The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

  From the start, this anthology series has acted on the belief that many varieties, schools, and movements of poetry can coexist and even flourish in a shared space. I take “unity” in the larger context to mean the same sort of respect and tolerance; the sense, too, that all of us are greater than the sum of our opinions; and the conviction that disagreements, whether literary or political, can be settled peaceably. But better than any definition is an example. During the Civil War, Walt Whitman spent three years visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals in and near Washington, D.C. He brought gifts to the patients, ministered to them, talked with them, listened. In his new book The Dharma of Poetry, the poet John Brehm writes:

  Among the many remarkable aspects of Whitman’s wartime service, perhaps most remarkable is this willingness to tend to Confederate as well as Union soldiers, even though his own brother had been wounded at Fredericksburg, and would later nearly die of starvation in a Confederate prison. Whitman’s compassion made no distinctions, and that generosity of spirit informs one of his great short lyrics about the war, published in 1865, after the fighting had ended.

  Brehm follows with a brief Whitman poem that sublimely illustrates the poet’s generosity of soul. The poem is “Reconciliation”:

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

  Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be

  utterly lost;

  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash

  again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

  For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

  I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

  I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the

  coffin.

  1. “Prize Fighter,” Harper’s (January 2021), p. 17.

  2. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/lecture/

  3. Harriet Torry, “US Economy Suffers Worst Year Since ’40s,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2021, p. A1.

  4. The poem appeared in The New Yorker, November 23, 2015.

  5. https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/tracy-k-smith-conversation.html

  TRACY K. SMITH was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972 and was raised in Fairfield, California. She studied at Harvard University, where she joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Her collection Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011) won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other books of poetry are Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Duende (Graywolf, 2007), which was awarded the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and her debut collection, The Body’s Question (Graywolf, 2003), which received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light; the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (2018), and the cotranslator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems by Yi Lei. From 2017 to 2019, she served two terms as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Tracy K. Smith

  My twelfth-grade history teacher resorted to explaining whole historical movements and value systems by way of the phrase, “It was the spirit of the times.” Slavery, Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow. These things weren’t born out of deliberate schemes; they simply drifted in on the wind of a unanimous and undeniable zeitgeist.

  Sitting in that classroom, or puzzling over lecture notes at home, I had little to no sense of the fears, desires, and deceptions that had set the enterprise of empire into motion. I followed the tableau of American history like a latecomer to a movie-in-progress, longing to know the answers to countless whys and hows, but dutifully accepting that those explanations were beyond my or anyone’s reach.

  Throughout the tragedies, violations, griefs, and grievances that shaped 2020, it became clear to me why my teacher—and not just him but so many of the authors of history—insisted upon claiming recourse to an escape hatch like “the spirit of the times.” Without it, we’re not just inheritors of what was set invisibly into motion by forces beyond anyone’s control; we’re agents of theft, loss, self-interest, injustice, failure, and disregard. That’s a lot of responsibility. But accepting it gives us the right to claim credit for the acts of justice and healing that have kept our species from drifting away like ghosts.

  It’s by now surely cliché to call 2020 “a year like no other,” or to describe all the many ways in which it was “unprecedented.” But, even from this little bit of hindsight, I’m still floored by the tsunami of upheaval 2020 brought with it. The world entered a pandemic of such enormous magnitude, it outpaced even our experts’ most sobering projections. The tragic loss of life we witnessed—lost to COVID-19 and the inequities it exacerbated, lost to brutality and violence—revealed how truly vulnerable all of us are to our fragile social systems. And yet, in this country, we braved that onslaught with a chorus of contradictory voices: Don’t wear a mask. Wear a mask. It will be gone in a few weeks. It will linger longer than anyone wants to believe. We must do something to combat systemic racism. Stand back and stand by.

  The uncertainty, the sense of what was at risk changing from day to day, the wish to race ahead to the moment where our current worries would be far behind us—all of that was countered by the sense that time itself had come to a standstill. For me, this meant working from home while parenting my young children through the virtual school day. All the hours that had once neatly sequestered these regions of my life from one another slowed, blurred, collapsed into one. Nothing budged. Even so, I understood myself to be lucky, struggling through the seeming standstill of it all in relative safety.

  On May 25, 2020, Amy Cooper, a white woman in Central Park, was caught on video making false accusations to a 911 dispatcher about Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher who asked her to leash her dog. One of the most insidious mechanisms of American racism—a white woman’s false allegation against a Black man—replayed itself over and again before our eyes, like a case study. Only it ended differently. Christian Cooper was not questioned or captured or carried off by a mob. Amy Cooper was caught out in her lie, America’s age-old lie. That same day, George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill, was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while onlookers begged for mercy and Floyd called out to his own deceased mother. This, too, was captured on video. This, too, held the key to something age-old and quintessentially American. And it kindled uprisings, protests, and calls for racial justice that constituted a movement.

  Was the world still at a standstill, through all of this, or had we begun racing forward into a new phase where time, and the very nature of reality, bent to different laws? Is “law” even the right word, in a world where so much that once seemed concrete—like evidence, like fact—had been rendered abstract and malleable, while so much else—like the deaths that same summer of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and David McAtee—continued on in unwavering obedience to the brutal pattern of history?

  I believe poetry kept me from succumbing to despair in 2020. A version of that sentence might be true in any given year, but the despair of 2020 was different. I understood much of it to be universal, and a not insignificant part of it to be tribal. The universal despair of being vulnerable to a rampant virus, and the tribal despair of being vulnerable to racially motivated attack. The universal despair of knowing something in America is broken, and the tribal despair of seeing how few are motivated to fix it. I am extraordinarily lucky to have felt both forms of this despair to a lesser degree than many, but even that was enough to prompt crises of both hope and trust. But poetry—the best poems of this rough year—courageously named so much of what I felt myself to be witnessing and enduring. The best poems o
f 2020 also named many different complex emotional realities with clarity, imagination, rigorous music, and recourse to public history and private recollection. The best poems of 2020 reached me as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance.

  Of course they did. Of course the best poetry to emerge during a bitter year sprang from whatever else was indispensable to sustenance, peace of mind, justice, and healing at the time. What, then, are the gifts to emerge from 2020? How did we minister to ourselves? What did we offer one another?

  We sought to do right by the living and the lost—the public heroes and victims of a cruel year, and our very own family members, coworkers, and neighbors who remind us that the essential work of justice is up to us, the living, to commit to. We talked to one another. We lifted one another out of isolation. We drew close to the circle of community, even across all manners of distance. We looked out our windows. We contemplated trees. We watched birds. We took stock of the true scale of our lives on the earth. We sought to love ourselves better. We sought to love strangers better. We did the work of democracy. Humbly, earnestly, we pushed the vehicle of history forward, aware of all that is always seeking to haul it back. The seventy-five poems in this volume bear witness to these and other sustaining acts.

  The chorus of voices assembled here consoled and quickened me as I lived out my own version of 2020. But they also remind me that every year is many years, each experienced uniquely by all the many people alive within its frame. If my high-school teacher was even partly correct, and there is a spirit animating our time, I hope it is alert, alive, and ever-adapting, like the voices and imaginations that gave birth to the best poems of this unforgettable year. If there is a spirit animating our time, I hope it is built of music, conscience, rigor, resourcefulness, and even rage. I hope, like these poems, it is asking, even now, Why? How?

  ROSA ALCALÁ The Pyramid Scheme

  When we say you mellowed

  we mean you forgot

  the old grievances

  like a frying pan

  on the stove.

  Your whip went lax

  like skin, like hope

  of going home. You ask and ask

  what’s for lunch

  and when.

  And what’s more

  insulting to all the overtime

  you did

  than a cut-up hot dog

  and decaf

  in a plastic cup?

  Is this how we end up?

  Those of us who

  come here? By here you meant

  America,

  not the nursing

  home.

  The pay down scheme started

  the moment you got

  off the boat, I want to scream.

  Is that too

  angry, too

  glib? Instead of fry

  I tend to steam.

  A TV commercial

  promises

  a new body. That’s

  impossible,

  you laughed. Now

  where are my glasses, my teeth?

  The nurses here

  steal

  everything.

  from Green Mountains Review

  LAUREN K. ALLEYNE Divination

  Thasos, Greece

  You begin with the bones, their honey-

  combed crevasses airy and bloodless,

  the marrow gone to dust.

  You finger the hollow cranium, imagine

  hooking each vertebra into place—threading

  together the chain link spine,

  hanging the ribs. The teeth,

  you think, would be easiest; how they love order

  even now, stone-white soldiers

  refusing surrender. The unliving beast

  would slowly emerge, terrorless and mute,

  a mannequin of its former furred and bleating self.

  But this is not what drove you

  to pause on the path, to cradle femur, tibia, and shard

  in your sack of not-skin, to carry death’s leftovers

  on your back like a too-tired infant.

  When you bring the bones down the mountain,

  unbury them one by one, you do not want to

  build the beast back, or undo

  what brought this horned thing to your table.

  Rather, you want to understand surrender,

  to see with your own eyes what becomes

  of the body, this creaky, bone-borne carriage

  you will drive through your life to its end, then,

  somehow, let go.

  from Orion Magazine

  JABARI ASIM Some Call It God

  I choose Rhythm,

  the beginning as motion,

  black Funk shaping itself

  in the time before time,

  dark, glorious and nimble as a sperm

  sparkling its way into the greatest of grooves,

  conjuring worlds from dust and storm and primordial soup.

  I accept the Funk as my holy savior,

  Funk so high you can’t get over it,

  so wide you can’t get around it,

  ubiquitous Funk that envelopes all creatures great and small,

  quickens nerve endings and the white-hot

  hearts of stars.

  I believe in Rhythm rippling each feather on a sparrow’s back

  and glittering in every grain of sand,

  I am faithful to Funk as irresistible twitch, heart skip

  and backbone slip,

  the whole Funk and nothing but the Funk

  sliding electrically into exuberant noise.

  I hear the cosmos swinging

  in the startled whines of newborns,

  the husky blare of tenor horns,

  lambs bleating and lions roaring,

  a fanfare of tambourines and glory.

  This is what I know:

  Rhythm resounds as a blessing of the body,

  the wonder and hurt of being:

  the wet delight of a tongue on a thigh

  fear inching icily along a spine

  the sudden surging urge to holler

  the twinge that tells your knees it’s going to rain

  the throb of centuries behind and before us

  I embrace Rhythm as color and chorus,

  the bright orange bloom of connection,

  the mahogany lure of succulent loins

  the black-and-tan rhapsody of our clasping hands.

  I whirl to the beat of the omnipotent Hum;

  diastole, systole, automatic,

  borderless. Bigger and bigger still:

  Bigger than love,

  Bigger than desire or adoration.

  Bigger than begging and contemplation.

  Bigger than wailing and chanting and the slit throats of roosters.

  For which praise is useless.

  For which gratitude might as well be whispered.

  For which motion is meaning enough.

  Funk lives in us, begetting light as bright as music

  unfolding into dear lovely day

  and bushes ablaze in

  Rhythm. Until it begins again.

  from Poem-a-Day

  JOSHUA BENNETT Benediction

  God bless the lightning

  bolt in my little

  brother’s hair.

  God bless our neighborhood

  barber, the patience it takes

  to make a man

  you’ve just met

  beautiful. God bless

  every beautiful thing

  called monstrous

  since the dawn

  of a colonizer’s time.

  God bless the arms

  of the mother

  on the cross

  -town bus, the sterling silver

  cross at the crux

  of her collar bone, its shine

  barely visible beneath

  her nightshade

  navy, New York

  Yankees hoodie.

  God bless
the baby boy

  kept precious

  in her embrace.

  His wail turning

  my entire row

  into an opera house.

  God bless the vulnerable

  ones. How they call us

  toward love & its infinite,

  unthinkable costs.

  God bless the floss.

  The flash. The brash

  & bare-knuckle brawl

  of the South Bronx girls

  that raised my mother

  to grease knuckles, cut eyes,

  get fly as any fugitive dream

  on the lam,

  on the run

  from the Law

  as any & all of us are