The Best American Poetry 2012 (34 page)

Of “Void and Compensation (Facebook),” Morse writes: “A few years ago, within the span of a month, a number of my high-school classmates and I started to communicate again via Facebook. There they were, after twenty-five years of no contact, posting updates and pictures on a ‘wall.' They were familiar yet different—some with families, some with different names, all of them magically narrowing a generation's worth of time in two or three minutes. For anyone living in New York during 9/11, a ‘wall' with words and photos has a haunting resonance. The poem emerged from contemplating a wall for the no-longer-missing (and their uncanny, sudden resurfacings) and remembering a wall for those still missing. I was thinking about friends no longer living, friends with whom I wish I were still in touch. In particular I miss Leo Millar, a college friend, and this poem is an elegy for him.”

C
AROL
M
USKE
-D
UKES
was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945. She is a professor at the University of Southern California and has also taught at Columbia, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two essay collections. Her most recent books are
Twin Cities
(Penguin, 2011) and two anthologies:
Crossing State Lines: An American Renga,
coedited with Bob Holman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) and
The Magical Poetry Blimp Pilot's Guide,
coedited with Diana Arterian (Figueroa Press, 2011). Her other books of poetry include
Sparrow
(Random House, 2003),
An Octave Above Thunder, New and Selected Poems
(Penguin, 1997), and
Red Trousseau
(Viking/Penguin, 1991). Her collection of reviews and critical essays,
Women and Poetry:
Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self,
was published in the “Poets on Poetry” series of the University of Michigan Press in 1997. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, and the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. For many years she was poetry columnist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Review.
On November 13, 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Carol as California's poet laureate.

Of “Hate Mail,” Muske-Dukes writes: “I am (and have always been) an outspoken woman. Thus I've acquired a lot of friends and also a few enemies. Someone in the latter group began sending me anonymous ‘hate' email not long ago. If you have ever received hate mail, you know that it is quite scary—especially if the unknown correspondent has ‘facts' about your life, and appears to have some familiarity with your day-to-day life and your family and friends. The emails I received were somewhat threatening, but they were mostly just rantings by an odd, not-very-intelligent, very angry person who did not like me at all. (My webmaster and others tried to track the emails, but the author had disappeared into cyberspace, impossible to trace.)

“At one point, I realized that this mail was kind of funny. The ability to reread the emails and laugh at them gave me the idea of writing a parody: writing hate mail to myself. Of course, the bizarre insulting perspective and nutzoid observations of my poem are original, are mine—but the ‘spirit' of the disturbed correspondent inspired my ‘voice' in the poem.

“Goethe said, ‘A poet must know how to hate.' I've always written poems of love and loss. I must say that I found it absolutely exhilarating to write a ‘hate' poem, especially a hate poem to myself. It was cathartic, but it was also kind of inspiring—I think I may have a talent for this! I experienced the ‘freeing' of a reckless voice, the freedom of (faux) anonymity. Perhaps I'll crank out a couple more.”

A
NGELO
N
IKOLOPOULOS
was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1981. He is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program. His first book of poems,
Obscenely Yours,
won the Kinereth Gensler Award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and hosts the White Swallow Reading Series in New York City.

Nikolopoulos writes: “Like most of my poems, ‘Daffodil' emerged
out of a briny mixture of self-contempt and nostalgia. I was thinking of my early twenties—an unapologetic time for most of the gay men I knew—and how I wore my sex on my sleeve like a garish motel sign:
Vacancy, always.

“San Francisco, 2002: I was blond-streaked and
giving it
and obnoxious, like Wordsworth's daffodils. But aren't all such lavish displays a performance, an act of covering up? (Stale Nag Champa burns in the dormitory.) The poem's more Gerard Manley Hopkins then—‘A little sickness in the air / From too much fragrance everywhere:'—since spring's a prelude to death after all.

“So I wanted to write a poem about youth that both admired and despised it at the same time. It's a song of praise and condemnation then—both
Hello, how've you been?
and, thankfully,
Good riddance.
”

M
ARY
O
LIVER
was born in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights in 1935. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she did not receive a degree. Her first collection of poems,
No Voyage, and Other Poems,
was published in 1963 by Dent Press in the United Kingdom. She has since published fifteen books of poetry and five books of prose.
American Primitive
(Little, Brown, 1983) received the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and
New and Selected Poems
(Beacon Press, 1992) won the National Book Award in 1992. The first part of her book-length poem
The Leaf and the Cloud
(Da Capo Press, 2000) was selected for inclusion in
The Best American Poetry 1999
and the second part, “Work,” was selected for
The Best American Poetry 2000.
Her books of prose include
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
(Da Capo Press, 2004). Beacon Press published
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
in 2005 as well as her first poetry CD,
At Blackwater Pond,
in 2006.
Red Bird
was published by Beacon Press in 2008. Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for more than forty years.

Of “In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama,” Oliver writes: “The poem follows my usual path. I go out into the world and look and reflect, listen and consider. A great deal of what I find, and more and more lately, is simply action and noise. The world is changing, as it always has and always will. But something is missing in all that activity; the way we use the earth is like a victor's use after the last battle. And yet everything is part of a mystery—
the
mystery—and therein, so I believe, is a holiness. So I didn't pass the mule in haste but considered the flowers coming from its body, gave it at least a few moments of deep
attention, and, with the last adjective, placed it within that mysterious (and holy) territory.”

S
TEVE
ORLEN was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1942. He taught poetry craft in the MFA program of the University of Arizona for more than thirty years, shepherding dozens of young poets into bright careers, including Michael Collier, Richard Siken, David Wojahn, and Tony Hoagland. He received NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and published many books, including
The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems, 1978–2005
(Ausable Press, 2006). He died in November 2010. A month before his death he reported to the editors of
New Ohio Review,
where “Where Do We Go After We Die” would posthumously appear, that “The weather is cooler, my back & my hip joint flagellate me with every step, my wife is lovely, our son and his wife are visiting from LA and we told them all we want to do is stare at them and hug every once in a while, and Tony and Kath—I think you're friends with them?—are off soon for Majorca, where they're hoping to be included on a dig for the soul of Robert Graves.”

Tony Hoagland, Steve Orlen's literary executor, writes: “Steve wrote under the constellation of Randall Jarrell, the wisest of his own generation of poets, and ‘Where Do We Go After We Die' is a fine example of that wise, tender mode, braiding fable, anecdote, and meditation upon an undertone of philosophical acceptance. The Jon in the poem is the poet Jon Anderson, Steve's lifelong friend. As young poets, they labeled themselves ‘Sincerists,' and sought to write poems modeled upon perfect conversation between intimates, embodying ‘the poignant bravery of the living.' What's spectacular in ‘Where Do We Go After We Die' are the many nuanced fluencies of texture and intelligence, and the masterly closing movement, in which ‘speech reverts' from the personal to a more omniscient perspective: ‘And actions lose their agency—
It came to pass
—' The poem is about stories as much as death: its final lines rather magically depict the end of all the narratives, and the onset of speechlessness.”