The Best American Poetry 2015 (2 page)

“Fern Hill” is a full-throated evocation of Edenic innocence, a Romantic recollection of an enchanted boyhood in the tradition variously exemplified by Thomas Traherne in the latter half of the seventeenth century and Wordsworth a century later. I like quoting the last three lines of the poem because they reach for the highest notes available in bringing this elegy for youth to a close:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Is it possible that these lines make
The Atlantic
writer gag (“gloop”) precisely because they are so rich and so affecting and because such qualities are as outmoded as neckties? The sheer passion of the writing; the artful repetition of key phrases introduced earlier (“young and easy,” “Time” as a divine agent); the complexity of the final utterance, a subordinate clause that surpasses the main clause in its lyricism; the arresting simile at the very end—there is wizardry here, and wonderment, a sense of the natural sublime.

As for “Do not go gentle into that good night,” to dismiss Thomas's famous villanelle as “inferior Yeats” is a pedantry, and a false one. Use Yeats as your standard, and few poets shall 'scape whipping. But for the record Yeats did not write villanelles, and the effects Thomas achieves in “Do not go gentle” are not those that the Irish poet was after. In the face of his father's imminent demise, Thomas used the constrictive form dialectically, to discipline his feelings and to apply a restraint on his fountain of imagery and linguistic genius. The poem's second stanza attests to the power that he achieved through the use of the strict form:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

This is not a brand of poetry that would please the British poets of ironic understatement who chose Hardy as a master and whose greatest practitioner is Larkin. But it is a sterling example of Thomas's method, which (he wrote in a letter) was to let one image “breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.” The method is at the service of something that can never stay out of fashion for long: the heroic note, defiance in the face of mortality.

Instant dismissal of greatness goes together with a second thing that reliably gets a rise out of me, the glorification of dumbness in American culture. A generously funded study indicates that there is a correlation between the elimination of course requirements and widespread ignorance of American history, civics, our government and economic structures. Although you might expect to see such a revelation in a satirical weekly, it gets half a page of a daily newspaper noted for its sobriety. Some readers may wonder whether we really need focus groups, task forces, or in this case a commissioned study to reveal what anecdotal evidence provides in abundance—or perhaps this academic exercise in stating the obvious itself lends credence to the argument. In any case, if you wanted the veneer of pseudo-scientific authority that only statistics can confer, you are now entitled to say that most college students do not know the length of a congressman's term, the meaning and purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the name of the Revolutionary War general in charge of American forces at Yorktown.
²

As if to signal its opposition to grade inflation—another villain in parables about the decline of an informed citizenry—the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued grades to universities and colleges. Both Wesleyan University, whose president has written in passionate defense of the humanities, and Brown University, that bastion of exclusive progressivism, were among the ninety-eight institutions that flunked. Fewer than one in five graduates of F-rated schools will have been required to take a class in American history. Even fewer will have been asked to study a foreign language or Economics 101. As one who loved his Columbia education, with its strong core requirements, it pains me that our graduates know less, and are expected to know less, than their counterparts in previous generations. It is as though the
entire teaching profession has adopted a version of magical thinking that allows everyone to spin off the responsibility. But this I know: A lack of conviction in what you are teaching spells disaster. As Magdalena Kay writes: “Our current sense of crisis is partly a crisis of faith in what we are teaching, not just in how we are teaching it.”
³
Kay quotes Christopher Lasch, prophet of
The Culture of Narcissism
: “When elders make no demands on the young, they make it almost impossible for the young to grow up.”

Poetry may be the enchanted childhood, the “farm forever fled” in Dylan Thomas's ode to a lost paradise. But poetry is also an essential part of adulthood, and adulthood a more serious state of mind and being than an adolescence idealized by an eighteenth-century savant. I will continue to speak up for such allegedly outmoded things as canonical books, the study of Western culture and modern thought, the concept of genius, the value of the memorization and recital of verse, the sustaining power of the imagination, and the privileged status of the aesthetic considered apart from all political considerations. To an extent I believe that the attachment to such cultural values puts one in opposition to the worship of handheld gadgetry. I will always favor the physical book, but it would be foolish to deny a changing actuality—and the benefits that come with it. While I don't find it natural to read, say, George Meredith's
Modern Love
online, I am glad this formerly hard-to-find sequence of poems is available there, and I believe, moreover, that it is useless to resist advances in technological efficiency. The medium may not be the message but it alters the ground conditions of its being.

The idea of using social media as a channel for poetry has its attractions. Robert Wilson, editor of
The American Scholar
, initiated “Next Line, Please” on the magazine's website and asked me to serve as quizmaster and prompt-maker. Since we began the weekly challenges in May 2014, we crowd-sourced a rhymed sonnet over the course of fifteen weeks; we then had competitions for best haiku, tanka, anagram, limerick, sestina, completion of a fragment by Emily Dickinson, opening and closing sentences of imaginary novels. Among my favorites was the one we devoted to couplets. Each entry had to have “fall” as an end-word, with the result that seven of the couplets, when combined, fulfilled the requirements of two forms—the ghazal and the sonnet, or
what Mariam Zafar dubbed the “ghazal sonnet.” Here's what we came up with:

The better the book, the longer the farewell,

the leaves in amber as their shadows fall.

With a red gold fire raining down, we fall

in love. The lonely branches sprawling tall,

We lug the red-leaf-laden tarp like pall-

bearers to curbs for trucks to haul away our fall.

Of all sad leaves that curl and fall,

the red are those I must recall.

My austral spring belies your boreal fall;

you burn brown leaves and dismiss my call.

On the yellow brick road to Damascus St. Paul took a fall,

as did Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
upon meeting Bacall.

Popeye chuckled and scratched his balls: on the wall

he scrawled, “Explore the mall in the reddening fall.”

The authors were Bruce Bond, Katie Naoum, Leonard Kress, Lawrence Epstein, Diana (no last name given), Terence Winch, and John Tranter (channeling John Ashbery).

“Next Line, Please” was just one of several online verse initiatives that got started in 2014.
The New York Times
launched “The New Verse News” in December 2014. Poets were approached and asked to contribute a poem based on their reading of the day's newspaper. I was invited, and on Monday the 22nd, I wrote a poem based on the front-page article “Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia” by Ariel Kaminer. This well-researched piece about tensions on the campus of my alma mater made me ponder the conflicts revealed and the mysteries stated but unsolved.
⁴
Lifting whole phrases from the article, I wrote this:

Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia

False reports of rape are rare.

The accused rapist, an architecture student from Germany, said

“My mother raised me as a feminist.”

He supports equal rights for women.

Three women have accused him of “intimate partner violence.”

One accuser takes a bed with her wherever she goes

Which doubles as her senior thesis

And, in October, students at more than 100 colleges

Carried a mattress or pillow to dramatize the crisis

Of sexual assault on campus.

The president said “law and the principles of academic freedom

And at the same time protecting the rights of all.”

The man in the watch cap sits on the steps of Low Library.

He said it didn't happen.

Most of his friends dropped him

Last year when Ms. Sulkowicz—

Or when the
Spectator
published his name.

Campus hearings have a lower burden of proof

Than criminal trials and he said he was not allowed.

But she did not press criminal charges.

None of them would ever get over it.

Though I did little more than rearrange choice parts of the article, making a few changes in wording and adding the final line, the editor in charge of “New Verse News” informed me that the paper's “top editors along with the lawyers” decided against running the poem “given the sensitivities involved.” The subject was too hot to handle in a poem. The decision surprised me, because my poem did not strike me as either particularly provocative or deliberately offensive. Maybe, I mused, the editors thought the poem was boring. But a wise friend countered that if it had been boring, the paper would have unhesitatingly posted it. No, I am afraid that the key words were “lawyers” and “sensitivities.” The lesson, so far as I can see, is that what is acceptable in a fact-checked newspaper article becomes dangerous, or potentially
dangerous, in a poem—even if the poem is absolutely faithful to the facts as reported. A poem is not a straightforward article; its meaning is not self-evident; it can be ambiguous, and if it is, it is dangerous, the more so at a time when the “sensitivities” of special-interest groups play a decisive part in limiting free speech on campus and everywhere else. From the newspaper's point of view, there was only a downside in posting my poem. They had wanted something harmless, or funny, or “poetic,” not anything that could stir up emotions about such timely campus subjects as rape and sexual assault, “yes means yes” contracts preceding the consummation of an affair, the rights of the accused in rape cases, the effects on the accusers, the artwork as a substitute for a conventional “senior thesis,” the way language reflects these tensions, the resort to platitudes by the university leadership.

I do not want to inflate the importance of my poem's fate. In journalism these things happen all the time. But a larger problem bedevils us: the problem of censorship and self-censorship. In 2014 hackers purportedly on hire from North Korea made a cyber raid on the electronic coffers of Sony Pictures. The hack attack was sparked by the studio's intention to release a broad comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco as a pair of journalists who are recruited to assassinate the leader of North Korea. It resulted in much egg on the face and a big hole in Sony's pocketbook. But the violation of Sony's cyberspace also delivered an unsubtle threat. Theater chains in the United States refused to book
The Interview
, not because it was a lousy film but out of fear that some madman might bring an AK-47 to the mall and mow down customers. Sony withdrew the picture; President Obama rebuked Sony and promised to retaliate for the act of “cyber vandalism,” and the leader of North Korea labeled our president a “monkey.” For a while George Clooney couldn't get anywhere with a petition urging solidarity with the makers of the movie, and though the film was released in the end, if only in a limited way, what bothered fans of the First Amendment was how quickly and instinctively we and our institutions cave in to the demands of dictators, even those of the tinpot variety.

The willingness to button up our lips does nothing to deter such shocking assaults on free expression as the homicidal attack on the editors, staff, and cartoonists of
Charlie Hebdo
in Paris on January 7, 2015. The satirical weekly that held nothing sacred, not even Charles de Gaulle, exists within a French tradition of caustic satire, brazen caricature, and principled impertinence. It has waged a war of wits with the forces of militant Islam. Back in November 2011, the magazine had had
the unmitigated gall of mocking sharia [in French
charia
], religious rule based on ancient Muslim principles unmodified by anything resembling a Reformation, an Enlightenment, or an Ecumenical Council. The cartoon on the cover of the issue entitled
Charia Hebdo
threatened “100 lashes if you don't die laughing!”
⁵
Five years earlier, the weekly reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammad that had aroused the ire of cutthroat jihadists. Surprisingly many publications in America and abroad did not have the guts to do so. The editors of
Charlie Hebdo
, including the legendary figures known as “Charb” (Stephane Charbonnier) and “Cabu” (Jean Cabut), were among the twelve individuals killed in the attack of January 7. For the right to say what they thought they paid with their lives.

On the very night that the Paris massacre dominated the news waves, with Parisians in the streets holding up signs saying “Je Suis Charlie,” I heard a
New York Times
columnist go on CNN and tell newscaster Don Lemon that “We in journalism should try to avoid giving offense.” It struck me as a very odd thing for him to say. Isn't giving offense, provoking discussion, stirring the pot, airing your views, part of the deal? A former press secretary to President Obama drew a distinction to the effect that while the press has the
right
to insult a religious leader, it may show bad
judgment
to wave a red flag in the eye of a stampeding bull. This is too halfhearted a defense of the freedom of speech and press, both of them under constant assault. In contrast, consider what “Charb” said, paraphrasing a line sometimes attributed to Emiliano Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution: “I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”