The Best American Poetry 2012 (29 page)

P
ETER
C
OOLEY
was born in Detroit in 1940 and grew up there and in the suburbs of the city. He is a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago, and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
From 1970 to 2000 he was poetry editor of
North American Review.
Since 1975 he has lived in New Orleans, where he teaches creative writing at Tulane University. He has published eight volumes of poetry, seven of them with Carnegie Mellon University Press. That press will soon release his latest,
Night Bus to the Afterlife.
He is currently finishing a volume of ekphrastic poems on Rembrandt, Rodin, and Michelangelo.

Cooley writes: “I am irritated by our contemporary mania for mandating ‘relevant' topics for the poet. For years I have been told I should be writing about New Orleans since it is such an interesting city. When Katrina hit and people found out my wife and I stayed in town for the hurricane, I was told I should be writing about the storm. I have been warned repeatedly that I should not be writing about religious subjects unless I express healthy disbelief. This poem is my perverse way of answering clarion calls for poems about tourism and disaster but still maintaining ‘I'll write religious poems if I damn well please.'”

E
DUARDO
C. CORRAL was born in Casa Grande, Arizona, in 1973. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/
The Nation
award and residencies from Yaddo and from the MacDowell Colony. He is the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers' Award.
Slow Lightning,
his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He lives in New York City.

Of “To the Angelbeast,” Corral writes: “The poem is dedicated to Arthur Russell, a musician/composer who died from AIDS in 1992. Formally trained as a cellist, Russell worked in many genres (disco, classical, rock, folk, experimental) but his cello-centric compositions are the songs that haunt me. In songs like ‘A Sudden Chill,' ‘Losing My Taste for the Night Life,' and ‘Another Thought,' the cello becomes an animal-like presence that devours everything: melody, lyrics, voice. Everything but death.”

E
RICA
D
AWSON
was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1979. Her poems have appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2008, Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird,
and
Harvard Review.
Her collection of poems,
Big-Eyed Afraid
(The Waywiser Press, 2007), won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Prize.
Contemporary Poetry Review
named it the Best Debut of 2007. An assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa, she serves as poetry editor for
Tampa Review
and teaches in the university's new low-residency MFA program.

Dawson writes: “ ‘Back Matter' exists because someone calls me
‘street,' perhaps too much for poetry with a capital P. Insert the wipe-your-hands-clean gesture and the shrug-it-off neck cracking.

“Irritated (understatement), I sit down to write ‘Back Matter.' I'll just say the process involves the inability to read your handwriting on last night's draft. I conflate a small narrative in Cincinnati, weaving in various definitions of the word ‘back.' With the narrative and countless denotations and connotations in my head, I try capturing moments when I'm part of the world with my back to it at the same time—in that cage of loneliness.”

S
TEPHEN
D
UNN
was born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939 and is a distinguished professor (emeritus) of creative writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. A graduate of Hofstra and Syracuse Universities, he is the author of
Walking Light
(BOA Editions, 2001), a book of essays and memoirs, and of sixteen books of poetry, including
Here and Now
(W. W. Norton, 2011, in which “The Imagined” appears).
Different Hours
(W. W. Norton, 2000) won the Pulitzer Prize. He has received fellowship awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

Dunn writes: “I began ‘The Imagined' at Yaddo in the summer of 2010, and ‘finished' it a few weeks later. At this point the poem consisted of its first half, with which I was somewhat but not fully pleased. A few days later I gave an ‘imagined man' to the woman. This seemed not only fair, but finally truer to the likelihood of my concerns. For a while, the poem ended with ‘just the two of you,' which I still believe could be a satisfactory ending. But on revisiting the poem, I added the last three lines, then crossed them out, then put them back in again.

“When I've read this poem at readings, very solemn-faced women in the audience seem to be registering disapproval with the first half of the poem. Their demeanor changes in the second half—many seem delighted that their secret man has been acknowledged and identified.”

E
LAINE
E
QUI
was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1953. She has published six books with Coffee House Press. They include
Voice-Over
(1998), which won a San Francisco State Poetry Award;
Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems
(2007), which was a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and most recently,
Click and Clone
(2011). She teaches at New York University and in the MFA programs at the New School and City College. She lives in New York City.

Of “A Story Begins,” Equi writes: “I like to write about reading, to
reflect on how we become absorbed in books, and how in a strange way, books read us—call to us at particular moments. I was especially frustrated when I wrote this poem because it was summer, my apartment was undergoing a seemingly endless renovation, and I couldn't find a novel, mystery, or any kind of book to lose myself in. Even the most outlandish and exotic narratives sounded contrived and predictable. In the end, I gave up altogether on the idea of literary escapism. Instead, I opted to read a number of poets known for their pessimism, spleen, and generally grouchy tone. This proved to be quite entertaining and, in fact, helped me write several new poems, including this one.”

R
OBERT
G
IBB
was born in 1946 in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books of poetry:
The Names of the Earth in Summer
(Stone Country, 1983),
The Winter House
(University of Missouri Press, 1984),
Momentary Days
(Walt Whitman Center, 1989),
Fugue for a Late Snow
(University of Missouri Press, 1993),
The Origins of Evening
(W. W. Norton, 1997),
The Burning World
(University of Arkansas Press, 2004),
World over Water
(University of Arkansas Press, 2007), and
What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979–1993
(Autumn House Press, 2009). He has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Two new books will appear in 2012:
Sheet Music
(Autumn House Press), which includes “Spirit in the Dark,” and
The Empty Loom
(University of Arkansas Press). He lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.

Gibb writes: “ ‘Spirit in the Dark' details an instance of ‘another world's intrusion into this one,' to borrow from a character in
The Crying of Lot 49.
The encounter took place late one night in an old house partitioned into apartments. We'd plated the second side of the Ninth Symphony and as the final movement began building toward the choral ‘Ode to Joy,' whatever it was—ghost, spirit—entered from the hallway. Somber, it seemed drawn by the music, moving slowly toward the record player, in front of which it hovered and then, for whatever reason, simply withdrew again, leaving us—but leaving us how? Hadn't we just witnessed the inexplicable? Was the experience transformative, with reality now turned numinous and specter-laden, inhabited by wonder and amazement? Or had something like Weber's routine simply reasserted itself through strength of numbers, the weight of the everyday, apparitionless, world? As if we're not fit company for charisma after all. And music, the poem's other presence, what's the impact, the afterlife there? The meaning of our experience exceeds us,
the poem seems to be saying, no matter how revelatory that experience may seem. We're all in the dark, left to guesswork.”