The Best American Poetry 2012 (28 page)

A
NNE
C
ARSON
was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950. She teaches ancient Greek at various places, now at New York University. Her most recent book is
Nox
(New Directions, 2011).

Carson writes: “ ‘Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences' was part of a sonnet cycle I wrote once when invited to Harvard to give a lecture on pronouns. The sonnets were performed as part of a collaborative composition that included choreography by three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Company—Rashaun Mitchell, Julie Cunningham, and Andrea Weber—with sound design by Stephanie Rowden and video by Sadie Wilcox. Harvard was baffled but appreciative.”

J
ENNIFER
C
HANG
was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1976, and was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia. She is the author of
The History of Anonymity
(
VQR
Poetry Series/University of Georgia Press, 2008). She cochairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes Asian-American poetry, and is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Bowling Green State University.

Of “Dorothy Wordsworth,” Chang writes: “The first draft came swiftly, and then I spent nearly two years revising it. I'd written it for National Poetry Month's ‘write a poem a day' challenge, which I'd never participated in before, but I was being wooed by a non-poet trying to impress me by gamely writing poems and I was wooing as a poet trying to impress him by writing obstreperously. The title was initially
‘Wordsworth' and I had the word ‘jaunty' somewhere. It was pure dreck, not jaunty at all, but I liked the first line and took the trouble of revising it into quatrains. Later, after further ill-fated tweaking, I made the poem worse, retitling it ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality,' and shared it at a reading, where no one laughed or sighed or knew what to make of it.

“I had been thinking a lot about Dorothy Wordsworth, too. ‘I do not remember this day,' reads one entry from
Alfoxden Journal,
which is one way of staying quiet. I couldn't help comparing this to the Dorothy we find in ‘Tintern Abbey,' silently absorbing her brother's lyric exertions. What did she remember of
that
day? I wanted more words from her, from myself, but I was done. The poem was kaput. Until one afternoon, sparked by impertinence, a good impetus for revision, I surprised myself by taking the poem out and arriving at a new ending and title. And then I stuck my own name on it!”

J
OSEPH
C
HAPMAN
was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1982. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a BA in English, and the University of Virginia, where he earned an MFA in poetry writing. From 2007 to 2008, he served as poetry editor for
Meridian
magazine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife, Julia Hansen.

Chapman writes: “When the editors of
The Cincinnati Review
originally took ‘Sparrow,' they invited me to write a brief explanation of the poem's genesis. I wrote about the sources of the poem—St. John of the Cross's
Ascent of Mount Carmel
and the Psalms—and the way the poem's borrowed language animates a speaker who then becomes language again.

“Rereading the poem more than a year later, I'm less fascinated by its sources. Instead I find myself drawn to its surfaces: the oil spot becoming a closed garden becoming a sealed fountain; the dark habit of St. John of the Cross that doubles as a rib cage and a bird's oily, feathered wings. The end of the poem remains startling to me, which is a good thing, I guess. Every image in the poem metamorphoses into ‘words / & the Sparrow.' That shift is my attempt at a fancy enactment of the simple truth that language consumes everything. That God consumes us.

“I couldn't have said any of this after I initially wrote the poem. But I think it's important that the poem wants to preserve the life of all things outside us, including the things we imagine and the word we imagine them with. Even though I can picture the exact parking garage in which
I set the poem—the Water Street garage near the downtown mall in Charlottesville—the sparrow and the language I used in the poem are no longer my own, if they ever were.”

H
EATHER
C
HRISTLE
was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1980. She is the author of three poetry collections:
What Is Amazing
(Wesleyan University Press, 2012),
The Trees The Trees
(Octopus Books, 2011), and
The Difficult Farm
(Octopus Books, 2009). She has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Emory University, where she was the 2009–2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the web editor for
jubilat
and lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband, Christopher DeWeese, a poet, and her cat, Hastings.

Of “BASIC,” Christle writes: “This poem occurred to me fairly quickly, though not all at once. It began (as things often do) with an image/premise, and then grew through the imagination of consequences. The initial image came from a childhood memory I have of learning how to use Logo, a computer programming language designed as an educational tool. We'd type in ‘FD 100 RT 120 FD 100 RT 120' and this little turtle icon would draw a triangle. Magic! I chose the name of a different programming language—BASIC—as the title, because it had a few more shades of meaning to it. For me, the heart of this poem lies in its belief that whatever happens (beginning on the screen, and then moving out into the world) is the result of the program's design. I would like to write a program that makes people cry, but I do not know how, and so instead I have to write poems.”

H
ENRI
C
OLE
was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry, including
Middle Earth.
He has received the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Award. His most recent collection is
Touch
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of
The New Republic.
He lives in Boston.

Of “Broom,” Cole writes: “I wrote this poem after the death of Mother, a Frenchwoman who came to this country as a young military bride. Though she spent sixty years trying to be an American, at the end of her life she became a Frenchwoman again, only speaking the language I love. I think of her every day.”

B
ILLY
C
OLLINS
was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received
his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include
Horoscopes for the Dead
(Random House, 2011),
Ballistics
(Random House, 2008),
The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems
(Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled
She Was Just Seventeen
(Modern Haiku Press, 2006),
Nine Horses
(Random House, 2002),
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
(Random House, 2001),
Picnic, Lightning
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998),
The Art of Drowning
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and
Questions About Angels
(William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of
Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
(Random House, 2003) and
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday
(Random House, 2005). He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York) and a Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College. A frequent contributor and former guest editor of
The Best American Poetry
series, he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He also edited
Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds,
illustrated by David Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Of “Delivery,” Collins writes: “Here we are back at lyric poetry's oldest subject, only instead of the hooded no-face ready to cut you down with a scythe, we have a delivery truck. To associate a vehicle with death is nothing new; whether the fancy is for a sweet chariot, a ferryboat across Stygian waters, or a horse-drawn carriage heading toward ‘Eternity,' we like to think of dying as a journey, especially one that begins with someone picking us up and taking us somewhere. It beats being alone. Here, the truck is only delivering the news, but even that is too frightening for ‘the speaker,' who substitutes the benign image of a
drawing
of a truck and then gets busy adding some endearing boyhood details. As I look back at the poem, it seems nothing more than a futile attempt at avoidance, but at least it echoes a theme both noble and ancient. I don't know if I had in mind Yannis Ritsos's amazing poem ‘Miniature,' in which death arrives in a fairy-tale carriage whose wheels are made of lemon slices, but even if I wasn't, my poem lies uneasily in that poem's shadow.”