The Best American Poetry 2012 (30 page)

K
ATHLEEN
G
RABER
was born in Cape May County, New Jersey, in 1959. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, and she divides her time between Richmond, Virginia, and her hometown of Wildwood, New Jersey, where for twenty-five years she and her husband operated a music shop on the Boardwalk. She is the author of two books of poetry,
Correspondence
(Saturnalia Books, 2005) and
The Eternal City
(Princeton University Press, 2010).

Of “Self-Portrait with No Internal Navigation,” Graber writes: “When I travel back home to South Jersey from Virginia, I drive almost directly northeast so that I end up in Lewes, Delaware. A ferry runs between Cape Henlopen and Cape May. The journey across the Delaware Bay takes about eighty-five minutes, and because I often travel with my big dog, I usually sit in my car to keep him company and to read in the rocking silence. It didn't take long before I noticed the pigeons nesting on the pipes over my head. Unlike many people, I've always found pigeons remarkably beautiful and interesting. Not long before I wrote this poem, I had a strange dream that I was sleeping on a tightrope. I could speculate a lot about the meaning of that, but the immediate result was that I finally made the time to watch
Man on Wire,
the documentary about Philippe Petit and his walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I have a great fear of heights (though I was not frightened in my dream!). I visited the World Trade Center only once—around 1980. I was a college student, and a friend who had come to NY to visit me wanted to do the sort of things tourists do. I could not even exit the elevator when its doors opened onto the observation deck of floor-to-ceiling glass. There are many things that lose some of their mystery when we dwell deeply upon them, but the idea that Philippe Petit walked between those buildings only becomes more and more astonishing to me the longer I consider it. And that particular feat has now been freighted by history with a unique poignancy. This poem was originally called ‘Self-Portrait with Love Story,' but that seemed too sentimental to me.”

A
MY
G
LYNN
G
REACEN
was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Lancaster University, England. She is a poet, a novelist, a food writer, an occasional essayist, and a contributing book reviewer for
The New York Quarterly.
She has also moonlighted as a jazz vocalist since 1998. She lives outside San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.

Of “
Helianthus annuus
(Sunflower),” Greacen writes: “My ninth-grade algebra teacher was obsessed with the twelfth-century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, and in particular the number sequence for which he is most famous, in which each number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc). I barely scraped a passing grade in that class, but later, her reverent mutterings about the golden mean and packing density and Fibonacci sequences dictating forms in nature began to come back to me. Fibonacci series occur, for instance, in the scales on pinecones and pineapples, the shell of the chambered nautilus, and perhaps most famously in the seed head of the sunflower. I was taken with the idea of the golden mean being represented by this golden flower, and with the fact that the mean is represented by the Greek letter Φ, which if you squint at it you might see as an abstracted sunflower, a large disc on a straight stem. Being a bit of a nerd, I decided to see what would happen if I followed the Fibonacci sequence in my lines and discovered that it determined a certain pleasing packing density even on the page. (Mrs. G., if you're out there—I get it now!) The ‘weary of time' reference comes from William Blake's poem ‘Ah! Sunflower.' Contradicting Mr. Blake felt even more dangerous than passing notes in that algebra class, but with all due respect, it made more sense to me to see the sunflower as a supplicant to the sun god, Apollo, who is often associated with order and with the golden mean.”

J
AMES
A
LLEN
H
ALL
was born in Columbus, Indiana, in 1976. His book of poems,
Now You're the Enemy
(University of Arkansas Press, 2008), won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the 2011 recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam, in upstate New York.

Of “One Train's Survival Depends on the Other Derailed,” Hall writes: “One night I was at a bar in Tucson called Plush, drinking whiskey with some poets. One young woman—not a poet, but flush with artistic air—told a story about her childhood pet, Bluebird, who was set free one evening from its cage by the babysitter, despite the child's prolonged pleas to keep the latch locked. The bird flew directly into an
electrical socket and committed suicide. We were shocked, and not just because she'd prefaced Bluebird's tale with ‘Here's a funny story.' The comedy existed in the prolonged pleas from the child, who was wise and wanted to keep her Bluebird alive. It seems she knew all along what the animal wanted.

“The next day, I drafted the poem. I'd been rereading poets I admire for their ability to pressurize story with lyric description and sonic texture, and went back to Susan Mitchell's
Rapture,
an important book in my development as a poet. I love—and borrowed—her maximalist sensibility, her use of the speaker's body as oracle, this choir-of-one who sings multiple experiences. The poem tries out her leaping connections, dizzyingly spun, so that the voice is changed by what it sings.”

T
ERRANCE
H
AYES
was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. He won the 2010 National Book Award in poetry for his book
Lighthead
(Penguin). His other books are
Wind in a Box
(Penguin, 2006),
Muscular Music
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005), and
Hip Logic
(Penguin, 2002). His other honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a USA Zell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hayes writes: “ ‘The Rose Has Teeth' takes its title from the brilliant 2006 Matmos album,
The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
—which takes its title from a passage in Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations.
‘Most artists are converted to art by art itself,' Lewis Hyde says in
The Gift.
My poem found its bones after I read Matthew Zapruder's marvelous poem ‘Never to Return,' in the 2009 edition of
The Best American Poetry.
My poem found its breath at the piano I have been trying to play since 1999, the year my daughter was born.”

S
TEVEN
H
EIGHTON
is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and translator. He has received four gold National Magazine Awards in Canada, where he lives. His novel
Afterlands
(Houghton Mifflin, 2007) was published in six countries and has been optioned for film. His poetry collections are
Patient Frame
(House of Anansi Press, 2010), which includes the poem chosen for this year's
Best American Poetry, The Address Book
(House of Anansi Press, 2005), and
The Ecstasy of Skeptics
(House of Anansi Press, 1994). He has a website:
www.stevenheighton.com
.

Of “Collision,” Heighton writes: “Kneeling next to a large doe as she lies dying beside a highway at two in the morning, after you've run into
her with your car, is an experience most people would prefer to forget. I would prefer to forget it myself, but in my capacity as professional melancholic I've kept compulsively returning to the crash and its aftermath, trying for over a decade to make poetic sense of it.

“A number of tentative, groping first drafts went nowhere. Then, a few years ago, while reading Les Murray's volume of selected poems
Learning Human,
I discovered his remarkable ‘The Cows on Killing Day.' In this poem the author, son of a dairy farmer, attempts to render a bovine perspective on . . . well, the title says it vividly enough. Murray's speculative ventriloquism led me to re-broach my own experience and try inverting the perspective from human to nonhuman. ‘Collision' is the result.

“To some, the idea of writing seriously—as opposed to comically, mythically, allegorically, or in story-book fashion—from a nonhuman point of view might seem fatuous, if not slightly deranged. To me it seems a natural extension of the imaginative writer's staple project: that of trying to inhabit with sympathy the solitude of another being.”