have been there all along.

  from The American Poetry Review

  KEVIN YOUNG

  * * *

  Money Road

  On the way to Money,

   Mississippi, we see little

  ghosts of snow, falling faint

   as words while we try to find

  Robert Johnson’s muddy

   maybe grave. Beside Little Zion,

  along the highwayside, this stone

   keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana

  Hot Sauce—the ground giving

   way beneath our feet.

  The blues always dance

   cheek to cheek with a church—

  Booker’s Place back

   in Greenwood still standing,

  its long green bar

   beautiful, Friendship Church just

  a holler away. Shotgun,

   shotgun, shotgun—

  rows of colored

   houses, as if the same can

  of bright stain might cover the sins

   of rotting wood, now

  mostly tarpaper & graffiti

   holding McLaurin Street together—

  RIP Boochie—the undead walk

   these streets seeking something

  we take pictures of

   & soon flee. The hood

  of a car yawns open

   in awe, men’s heads

  peer in its lion’s mouth

   seeking their share. FOR SALE:

  Squash & Snap Beans. The midden

   of oyster shells behind Lusco’s—

  the tiny O of a bullethole

   in Booker’s plate-glass window.

  Even the Salvation

   Army Thrift Store

  closed, bars over

   every door.

  We’re on our way again,

   away, along the Money

  Road, past grand houses

   & porte cochères set back

  from the lane, over the bridge

   to find markers of what’s

  no more there—even the underpass

   bears a name. It’s all

  too grave—the fake

   sharecropper homes

  of Tallahatchie Flats rented out

   along the road, staged bottle trees

  chasing away nothing, the new outhouse

   whose crescent door foreign tourists

  pay extra for. Cotton planted

   in strict rows

  for show. A quiet

   snow globe of pain

  I want to shake.

   While the flakes fall

  like ash we race

   the train to reach the place

  Emmett Till last

   whistled or smiled

  or did nothing.

   Money more

  a crossroads

   than the crossroads be—

  its gnarled tree—the Bryant Store

   facing the tracks, now turnt

  the color of earth, tumbling down

   slow as the snow, white

  & insistent as the woman

   who sent word

  of the uppity boy, her men

   who yanked you out

  your uncle’s home

   into the yard, into oblivion—

  into this store abutting

   the MONEY GIN CO.

  whose sign, worn away,

   now reads UN

  or SIN, I swear—

   whose giant gin fans,

  like those lashed & anchored

   to your beaten body,

  still turn. Shot, dumped,

   dredged, your face not even

  a mask—a marred,

   unspared, sightless stump—

  all your mother insists

   we must see to know

  What they did

   to my baby. The true

  Tallahatchie twisting

   south, the Delta

  Death’s second cousin

   once removed. You down

  for only the summer, to leave

   the stifling city where later

  you will be waked,

   displayed, defiant,

  a dark glass.

   There are things

  that cannot be seen

   but must be. Buried

  barely, this place

   no one can keep—

  Yet how to kill

   a ghost? The fog

  of our outdoor talk—

   we breathe,

  we grieve, we drink

   our tidy drinks. I think

  now winter will out—

   the snow bless

  & kiss

   this cursed earth.

  Or is it cussed? I don’t

   yet know. Let the cold keep

  still your bones.

  from The New Yorker

  MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

  * * *

  Poem for Vows

  (for E and G.)

  Hello beautiful talented

  dark semi-optimists of June,

  from far off I send my hopes

  Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost

  of Whitman who loved everyone

  is there to see you say what

  can never be said, something like

  partly I promise my whole life

  to try to figure out what it means

  to stand facing you under a tree,

  and partly no matter how angry

  I get I will always remember

  we met before we were born,

  it was in a village, someone

  had just cast a spell, it was

  in the park, snow everywhere,

  we were slipping and laughing,

  at last we knew the green secret,

  we were sea turtles swimming

  a long time together without

  needing to breathe, we were

  two hungry owls silently

  hunting night, our terrible claws,

  I don’t want to sound like I know,

  I’m just one who worries all night

  about people in a lab watching

  a storm in a glass terrarium

  perform lethal ubiquity,

  tiny black clouds make the final

  ideogram above miniature lands

  exactly resembling ours, what is

  happening happens again,

  they cannot stop it, they take off

  their white coats, go outside,

  look up and wonder, only we

  who promise everything despite

  everything can tell them

  the solution, only we know.

  from Poem-a-Day

  CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

  * * *

  DAN ALBERGOTTI was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1964. He is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). He holds an MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro and is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.

  Albergotti writes: “The Police Policy Studies Council’s form ‘Weapons Discharge Report’ can be found online. When I began to read it, I imagined the killers of Michael Brown, of Tamir Rice, of Walter Scott (and of many others) sit
ting at precinct desks, checking boxes. I felt ill. Most of my poem of the same title is made up of language adopted, or adapted, from the PPSC form.

  “I am writing this comment on the day of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States: January 20, 2017. Within hours of his swearing in, the WhiteHouse.gov page on civil rights has been removed, and one titled ‘Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community’ has been added.”

  JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His most recent collection of poems is Commotion of the Birds (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016). A two-volume set of his collected translations from the French (prose and poetry) was published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek; he exhibits his collages at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He has received a Pulitzer Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, and recently the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2011) and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House (2012). He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1988, the first volume in this series.

  MARY JO BANG was born in 1946 in Waynesville, Missouri, and grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She is the author of seven books of poems: Apology for Want (UPNE, 1997), winner of the Bakeless Prize; Louise in Love (Grove Press Poetry, 2001); The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (University of Georgia Press, 2001); The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Grove, 2004); Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Bride of E (Graywolf, 2009), and The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf, 2015). Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf in 2012. She teaches English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

  Of “Admission,” Bang writes: “The title of the poem gestures to Walter Gropius’s ‘Bauhaus Manifesto and Program’ (1919), which states, under the section ‘Admission,’ that: ‘Any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted [to the program], as far as space permits.’ It equally gestures to the fact that because Gropius believed women could think only in two dimensions, unlike men, whom he believed could think in three, women were initially admitted only to the weaving workshop. The poem also has in mind a 1926 black-and-white photograph, Walter and Ilse Gropius’s Dressing Room, taken by Lucia Moholy. Moholy took most of the iconic photographs of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and of the products produced in the workshops. The story of Gropius’s later use of her images in books without attributing them to her, and her legal efforts to have the negatives returned to her, is the subject of an article she published in 1983 in The British Journal of Photography, 130 (7.1), pp. 6–8, 18. For three months in the spring of 2015, during a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, I spent many hours at the Bauhaus-Archiv, reading Moholy’s letters and journals and looking at her photographs.

  “The poem contains an echo of two Botticelli paintings: Birth of Venus (where a nude Venus stands on a half shell) and Primavera (also known as Allegory of Spring). In Primavera, a fully dressed Madonna-like Venus stands slightly off center, framed by an arch, beneath a blindfolded cupid; stage right, Mars pokes at a raincloud with a staff and the Three Graces, each wrapped in diaphanous fabric, meet in the middle of a shared dance step and interlace fingers; stage left, Chloris matures before our eyes into a full-grown Flora, despite a blue-green Zephyrus’s best efforts to hold her back.”

  DAVID BARBER is the author of two collections of poems published by Northwestern University Press: Wonder Cabinet (2006) and The Spirit Level (1995), which received the Terrence Des Prez Prize from TriQuarterly Books. “On a Shaker Admonition” is included in his recently completed collection, Secret History. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena, he was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Stanford University before putting down roots in the environs of Boston. He is the poetry editor of The Atlantic and currently teaches in the Harvard Writing Program.

  Of “On a Shaker Admonition,” Barber writes: “I’ve long had a penchant for winkling poems out of all manner of marginalia and ephemera, oftentimes in an effort to breathe a flicker of new life into long-gone or far-flung lexicons and vernaculars. I’ve been known to say, only half in jest at best, that this one or that one was ‘ripped from the footnotes.’ This is certainly the way ‘On a Shaker Admonition’ came about. In the Dover revised edition of Edward Deming Andrews’s landmark 1953 book, The People Called Shakers, the main appendix contains the complete text of Millennial Laws of 1821 drawn up by the Shaker settlement in New Lebanon, New York. As Andrews explains, ‘The socalled Millennial Laws of the Shakers, never printed nor even widely circulated in written form, implemented the doctrines of the order, and thus, in effect, greatly illuminate not only its government but the intimate habits and customs of the people.’ To which I might add, they make for yeasty reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in erstwhile utopias and other lost worlds. The ‘admonition’ that gave rise to the poem is found in Part III: Concerning Temporal Economy, Section V: Orders concerning Locks & Keys (Andrews, p. 283, Dover ed. 1963).”

  DAN BEACHY-QUICK was born in Chicago in 1973, and currently directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He is a poet and essayist, whose most recent books include gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015), a chapbook of poetry, Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs (Omnidawn, 2015), and a study of John Keats, A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work (Iowa University Press, Muse Series, 2013). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, the Monfort Professorship at CSU, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

  Beachy-Quick writes: “For the past few years, I’ve been writing poems that take their initial impulse to fill a page by thinking toward a poet whose work has been important to me—a set of dedications that are also expressions of gratitude. ‘Apophatic’ hopes to think of and feel toward Peter Gizzi, whose selected poems, In Defense of Nothing, opens up that strange ground (in its title alone, and then poem by poem) in which what exists must recognize itself first by positing what doesn’t—something depends so much on nothing. This sense of knowledge obtained through negation, or realization gained only through absence, feels to me one of the cruxes of poetic experience. In the poem, the hidden figure of that work is Oedipus, foot made lame as a baby by the ankle being pierced with a tether, who, before the horror of his deeds was revealed to him, was renowned for that abundant intelligence that answered the Sphinx’s riddle with the answer he himself embodied: ‘a man.’ But Oedipus is also that figure who comes to see that knowing the answer answers very little. And when he sees that awful fact fully, he blinds himself. I’ve come to think of his blindness as the manifestation of the nothingness that weaves and wends its way through the world entire, some fundamental requirement stitched through existence that keeps life uncertain, unstable, troubled by source, doubtful of its own nature. Dreary things to say, I know. But the apophatic also points always toward its opposite, and so that nothing also whispers to us of realization, illumination, understanding, and love, and maybe even points us the way there.”

  BRUCE BOND was born in 1954 in Pasadena, California. He is the author of sixteen books, including Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press, 2015), The Other Sky (Etruscan Press, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press, 2016), and Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016). Three of his books are forthcoming: Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press). He is regents professor at University of North Texas.
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  Bond writes: “ ‘Homage to a Painter of Small Things’ explores the work of the painter Matthew Cornell, how, beyond the virtuosity, he brings to his precision a sense of yearning and warmth, of worlds in transition, on the verge of a connection to something we do not understand. Sure, there is the solitude of a Hopper there, but with greater sublimity, as reflected in the quality of emerging light, the tender proximity of private spaces, and the ache of small things seen precisely, made transcendent less by romantic distortion than by an honoring of the given mystery of things. Matthew once said that he, in his painting, is ever looking for the home he never had. He the kid who lived in a different town each year or two. And yes, there is something so singular about being that boy, and something broadly human in Matthew’s search for him in the child he never was. Long ago, the future was enormous. Still is.”

  JOHN BREHM was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1955 and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of two books of poems from University of Wisconsin Press, Sea of Faith (2004) and Help Is on the Way (2012); the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy; and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Brehm lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches for the Literary Arts and Mountain Writers Series. He also teaches for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.

  Brehm writes: “I began ‘Intrigue in the Trees’ not long after the Four-Mile Canyon fire just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Severe drought conditions coupled with high winds, high heat, and low humidity whipped the fire right to the edge of the neighborhood where I was living at the time. The fire was my second experience of an extreme weather event—I’d been caught in a flash flood in Guadalajara several years before—and it occurred to me that perhaps we had worn out our welcome on the planet, that the earth, in increasingly violent acts of self-protection, was trying to get rid of us. I’d also been reading about animal intelligence, particularly in crows, and thinking about the arrogance of assuming that only we possess consciousness—an instance of just the sort of human exceptionalism that has helped create our current crisis. (Even trees, we now know, are capable of communicating with each other—to warn of insect attacks, for instance.) And I was feeling our indebtedness to animals for all the ways they help us understand ourselves—the many creaturely metaphors that serve as mirrors for our behavior and inner states. Such were my preoccupations at the time. Seeing crows gathering ominously in a tree while walking to the Laughing Goat Coffee House catalyzed these concerns into a poem.”