The Best American Poetry 2012 (36 page)

P
AISLEY
R
EKDAL
was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1970. She is the author of four books of poetry:
A Crash of Rhinos
(University of Georgia Press, 2000),
Six Girls Without Pants
(Eastern Washington University Press, 2002),
The Invention of the Kaleidoscope
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), and
Animal Eye
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). She has also written a book of essays,
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee
(Vintage Books, 2002), and a hybrid photo-text memoir entitled
Intimate
(Tupelo Books, 2012). She teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Of “Wax,” Rekdal writes: “This poem took eight months to write. My inspiration was twofold: first, John Ashbery's ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,' which I play with a little bit here; second, the work of my friend Lela Graybill, an art historian at the University of Utah, who is at work on a book about the French Revolution and spectacles of violence. I thought at first that this poem, a response to her work, would be short: two pages at most. Then I started doing research about wax, and fell headlong into an obsession with it as a material medium. More pliable and far less durable than stone, used mainly for modeling processes rather than for finished products, what does a waxwork suggest about permanence? I was also fascinated—OK, maybe freaked out—by why we would feel the need to make a life-size representation of someone like, say, Charles Manson or Angelina Jolie out of a lump of congealed fatty acids, and then pay money to have our pictures taken with it. None of it made sense. Around the same time, as is evident in the poem, my mother had cancer—one of the latest in a string of people in my family who'd had some form of this disease—and suddenly my family and I were having lively, cocktail-fueled dinner conversations about things like genetic testing and end-of-life care. I never thought these issues were related until thirty dead pages into my second draft when I began to realize that my obsession with wax was perhaps an obsession with the ways we see ourselves and our loved ones when we are least in control of our bodies. Once I understood that, the poem began to come to life. The rest was—as it always is—subtraction.”

M
ARY
R
UEFLE
was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is
Madness, Rack, and Honey
(Wave Books, 2012), a collec
tion of lectures on poetry. Her
Selected Poems
(Wave Books) appeared in 2010. She has written a second book of prose,
The Most of It
(Wave Books, 2008). She is an artist who erases, treats, and extra-illustrates nineteenth-century books (maryruefle.com). She lives in Vermont.

Of “Middle School,” Ruefle writes: “When I reread this poem, two lost memories return. Once I was watching an Italian film (whose name, sadly, I can't recall) and one of its scenes was shot in front of ‘Cesare Pavese Middle School.' I loved that! It lodged in my mind long enough to appear in the poem. Another time I was in a Laundromat, staring at the floor. I found a wonderful object there, a little totem figure, a chieftain made entirely out of twist ties twisted together. I took this figure home and for a couple of years he sat on my desk until I gave him to a friend in need of such a thing. I would like to take this opportunity to divulge (now that no one cares) that my principal, in whose office I stood trembling many a time, was later arrested for shoplifting and lost his job. I imagine he must have fallen into a great depression, and come at last to understand those he shepherded. Let us hope.”

D
ON
R
USS
was born in Wildwood, Florida, in 1943. He is a retired professor of literature, composition, and film now living and writing in Atlanta. He has published a volume of poems,
Dream Driving
(Kennesaw State University Press, 2007), and a chapbook,
Adam's Nap
(Billy Goat Press, 2005).

Russ writes: “ ‘Girl with Gerbil' began as an entry in a notebook: ‘a constellation of air-holes punched into the lid of a shoebox—night sky for a little girl's gerbil.' The shoebox was temporary, and the little girl I knew is now a young woman. By the time I got back to it, the original idea had begun to gather into itself other preoccupations of mine. Little worlds—snow globes, doll houses, shadow boxes, and such—have fascinated me for my entire life, and now more than ever I wonder about this little world of ours lost in this very big and very mysterious universe.”

K
AY
R
YAN
was born in California in 1945. She has published eight books of poetry, including
Flamingo Watching
(Copper Beech Press, 1994), and
Elephant Rocks
(1996),
Say Uncle
(2000),
The Niagara River
(2005), and
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
(2010), all from Grove Press.
The Best of It
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She served as United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010.

Of “Playacting,” Ryan writes: “Reading W. G. Sebald one morning I
came upon his reference to playacting, how tribal cultures kept hold of a sense that their rites weren't exactly real even though they might really die as a result of them. This sounded pretty much like life. I recognized the feeling of being a little abstracted. It's a problem, how to die inside something never quite convincingly real.

“No, actually, it's not a problem, in that it will happen whether I agree or not. But it is interesting—interesting to admit that one is not utterly convinced, to go ahead and admit it and to let one's mind move around from there. I find these thoughts quite horrible, but the mind doesn't care if thoughts are horrible; it's just so glad that they're interesting.”

M
ARY
J
O
S
ALTER
was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. She is the author of six books of poems, all published by Alfred A. Knopf. The most recent is
A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems
(2008). She is also the editor of Amy Clampitt's
Selected Poems
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), and a coeditor of
The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
4th and 5th editions. She lives in Baltimore, where she is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University.

Salter writes: “The setting of ‘The Gods' is familiar to the poet: I often find myself in the cheapest seats in the concert hall. In the third or fourth balcony, one may feel far closer to the architect than to the composer, and the mind wanders. Who are the gods or goddesses pictured on the mural? Who chose John Greenleaf Whittier's name to be engraved in marble? Since I can't see the musicians very well, why don't I just close my eyes and listen?

“What surprised me as the poem unfolded is that it became, if not very polemically, a feminist poem. I hadn't expected that. Why aren't there any women's names inscribed inside the dome? Do I dare to slip into a seat closer to the action—say, seat D9, which I haven't paid for?

“‘The Gods' has its political side, for sure. But I hope the poem is at least a little funny—that it acknowledges the timeless human comedy.”

L
YNNE
S
HARON
S
CHWARTZ
was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, a time and place she immortalized (well, sort of) in her 1989 novel,
Leaving Brooklyn
(Houghton Mifflin). She began writing poetry in childhood, but after that wrote mostly prose. However, now and then she is seized with the urge to return to poetry, and from those urges came her first collection,
In Solitary
(Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), and her most recent,
See You in the Dark
(Northwestern University Press, 2012).
Schwartz's twenty-two books include memoirs (
Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books,
Beacon Press, 1997) and story collections (
Acquainted with the Night,
Harper & Row, 1984). Her translations from Italian include
A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg,
and
Smoke over Birkenau,
by Liana Millu, which received the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Translation. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Schwartz writes: “As far as I can remember, ‘The Afterlife' did begin as a dream, just as in the poem. How can anyone remember a dream almost a year old? All I recall is that I was in the afterlife searching for my mother, and my great shock and dismay that she didn't seem at all pleased to see me. I'm not sure whether in the dream I was actually dead or just paying a visit to the dead, but in either case, what a disappointment that my mother greeted me in so perfunctory a way.”