The Best American Poetry 2012 (26 page)

S
HERMAN
A
LEXIE
was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie
Smoke Signals.
His most recent books are the poetry collection
Face,
from Hanging Loose Press (2009), and
War Dances,
stories and poems from Grove Press (2009). He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.

Of “Terminal Nostalgia,” Alexie writes: “For such a young country, the United States is intensely nostalgic. And Internet culture—with its endless remixes of pop culture—is even more nostalgic. As for the particular brand of nostalgia that afflicts Native Americans? Well, it has a lot to do with romanticizing pre-Columbian culture. Thinking about all this, I thought I'd write a ghazal (a seventh-century Arabic poetic form) that combined American pop culture nostalgia with Native American cultural nostalgia. The result is, I believe, funny and sad at the same time, although, when I've performed it live, it seems that people are afraid to laugh.”

K
AREN
L
EONA
A
NDERSON
was born in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1973. She is the author of
Punish honey
(Carolina Wren Press, 2009) and is an assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Of “Receipt: Midway Entertainment Presents,” Anderson writes: “A few years ago, I started using my cash register receipts as occasions for poems, a practice that has proven to be both revelatory and embarrassing. This poem in particular was based on a ticket stub from the county fair in St. Mary's County, Maryland, which is a lot like the fairs I used to go to in eastern Connecticut and southwestern Minnesota. I'm a former
4-H member (I mostly entered marigolds and cake), and I always liked the mobility of being at the fair—moving like money from the surreal mash-up of those intense local contests to that other economy in the parallel universe of the midway.”

R
AE
A
RMANTROUT
was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947. She teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. Her most recent books are
Money Shot
(2011),
Versed
(2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and
Next Life
(2007), all from Wesleyan University Press.
Just Saying,
the manuscript containing “Accounts,” will be published by Wesleyan in 2013.

Armantrout writes: “Like many of us, I have been fascinated with physics, as I encountered it in popular books such as Brian Greene's, for many years. In the summer of 2010, I invited a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego, Brian Keating, to lunch, hoping he could help me understand the origin of matter in the early universe. The poem is not a transcript of our conversation, but rather an absurdist account of my attempts to visualize what Brian was saying. At times it takes the form of two voices, one correcting the other. Such visualizations and corrections could go on indefinitely.”

J
ULIANNA
B
AGGOTT
was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1969. She is the author of eighteen books, mostly novels, under her own name as well as the pen names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode. Three of her books are collections of poetry:
This Country of Mothers
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2001),
Lizzie Borden in Love
(SIU Press, 2006), and
Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees
(Pleiades Press/Louisiana State University Press, 2007), which is a manual on how to write poems, written in poems. An earlier version of the poem in these pages appeared in a desktop calendar published by Alhambra. Baggott's most recent novel,
Pure
(Hachette, 2012), is the first in a postapocalyptic trilogy. She teaches at Florida State University.

Of “For Furious Nursing Baby,” Baggott writes: “First, I should confess: I can be contrary. I wrote a poem called ‘Q and A: Why I Don't Write Formal Poetry,' and realized, by the end of it, that I'd challenged myself into some kind of formal duel. I started writing sonnets. At first, I was very strict then loosened. ‘For Furious Nursing Baby' was originally a sonnet—you can still hear it echoing—that eventually simply looked too confined and bound-down on the page. The poem is about the wildness of a nursing baby—a poem undeniably of the flesh. I felt
compelled to unclasp the lines . . . and so now, when I look at it on the page, it appears sprung loose, as the flesh of nursing breasts tend to do when unbound, unclasped.”

D
AVID
B
AKER
was born in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and has lived since 1984 in Granville, Ohio. He teaches at Denison University, where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham endowed chair of English, and also teaches regularly in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. The latest of his fourteen books are
Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets
(University of Arkansas Press, 2012) and
Never-Ending Birds
(W. W. Norton), winner of the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is poetry editor of
The Kenyon Review.

Of “Outside,” Baker writes: “Where does art live? It tends to live indoors—inside massive buildings like mansions, monasteries, and museums, or inside fussy little buildings like galleries and academies. But in my small village in Ohio art also lives in trees, in reconstituted toilets, out in the yard, even in the air—on the property of one citizen, who lives inside my poem ‘Outside.' A few years ago this fellow moved himself onto an acre of his family's old farm site, outside, I mean; when the weather is bad he stays in farm buildings. And he has moved his utilities outside, his sink and stove and such, and some of these also house his art.

“By outsider art we usually mean the works created by people who are not typical or mainstream artists, whose work may be folk art, or whose reputations are not respectable within the cozy confines of ‘fine art.' Outsiders are outside the field. But my neighbor is an actual outsider. He lives outside in a real farmyard. His art lives outside. And this is where he is at home.

“My poem barely touches upon all the idiosyncratic, inventive, and nonce creations he has made. Some are functional. Some are ‘pure' art. And my friend finds no difference between function and purity, between his living and his making, or between his inner world and his outside existence.”

R
ICK
B
AROT
was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University. He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books:
The Darker Fall
(2002) and
Want
(2008),
which won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and at Warren Wilson College.

Of “Child Holding Potato,” Barot writes: “The painting referred to in the poem's title is by Giovanni Bellini, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Recently, I was at a dinner party and discovered that the woman sitting across from me had worked as a docent for decades at the Met. It was fun to talk to someone who could conjure up in her own mind the paintings that I loved at the museum. When I mentioned the Bellini, she said she didn't think it was a potato in the child's hand, though she wasn't sure what it was. I made a mental note then to look into books about Bellini and find out exactly what the object is. To my eye the object had looked like a gold potato, though I suppose now that it could be any number of other things: another tuber, maybe, or a pear, or a stone. I still haven't looked it up. And, in any case, the misreading now seems an important part of my relationship with the painting and the poem that came out of it. In the state of mind I was in while looking at the painting, a pear or a stone would have been just as dire as a funny little potato.”