The Best American Poetry 2015 (24 page)

Hayes writes: “ ‘Antebellum House Party' owes its life to a project
by Ray McManus, a fellow South Carolina–born poet, who invited me to write a poem for an anthology he was editing,
Found Anew: New Writing Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections
. I don't typically write poems by request, but after I came across an especially intriguing photograph (digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/bcp/id/27/rec/8), the poem came into focus. I hope it speaks for itself. Meanwhile, just recently a friend who'd read the poem forwarded a quote from Lyndon Johnson to his African American chauffer, Robert Parker: ‘Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture.' The context for this quote awaits you in cyberspace.”

R
EBECCA
H
AZELTON
was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1978. She is the author of
Fair Copy
(Ohio State University Press, 2011) and
Vow
(Cleveland State University Press, 2013).

Hazelton writes: “I wrote ‘My Husband' because there is so much attention given to the early stages of love, and so little given to long-term relationships (unless, of course, they are going badly). I wanted to write a poem that celebrated the delight and sensuality of the quotidian.”

J
ANE
H
IRSHFIELD
(born New York City, 1953) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the newly published
The Beauty
(Knopf, 2015), and two books of essays,
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
(HarperCollins, 1997) and the newly published
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
(Knopf, 2015). She has also edited and cotranslated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets. Her work appears in seven previous editions of
The Best American Poetry
and the 25th anniversary
Best of the Best American Poetry
. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Of “A Common Cold,” Hirshfield writes: “It will not surprise any reader to learn that I started this poem during the long (far more than eight days) course of the cold it describes. I was staying at the Civitella Ranieri in Umbria—where almost all the other residents caught the same cold. No remedy seemed to help. One day, still sick, I joined a group going to see a number of nearby Piero della Francesca paintings, including the famous
Madonna del Parto
, who stands, heavy with child, between drawn-back curtains. Alone with the painting for a few unexpected minutes, I found sudden, silent tears streaming down my face.

“Over the next days, I began to think about colds, about their
independent lives from their own point of view, about how they must possess a kind of immortality, mutating perhaps but meanwhile unceasingly traveling from one person to another, one circumstance to another, one country to another, one decade, century, millennium, to another. This poem is in part the Baedeker Guide a cold virus might write (though every place mentioned is somewhere I have been, on poetry-related travels that often do seem to lead to colds—or perhaps to the one, ever-changing cold I keep meeting again wherever I go). A cold is in some ways not unlike a work of art: it inhabits each of us acutely but differently, and is passed from person to person because we are incapable of resisting its passage through us. There is also the impeccably democratic solidarity of colds to be admired: colds do not care if they are in the nose of a dictator or of a four-year-old, in the confines of a prison cell or the presence of a painting so transcendent it conquers all possibilities of separation—whether belief, time, culture, even the exhausted misery of many nights' coughing. For those moments, there was remedy after all. But perhaps the virus was also—in the phrase we sometimes use to describe the condition of being riveted—stopped cold in its tracks by Piero della Francesca's painting.”

B
ETHANY
S
CHULTZ
H
URST
was born in Parker, Colorado, in 1978. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Idaho State University. Her first book of poems,
Miss Lost Nation
(Anhinga, 2014), won the Robert Dana–Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Of “
Crisis on Infinite Earths
, Issues 1–12,” Hurst writes: “In this poem, I was interested in exploring public vs. private stances in mourning. What's the difference between paying respects and producing a self-centered display? What separates necessary attention to a disaster from morbid curiosity or rubbernecking? The poem's speaker struggles to find those boundaries, as well as the appropriate emotional response for personal ‘disasters.'

“The first section, about wanting to be at Comic Con, came from a fragment of a dream, and for the speaker, superheroes seemed the answer: these would be the invulnerable figures to counter the speaker's confusion. But it turns out that superheroes, who juggle saving the world with maintaining an unassuming secret identity, are also all about the struggle between private and public persona. Reboots and multiple authorship have created confusion for superhero identities. It's intriguing that maybe these characters endure because of their fundamental inconsistencies.”

S
AEED
J
ONES
's debut poetry collection,
Prelude to Bruise
(Coffee House Press), won the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer/Art/Mentorship.

Jones writes: “ ‘Body & Kentucky Bourbon' is loosely based on a brief relationship I had with a man I desired but did not truly understand or love. I didn't realize just how much we had been strangers to one another until well after the relationship ended. And I began to wonder if, in fact, this intimate strangeness is perhaps more common than one would expect. I wanted to write a poem that would force me—every time I read it—to reflect on everything I did not and could not know about him as a kind of penance for not having the presence of mind to just ask him when we were still a part of each other's life.”

J
OAN
N
AVIYUK
K
ANE
was born in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1977. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska, she raises her young sons in Anchorage. A graduate of Harvard College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University, she is the author of
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
(published in 2009 by NorthShore Press Alaska and brought back into print in 2012 by the University of Alaska Press) and
Hyperboreal
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, an American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, an artist fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation, a fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and the United States Artists Creative Vision award.

Of “Exhibits from the Dark Museum,” Kane writes: “I was fortunate to work closely with the elders committee of Sitnasuak Native Corporation in Nome, Alaska, on several years of Inupiaq language projects and subsistence calendars. The meetings never passed without hours of stories about Nome, our home villages, or places far distant. The poem here arose after one of these meetings, when I'd returned to Anchorage on the flight from Nome that travels north through the subarctic before turning south to Anchorage. One of the elders had been cleaning out old buildings in Nome, with the contents of the buildings dating from Nome's gold rush, and talking about the many hauntings and layers of history that populate both the town and our memories of all the change we've seen and continue to see in Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage and couldn't
sleep, troubled by images and stories of disturbance, feeling unsettled. I got up to write the poem as my husband and children slept.”

L
AURA
K
ASISCHKE
was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1961. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently
The Infinitesimals
(Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as eight novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan.

Of “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike,” Kasischke writes: “The poem contains the story of this minor accident, just as it happened, along with my overreaction to it, which brought in an ambulance and drew a crowd. The end of the poem is, I suppose, my excuse for that overreaction. Witnessing it threw me back to another time and place—where part of me resides permanently, I guess, and from which, I think, all these years later, I relive the other experience in every fender bender I see, and every time a loved one gets the flu or comes home an hour late, all that. I'm not sure I'd made this connection so clearly before I wrote this poem—not that it will change anything, but at least I got a poem out of it.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Altadena, California, D
OUGLAS
K
EARNEY
lives with his family in California's Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches in the BFA in critical studies and the MFA in creative writing at CalArts, where he received his MFA in writing (2004). His third poetry collection,
Patter
(Red Hen Press, 2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. His second book,
The Black Automaton
(Fence Books, 2009), was a National Poetry Series selection. He has received residencies or fellowships from Cave Canem and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Two of his operas,
Sucktion
and
Crescent City
, have received grants from the MAP Fund.
Sucktion
has been produced internationally.
Crescent City
premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Hammer.

Of “In the End, They Were Born on TV,” Kearney writes: “About six months into my wife N's very difficult pregnancy, her OB/GYN called to tell me she had transferred N to a new doctor. It turns out the new doctor was a star of a reality TV show about difficult pregnancies and how such challenging work affects the doctors' own families
and relationships. It wasn't long before the show's producer asked N whether she would be willing to appear on the show.

“Through most of her pregnancy, N had hyperemesis—morning sickness on steroids. She would vomit dozens of times a day; even water made her vomit. She was on an IV for nutrition and was at home on bed rest, and, as it happened, she became familiar with the TV show during those months she spent lying very still on the couch. She found it helpful to watch other women in similar circumstances, so she agreed to be on the show.

“The poem pivots on a shoot the crew did at our home when, in pursuit of emotional exposition, the interviewer pressed us to discuss the miscarriage that had terminated N's last pregnancy. Each time we tried to tell the story, some external sound—dogs and low-flying aircraft—ruined the take. The details with which we told the story diminished with each interrupted retelling. As the poem says: ‘It was horrible.'

“Still, the crew was professional and kind. The doctors gave my wife the best care we could have imagined. To my knowledge, the show—we were a two-episode arc!—never aired. We have it on DVD, though. We'll show it to the twins when they're a bit older.”

J
ENNIFER
K
EITH
is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. She attended the University of Virginia and graduated from the American University in Washington, DC, with a degree in cinema. She received the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she collects tea and plays bass guitar for the rock band Batworth Stone.

Of “Eating Walnuts,” Keith writes: “As a child, I read about a squirrel learning to eat hazelnuts through trial and error. I was impressed that this instinct-driven animal had to teach itself, making several unsuccessful attempts before finding the most effective method.

“My late father was a painter with unusual spatial intelligence and perhaps a touch of OCD. He loved showing my mother and me better, more efficient ways of doing small things like loading the dishwasher. This wasn't nearly as exasperating as it sounds.

“My current job involves spending time with neurosurgeons who are fantastically creative in discovering new ways to access brain lesions while avoiding damage to surrounding tissue and structures. Thus the poem takes on another layer of meaning for me.”

D
AVID
K
IRBY
was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1944, and teaches at Florida State University. He is the author most recently of
The Biscuit Joint
(Louisiana
State University Press, 2013) and
A Wilderness of Monkeys
(Hanging Loose Press, 2014). For more, see
www.davidkirby.com
.

Of “Is Spot in Heaven?” Kirby writes: “At the heart of this poem is Sam Cooke's haunting ballad ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,' in which a man worn down by life on earth says he doesn't want to leave because he doesn't know what's on the other side. That's a question that vexes both theologians and children alike, one that I answer the way one can only in a poem, where the poet has the opportunity to invent a world that contains everything this world doesn't. When I look back at my poems, it seems that most of them are little problem-solving machines; this one is no different.

“Currently I'm reading Andrew Grant Jackson's
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music
, a book about a time when, in his words, ‘You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing a new classic,' including Cooke's song but also ‘Like a Rolling Stone,' ‘Papa's Got a Brand New Bag,' ‘Respect,' ‘The Sound of Silence,' ‘Yesterday,' ‘People Get Ready,' and hundreds of others. How'd that happen? A statistician I know said it's pretty simple: events tend to occur at more or less regular intervals, though sometimes they occur more often in a given time period and sometimes less so.