The Best American Poetry 2015 (27 page)

C
LAUDIA
R
ANKINE
was born in 1963. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including
Citizen
and
Don't Let Me Be Lonely
, and the plays
Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue
, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre, and
Existing Conditions
(written collaboratively with Casey Llewellyn). Rankine is coeditor of the
American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century
series with Wesleyan University Press and
The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind
with Fence Books. A recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Foundation, the NAACP, Poets & Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches at Pomona College and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Of this excerpt from
Citizen
, Rankine writes: “Jim Crow Road was photographed by Michael David Murphy. When I first saw the image I was sure it was Photoshopped. I was wrong. The road is located in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Sometimes when I am waiting for something else to happen I wonder what's it's like to have a signifier of our racial caste system as a destination, a home address.”

R
APHAEL
R
UBINSTEIN
was born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1955. After graduating from Bennington College, he moved to New York City in 1979, where, apart from several years in Milan, Italy, he has lived ever since. His poetry publications include
The Basement of the Café Rilke
(Hard Press, 1997),
The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces
(Make Now, 2005),
The Cry of Unbalance
(Song Cave, 2013), and the forthcoming
A Geniza
(Granary Books). He is also the author of
Postcards from Alphaville
(Hard Press, 2000),
Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990
–
2002
(Hard Press, 2003), and
The Miraculous
(Paper Monument, 2014). He has received the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters
from the French government and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital arts writers grant. From 1994 to 2007 he was an editor at
Art in America
. He is currently professor of critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art.

Rubinstein writes: “As a commuting teacher, and a longtime fan of the poetry of voyage epitomized by Valery Larbaud and Blaise Cendrars, I often start poems in transit. ‘Poem Begun on a Train' was written in the fall of 2013 in response to an invitation from Andrew Ridker to contribute to
Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics
(Black Ocean). Gradually, what began as a poem about its own making led me, via increasingly dark scenarios of readership, from tautology to history. The Scottish modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who was appropriating texts many decades before the advent of ‘conceptual writing,' supplied not only an instance of a poet under state surveillance but also a model for the recasting of found prose as verse, something I do throughout the poem. Another person on my mind, though unnamed, was Franco Moretti, an innovative literary scholar known for his concept of ‘distant reading.' The 2013–2014 Whitney Museum exhibition mentioned at the end of the poem focused on mostly forgotten 1970s New York performance art, including Squat Theatre, a group of Hungarian exiles whose theater was a storefront space on West 23rd Street. Soon after arriving in New York I saw their wild multimedia piece
Andy Warhol's Last Love
, which included a recital of Kafka's ‘An Imperial Message.' Distressingly, Kafka has turned out to be as relevant to the twenty-first century as he was to the twentieth.”

N
ATALIE
S
CENTERS
-Z
APICO
, born in 1988, is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. She is the author of
The Verging Cities
(Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). She teaches creative writing and English at Juan Diego Catholic High School and splits her time between El Paso–Cd. Juárez, Oviedo, and Salt Lake City. Learn more at
nataliescenterszapico.com
.

Of “Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez,” Scenters-Zapico writes: “As an adolescent, I loved reading history books and became very familiar with Chicago/Turabian style. As a game, I would read these histories by beginning with the endnotes and find each corresponding reference in the main passage. I was fascinated by the way the focus of the book changed simply by giving the limelight to the endnotes. This poem is an exploration of how the order of a book, especially one that claims to be historical or academic, holds two stories. One, which contains the
main subject of the text; the other, the hidden back material that often presents secondary stories thought not worthy of mention in the main text by the author. In ‘Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez' I wanted to give Cd. Juárez the place of front material without neglecting the fact that it is often placed as back material in U.S. history. In this way, I hope to give the reader an opportunity to put into practice the way that I read history books as an adolescent, thereby recognizing the day-to-day ways in which Cd. Juárez is important to U.S. consciousness.”

E
VIE
S
HOCKLEY
was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1965 and reborn in Durham, North Carolina, in 1996. Her poetry publications include
the new black
(Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry;
a half-red sea
(Carolina Wren Press, 2006); and two chapbooks. She is also the author of
Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
(Iowa, 2011). She is a creative writing editor for
Feminist Studies
and an associate professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She has made her home in Jersey City, New Jersey, now for more consecutive years than in any place she has lived in since Nashville, a fact that she finds shocking.

Of “legend,” Shockley writes: “I have always loved form, forms, in poetry: given forms, like the sonnet and the ghazal; visual form, as in concrete poetry or other approaches that purposefully use the space of the page; and procedural forms, such as the constraints the Oulipians have developed. This poem falls largely within that last category. The constraint it employs is called
univocalism
, which means that only one of the vowels is used throughout the poem. In this case, it's the vowel ‘e,' to the exclusion of all the others. Univocalism is challenging, but fun to write, and it can create powerful sonic effects.

“As I recall, I wrote this poem at the very beginning of a six-week period I spent in Asheville, North Carolina, during the summer of 2012. I'd hoped this would be a window in which I would write a lot, but that turned out to have been extremely optimistic. I was there to teach two courses for the Bread Loaf School of English, and any time that wasn't devoted to work I spent enjoying Asheville and seeing my friends in the area. But in my first days in town, I sat down with my notebook and used the formal constraint to jump-start a poem out of thin air. The story of Fern and Bess, two ‘clever femmes' who were working against constraints of their own, seemed to write itself, as I searched for words that fit the bill. I decided to teach the form in my creative
writing course a few weeks later. My students came up with some strong, energetic, vibrant poems, thanks in part to a constraint that won't allow you to slide by on your go-to words and phrases or rely on mindless patterns of syntax.”

C
HARLES
S
IMIC
is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate.
The Lunatic
, his new volume of poetry, and
The Life of Images
, a book of his selected prose, were published in the spring of 2015. He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 1992
.

Of “So Early in the Morning,” Simic writes: “My friends have been dying over the last few years, so that's behind this poem of mine.”

S
ANDRA
S
IMONDS
was born in Washington, DC, in 1977 and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida. She is professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia, and is the author of four collections of poetry:
Ventura Highway in the Sunshine
(Saturnalia Books, 2015),
The Sonnets
(Bloof Books, 2014),
Mother Was a Tragic Girl
(Cleveland State University Press, 2012), and
Warsaw Bikini
(Bloof Books, 2009).

Of “Similitude at Versailles,” Simonds writes: “This poem, from my fourth book,
Ventura Highway in the Sunshine
, is part of a series of poems that deals with how we teach humanities courses at the university. Before I started my job as a professor, I had always taught literature, not humanities, and I was interested in exploring and interrogating the humanities textbook and canon formation as a poetry project—what do we leave out of the humanities, what is included in the humanities? What voices are forever lost? What voices stick around and echo into the future? I came to the conclusion, as so many have before me, that it's the minor voices that get left out (like mine?), and I tried to think about my own life as a poet. What are the material circumstances of my life and how do these material circumstances affect my work as a poet? What does it mean to try to write a poem in a house when children need to be fed, when cartoons are distracting you from trying to write, when you are living paycheck to paycheck? I wanted to include the material circumstances of my life to be, not the background of my poem, but rather the foreground to make a point about the humanities. What does it mean to be a working mother in the twenty-first century? Will my voice also be lost? Saved?”

E
D
S
KOOG
was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He has lived in New Orleans, Southern California, and Montana, and currently lives in Seattle. He has published two books of poems,
Mister Skylight
(Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and
Rough Day
(Copper Canyon, 2013), which won the Washington State Book Award in poetry. In addition to sometimes teaching at Seattle's Hugo House, he is codirector of Writing Week at the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program, is cohost (with the novelist J. Robert Lennon) of the podcast
Lunch Box, with Ed and John
, and is poetry editor of
Okey-Panky
.

Of “The Macarena,” Skoog writes: “I think I took a long time paying my dues, a process that started only after school began to wear off. This poem recalls a few months of that time. Twenty-three years old that summer, I'd rented an apartment in the Sunflower Hotel in Abilene and tried to write a novel about the people who worked at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, which resembles a college campus. A fountain burbles in the chapel where he's interred. Long hours there. In my family, Eisenhower is remembered as kindly and local. I didn't have enough dissonance, perhaps, to sustain such a narrative. It was a severe, lonely time. Coffee talked to me from the stovetop percolator. I almost got arrested for climbing a grain silo to watch the sunrise. I was naïve about writing and love. Still am, I hope. When small-town loneliness got to me, I'd drive to Kansas City and visit a friend who was living by the art museum. She was gearing up to move to New York and maybe I'd come, too. Instead I abandoned the novel, and novel writing, and moved to Seattle for another love. Eighteen years later I wrote this poem.”

A. E. S
TALLINGS
was born in 1968. She studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and since 1999 has lived in Athens, Greece. She has published three collections of poems,
Archaic Smile
(University of Evansville Press, 1999),
Hapax
(Northwestern University Press, 2006), and
Olives
(Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her verse translation of Lucretius,
The Nature of Things
, was published by Penguin Classics in 2007 and her verse translation of Hesiod's
Works and Days
is forthcoming from the same publisher. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, United States Artists, and MacArthur foundations, as well as a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Of “Ajar,” Stallings writes: “I've spent the last couple of years at work on a verse translation of Hesiod's eighth-century BC almanac,
Works and Days
, for Penguin Classics. Hesiod's is the first version we have of the story of Pandora and the Jar. (It's better known as Pandora's Box; but in Hesiod's
time, the storage vessels were jars.) So it was natural to conflate that with home life. (The offending washing machine has since been replaced, thank the gods.) In Greek, the word usually translated as ‘hope' (‘elpis') is more ambiguous, and could even mean ‘anxiety' about the future. I think that was in the back of my mind, too. The last line, it strikes me in retrospect, is a pretty Hesiodic sentiment. The formal structure, with the two strands of rhymes running through the tercets, showed up from the get-go, but it didn't occur to me to do the (perhaps obvious) thing of cracking open the lines until relatively late in revision. The space, or pause, gave it a bit more breathing room on the page. The punning title probably came at about the same moment.”

S
USAN
T
ERRIS
was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1937 and lives in San Francisco. Her most recent book is
Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems
(Marsh Hawk Press, 2013). She is the author of six books of poetry, fifteen chapbooks, and three artist's books. She had a prior career in the field of children's books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux was the primary publisher for her twenty-one children's and young adult books. She is the editor of
Spillway Magazine
. Her book
Memos
will be published by Omnidawn in 2015. See
www.susanterris.com
.