The Best American Poetry 2012 (32 page)

L
AWRENCE
J
OSEPH
was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. He attended the University of Michigan, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of five books of poetry:
Into It
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005),
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005),
Before Our Eyes
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993),
Curriculum Vitae
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), and
Shouting at No One
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He has also written
Lawyerland
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), a book of prose, and
The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose
(University of Michigan Press, 2011). He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law, where he teaches courses on labor, employment, tort and compensation law, legal theory, jurisprudence, and law and interpretation. He has won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and has taught creative writing at Princeton University. Married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem, he lives in downtown Manhattan.

Joseph writes: “There's a couplet in the opening poem of Wallace Stevens's last book of poems,
The Rock
: ‘The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings, / Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.' The whole of my work is my ‘whole peculiar plot.' I see myself—as Stevens and as Eugenio Montale and Louis Zukofsky did—writing, plotting, one long poem.

“‘So Where Are We?' is the title poem of my next book. My last book,
Into It,
contains poems, or parts of poems, which touch on the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. My reaction to the terrorist bombings has an intensely personal dimension. My wife and I live a block from Ground Zero. Shortly before the first plane hit on the morning of September 11, I left her to go to St. John's University in Queens, where I teach. Nancy spent that night in our apartment. More than twenty-four hours went by before I saw her again. We were evacuated from our apartment for over two months.

“Before I write a poem, I usually try to imagine the form or shape it will take. I feel the form or shape visually (‘conversation as design' was one of William Carlos Williams's definitions of poetry). Then, in effect, I load the shape or form with parts of the entire world of my subjects—with my ‘whole peculiar plot.' I imagined ‘So Where Are We?' in couplets. I also envisaged it as the second part of a diptych, the first part being ‘Unyieldingly Present,' a poem in couplets in
Into It
written as a compressed, collective portrayal of the terrorist attacks.”

F
ADY
J
OUDAH
was born in Austin, Texas, in 1971. Married with two kids, he is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston, Texas.
The Earth in the Attic,
his first poetry collection, was selected by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2008. His two translations of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry (from Copper Canyon in 2007 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010) received a TLS/Banipal prize from the United Kingdom and a PEN USA award for translation, respectively. His second book,
Alight,
is due from Copper Canyon Press in 2013. And his most recent translation of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan,
Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me,
is available this year from Yale University Press.

Of “Tenor,” Joudah writes: “In George Oppen's ‘Semite' these lines always haunt me: ‘Think // think also of the children / the guards laughing // the one pride the pride / of the warrior laughing so the hangman / comes to all dinners.' To say that I had the children of Gaza in mind when I wrote ‘Tenor' would be as accurate as saying Oppen had only one child in mind in his poem. War not only kills children, any children, but also destroys childhood, all childhood.”

J
OY
K
ATZ
was born in Newark, New Jersey, two months before John F. Kennedy was shot. Her latest collection,
All You Do Is Perceive,
is due in 2013 from Four Way Books. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Chatham University and at the University of Pittsburgh and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and young son.

Of “Death Is Something Entirely Else,” Katz writes: “When my son—now nearly five—was a baby, I spent all of my waking hours either feeling stoned or imagining my own death. The trance state was due partly to oxytocin, a natural hormone released during breast-feeding. I wasn't breast-feeding; I'm an adoptive mom, so that caring-for-baby chemistry (it feels like a heroin high) was a nice bonus. As for imagining my death—I guess most new parents do. I never felt so mortal.

“I tried for a long time to record the feeling of being with the baby in those hours when he was engaged in some activity (as in this poem: dropping sheets of printer paper onto my face) and not paying too much attention to me. This is one of those attempts. The feelings I experienced were terrifying and rapturous. Simply the act of regarding him was joy, and a cliff-edge mortality was part of that joy.”

J
AMES
K
IMBRELL
was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1967. He is the author of two volumes of poetry,
The Gatehouse Heaven
(1998) and
My Psychic
(2006), both from Sarabande Books. He has won a Whiting Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently served as the Renée and John Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He taught at Westminster (Missouri) and Kenyon Colleges before moving to Tallahassee, Florida, where he is an associate professor of English at Florida State University.

Of “How to Tie a Knot,” Kimbrell writes: “I wanted to ground this poem in a physical hunger that might give voice to a more or less spiritual desire, the desire for access to the real, whatever it might finally be. In this pursuit, a variation on a line from Robert Duncan's gorgeous ‘In the South' makes an appearance, but mostly what we have here are the musings of someone acting out a self-inflicted deserted island scenario in which half the day is spent trying to make sense of the conflicting desires that govern our days, while the other half is spent losing bait. Amen.”

N
OELLE
K
OCOT
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1969. She lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York City. She is the author of five books of poetry,
4
(Four Way Books, 2001),
The Raving Fortune
(Four Way Books, 2004),
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
(Wave Books, 2006),
Sunny Wednesday
(Wave Books, 2009), and
The Bigger World
(Wave Books, 2011). She is also the author of a discography,
Damon's Room
(Wave Books, 2010), and she translated some of the poems of Tristan Corbière from the French, which are collected in a book called
Poet by Default
(Wave Books, 2011). She is the widow of composer Damon Tomblin, who died in 2004, “and left me speechless. I write poems every day just to get away from the grief and sadness I experience without him being on the earth anymore. But still, I have a lot going on in my life, and am pretty happy when the day is done.”

M
AXINE
K
UMIN
was born in Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, in 1925. Her seventeenth poetry collection,
Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990–2010,
published by W. W. Norton, received the
Los Angeles Times
Book Award for 2011. A former United States Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, she lives with her husband on a farm in New Hampshire. A retired professor, she is “now content to be a writer and poet.”

Of “Either Or,” Kumin writes: “I've paraphrased the late astronomer Loren Eisley, and somewhere I read the famous quotation from
Socrates. These sorts of fragments tend to adhere; sometimes they lead to poems. The rest describes exactly how it is where we live.”