The Best American Poetry 2015 (16 page)

in which he and Paret are marionettes. Someone jerks his strings. He can't

stop punching. He will become

world champ four more times, but will himself be beaten almost

to death by five young

homophobes, one with a baseball bat, as he leaves a gay bar near Port

Authority. He will drive

a pink Lincoln Continental. After Paret's death, Manny

Alfaro, the Kid's manager,

will say, “Now, I have to go find a new boy.” His widow,

Lucy, will bury him

in the St. Raymond Cemetery in the Bronx. She will never

remarry, will tell an interviewer,

“Dream? I stopped dreaming a long time ago.” Boxing matches

will stop being televised

for the next decade. Ruby Goldstein will referee only one more fight,

then retire. Emile

will suffer dementia pugilistica. He will be forced to sell his Continental

and will ride the bus,

he'll say, “like everyone else.” Benny Paret, Jr., the Kid's son

who was two years old

when Emile killed his dad, will meet and forgive him forty-two years

later. Lucy

had refused to go to the Garden or watch the fight on TV.

A neighbor had to tell her.

Across nine million flickering screens nation-wide

they hoisted the Kid's

still body onto a stretcher and carried him slowly out of the ring.

Don Dunphy signed off,

“saying goodnight for your hosts, the Gillette Safety

Razor Co., makers

of the $1.95 Adjustable Razor, super blue blades, foamy shaving

cream, and Right Guard

Power Spray Deodorant, and El Producto, America's largest-selling

quality cigar.”

from
Southwest Review

Photograph courtesy of Michael David Murphy

Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget. If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings. Do you feel hurt because it's the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other?

An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn't bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” You and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turnoff, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it's another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it's raining. Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.

from
Granta

Excuse me while I adjust the privacy settings of this poem

so that if it's ever published it will exist as a legible text

and not as a string of stubborn phrases I silently repeat to myself.

Three lines written, now three and a half, yet for the moment no one

but me has access to them, as they stretch haltingly

across the perfect grid of my Rhodia notebook,

unless, that is, Amtrak has installed

hidden video cameras above the seats in the coach class

of this Northeast Regional and one of them is focused on this very page.

Whoa, that idea came a little too easily.

The belief that your every move is being watched

used to be a sign of clinical paranoia,

except for those living under totalitarian regimes

in which case it was a perfectly reasonable assumption.

Now it's becoming a perfectly reasonable assumption

no matter where you breathe, no matter where you write.

Let's assume that Amtrak hasn't installed

individual video surveillance, at least not yet.

Let's further assume that this poem, which is slowly crawling from pure potentiality

to an intermediate state of being more concrete

than if I wrote it by fingertip on a steamy window

but less so than the station signs howling past,

has no other reader but me.

Still, once I transcribe my handwritten draft into my MacBook Pro,

a nearly inevitable step I am already contemplating

and will have long since accomplished by the time you read these lines

it will have become so easily available to endless numbers

of bureaucrats and hackers that I might as well post

the whole thing online immediately.

Every poet thinks about every line being read by someone else

even if, as the line is written, its author suspects that he or she may die

before those words will win the attention of any other human being.

Positing a reader, sympathetic or dismissive,

is apparently necessary for every poem,

from the most compressed, tongue-entangled lyric

to stanzas as aerated and matter-of-fact as these.

There are times, however, when a reader is not merely posited

but becomes as factually undeniable as the poem itself.

What's more, instead of turning a cold shoulder

or bestowing ceremonial kisses on a prize-winner's cheeks,

this invisible reader rattles a set of prison keys

and is ready to dispatch an inconvenient text and author

to a cold library with zero opening hours

from which nothing circulates except ashes.

To earn shelf space in this grim depository

a poem doesn't even need to be written down.

Think of Mandelstam's “Stalin Epigram,”

16 lines recited to a few friends that signed their author's death warrant.

Obviously, I don't have the slightest intention of comparing myself to Mandelstam

or to any other poet writing within rifle shot of deadly auditors

nor, for that matter, to Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami,

recently sentenced to life in prison (subsequently reduced to a mere 15 years)

for reciting a poem on YouTube that displeased the Emir of Qatar.

I can't imagine any poem I might write coming with such a price,

yet I live at a time when writing and its surveillance

have become practically synonymous.

In
Discipline and Punish
(original French title,
Surveiller et punir
)

Foucault cites Bentham's panopticon prison

where an inmate can't know whether or not he or she

is being watched by a guard at any given moment

so must assume that observation is continual.

In the present state of “carceral society” surveillance really is continual

and increasingly it is undertaken by the subjects themselves.

Fitbit, I read, is a small device to track your physical activity or sleep.

You can wear the device all day because it easily clips in your pocket,

pants, shirt, bra, or to your wrist when you are sleeping.

The data collected is automatically synched online when the device

is near the base station. After uploading, you can explore visualizations

of your physical activity and sleep quality on the web site.

You can also view your data using their new mobile web site.

You can also track what you eat, other exercises that you do, and your weight.

This is the world prophesied by Kenneth Goldsmith circa 1997

when he submitted himself to week-long audio surveillance

or attempted to describe his every physical action for a 13-hour period.

It's also the world embraced by a new generation of digital literary scholars

who employ data-mining techniques pioneered by the NSA.

True, poets have been engaged in “self tracking” for a long time.

“Let no thought pass incognito and keep your notebook

as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens,” Walter Benjamin advised.

They've also sometimes operated on the other side of the fence:

Wordsworth spying for England on his and Coleridge's 1798 trip to Hamburg,

Basil Bunting working undercover for British Military Intelligence

in Teheran until he was expelled in 1952.

But more often they have been the ones spied upon,

like Hugh MacDiarmid hounded in wartime Scotland

as a Communist agitator while he looked for “a poetry of facts.”

At least he had the opportunity to lash back in a letter

to one of his tormentors, a certain Captain Jock Hay:

“It is intolerable that I should be subjected to inconvenience

and misrepresentation by a fatuous blowhard like you

and I have no intention of submitting to it,

even though the seriousness of it is mitigated by the fact

you are known as a windy ass and egregious buffoon

and not taken seriously by anyone who knows you.”

(Andrew McNeillie, “A Scottish Siberia,”
TLS
, Sept. 13, 2013.)

In
The Prelude
, Wordsworth was baffled at “how men lived

Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still

Strangers, not knowing each other's name.”

Now I know the names of a thousand “friends” I've never met, and they mine,

so what do I have to hide from any device capturing these lines

to a distant database? My mind is filled with eavesdroppers and spies.

I think a thousand times, or not a second, before I commit to a phrase