The Best American Poetry 2012 (35 page)

A
LICIA
O
STRIKER
was born in 1937 in New York City and hopes to return there after living most of her life in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published fourteen volumes of poetry, most recently
No Heaven
(2007),
The Book of Seventy
(2009), and
The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011
(2012), all with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also written several books of critical essays on poetry and on the
Bible, most recently
For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book
(Rutgers University Press, 2007). She teaches in the low-residency program at Drew University.

Ostriker writes: “ ‘Song' is one of a series of poems spoken by the old woman, the tulip, and the dog. They have come as a relief after a period of working on a series of poems of heavy self-examination and spiritual quest. I suppose they, too, may be a species of self-examination, but they continue to surprise me. Most people seem to like the dog best, but I am fond of all three characters.”

E
RIC
P
ANKEY
was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959. Educated in the public school system, he completed his undergraduate work in 1981 at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and earned his MFA in 1983 at the University of Iowa. He is the author of eight collections of poems. His first,
For the New Year
(Atheneum, 1984), won the Walt Whitman Award.
Heartwood
came out from Atheneum in 1988 and was reissued by Orchises Press in 1998. His next three collections were published by Alfred A. Knopf:
Apocrypha
in 1991,
The Late Romances
in 1997, and
Cenotaph
in 2000. Ausable Press published
Oracle Figures
in 2003,
Reliquaries
in 2005, and
The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984–2008
in 2008. New collections are forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and holds the Heritage Chair in writing.

Of “Sober Then Drunk Again,” Pankey writes: “The title does the work of narration in this little lyric. Sober for many years, I tried my hand at drinking again, and apart from the consumption of many fine bottles of wine, little good came of my failed attempt to drink moderately. A melancholic to start with, I was pulled even deeper down by alcohol and the lead weight of depression. This is a poem voiced from that depth.”

L
UCIA
P
ERILLO
was born in New York City in 1958.
Inseminating the Elephant
(Copper Canyon Press, 2009), her fifth book of poems, received the Washington State Book Award and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. In 2012 she published a book of stories,
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain,
along with a new book of poems,
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths.

Of “Samara,” Perillo writes: “A
samara
is beautiful both as a word
and as a thing. It is all but impossible to believe that the engineering of its perfect thingliness could have been accomplished by so random a process as natural selection—but this is just to restate the poem.

“I'm not much of a celebrator, but if I were going to start celebrating, the samara is probably the thing I'd start with. An ideal form, in such marvelous nonmotorized flight, which maybe, serendipitously, gets buried in the dirt, where instead of rotting it starts bursting toward the light as it becomes that complicated thing, a tree. A much better system than ours!—wherein our corpses don't grow, nourish nothing, and are too chemically infused even to rot.

“Though the readers and writers of poetry are a somewhat obscure subculture in our day and age, they (we) still have codes of conduct and attitude (like: thou shalt not be a warmongering Republican). There's also pressure—or this is just my imagination?—to keep on the sunny side of the street, or, as Roethke said, ‘Praise to the end!' But where are the songs of our gory going-down-into-sludge? The cries of ‘Oh, it's so unfair'? Or: ‘Holy Fuck, somebody do something, the morphine's not working'? The calls for mortality to be replaced, and now—if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can do this, not to live forever, ugh, but to be recycled for some purpose? To come to a graceful end, which is also a beginning?”

R
OBERT
P
INSKY
was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. His
Selected Poems
was published in paperback in March 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His CD
PoemJazz,
with the pianist Laurence Hob-good, has been released by Circumstantial Productions. He has won the Italian
Premio Capri,
the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for his translation of
The Inferno of Dante
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). He served as poet laureate of the United States from 1997 until 2000. He is also the author of several critical books, such as
The Situation of Poetry
(Princeton University Press, 1977), an interactive fiction computer game (
Mindwheel,
1984), and a prose book about King David,
The Life of David
(Shocken, 2006). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

Of “Improvisation on Yiddish,” Pinsky writes: “I have no idea how to spell the few dozen Yiddish words and phrases I know. They are part of my heard and spoken language—which is to say, the quality of language that interests me as a poet.

“In that heard and spoken texture, Yiddish is not italicized: it is continuous with the English I have spoken and heard, not set off from
it as though it were ancient Greek or Latin. ‘Improvisation on Yiddish' reflects that fact.”

D
EAN
R
ADER
was born in Stockton, California, in 1967 and grew up in Weatherford, Oklahoma, a farm town along Route 66. His debut collection of poems,
Works & Days
(Truman State University Press, 2010), won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. His most recent scholarly book,
Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI,
was published in 2011 by the University of Texas Press. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where he recently received the university's Distinguished Research Award.

Rader writes: “One thing I try to do in my book
Works & Days
is pose questions about identity. I wrote a series of self-portraits that are less sketches of the self and more like episodes of selfhood enacted through dialogues. Some of the dialogues are serious; some are goofy. Among the least goofy is ‘Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas.' Here I was interested in the connection between and among couplets, couple, and coupling. And I was thinking about how long poetic lines might somehow convey how long love (and loss) lasts. I also just like the character of Dido, and I wanted a version of the story in which she makes Aeneas doubt every future decision, she gets her say, and it is her words (not his deeds) we remember.”

S
PENCER
R
EECE
was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1963. An Episcopal priest currently serving as the chaplain to Bishop Carlos López-Lozano of the Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain, he lives in Madrid, Spain. His first book of poems,
The Clerk's Tale,
won the Bakeless Prize sponsored by Houghton Mifflin in 2003. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his second book of poems,
The Road to Emmaus,
in 2013.

Reece writes: “The people who change our lives are often mysteries. We never really understand them. This seems to me the crux of the story in the Bible that comes at the end of the Gospel According to St. Luke, ‘The Road to Emmaus.' The author of Luke may also have written Acts, the book that follows Luke in the Bible. The Emmaus story hinges Luke to Acts. The book of Acts shows how the faith spread. And so this story links the grief over death with the hope found in faith. The two disciples, Cleopas and the unnamed disciple, do not realize, at first, what is in front of them. This experience, of not realizing the love that is in front of you until it is gone, resonates deeply for me. Much of the work behind the poem came through the spiritual direction I received
from an unassuming Catholic nun of the Franciscan order over a seven-year period. I wanted to pay tribute to nuns in this poem: they, too, are an expression of love before us that is disappearing.”