The Best American Poetry 2012 (37 page)

F
REDERICK
S
EIDEL
was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936. He earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1957. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including
Ooga-Booga
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize; and also from Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
The Cosmos Trilogy
(2003) and
Going Fast
(1998).

B
RENDA
S
HAUGHNESSY
was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970. Her most recent collection of poetry is
Our Andromeda
(Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She is also the author of
Human Dark with Sugar
(Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and
Interior with Sudden Joy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). She is poetry editor-at-large at
Tin House
magazine and teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children.

Shaughnessy writes: “ ‘Artless' is about failing to turn painful experience into art and wondering if the art about that failure can produce a kind of new treatment for the hurt it can't erase, perhaps by writing over it, stanza by stanza, making room for other things, and lessening the power of the hurt. Thus the mantra-math of repeating ‘-less' ‘-less' ‘-less.'

“I was wondering what exactly allows such intense pain and such vast hope to coexist in the same small life, sometimes in the same moment. And why is there so little to hold on to through all the
wounding and grieving and rejoicing and loving and gratitude? What is the center and what the periphery? What is the meat and what the gristle? If I understand the heart as both our locus and our pump, this doubleness is a cruel trick: having a ‘crux' means the rest of what constitutes us is appendage or garbage or baggage. And yet this central self, the heart, is also capable of standing apart, regarding, and performing itself and our emotions, our lives. Performing love.

“This thought crushes me.

“And so what about this possibility of art? If there is no unified self to ‘be' fully self and heart at once always, why not embrace a poeticizing of our experience, why not be used by art? Push our lived life through the art and let what is extruded be beautiful?

“Because being used makes us feel empty.

“If the two meanings of ‘heart' are ‘center' and ‘part,' the word ‘art' also frames a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials but also with inner resources; that is, it is made of us. Art
is
life. And yet it is distinct from ‘life.' It is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly
not
life. It is
just made of us.

“The word ‘artless' is tricky. The correct if old-fashioned meaning is innocence, free of guile or artifice. It is a word that means purity, but sounds like it means inelegant, clumsy, or unbeautiful: something that fails to be art.

“One would think art could help manage life by transforming it into something beautiful and useful. But regular life has no such costume to slip into, no set to disappear into.

“I'm artless, because real pain is not imaginary. I suffer it purely and without artifice. And yet I dress it up and give it speech and qualities as if it is an imaginary friend. I know my pure, true ‘artless' self less and less and less with every stanza I write, trying to make this pain beautiful.”

P
ETER
J
AY
S
HIPPY
was born in Niagara Falls in 1961 and was raised on his family's apple farm. He was educated at Northwestern University, Emerson College, and the University of Iowa. He is the author of
Thieves' Latin
(University of Iowa Press, 2003),
Alphaville
(BlazeVOX Books, 2006), and
How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic
(Rose Metal Press, 2007). He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his wife, Charlotte, and their daughters, Beatrix and Stella.

Of “Our Posthumous Lives,” Shippy writes: “As everyone knows, poets have a moral obligation to be 37 percent truthful. This elegy weighs in, faithfully, at 39 percent. It sports a white sheet, but underneath is the honest-to-goodness ghost of my dear friend, sorely missed.”

T
RACY
K. S
MITH
was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972 and was raised in Fairfield, California. She attended Harvard and Columbia Universities and was a Wallace Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. She is the author of three collections of poetry:
Life on Mars
(Graywolf Press, 2011),
Duende
(Graywolf Press, 2007), and
The Body's Question
(Graywolf Press, 2003).
Life on Mars
won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

Smith writes: “In ‘Everything That Ever Was,' I was interested in exploring some of the darker implications of elegy. What if there was an afterlife not just for the loved ones we have lost, but also for the events and relationships we are happy now to be rid of? What would it mean if the past continued to live on, aware of us but separated from our realm by the same thing that separates us from our beloved dead? The poem imagines a scenario in which the past tries to make contact with the present in the same ways a ghost or spirit of the deceased might reach out to the living.”

B
RUCE
S
NIDER
was born in Columbia City, Indiana, in 1971. He is the author of two books,
Paradise, Indiana
(Pleaides Press/Louisiana State University Press, 2012) and
The Year We Studied Women
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.

Of “The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle,” Snider writes: “When I was in my early teens, a classmate's older brother returned home quite ill from studying dance in New York City and died (of what, no one would say). A rumor went around school that he'd come home with a trunk full of women's clothes. I have no idea if this was true, but the strangeness of that rumor and the silence accompanying his death spooked me in ways I couldn't articulate at the time. I suppose that this poem—one of several I've been writing about the lives of gay men in rural America—is my way of filling that silence.”

M
ARK
S
TRAND
was born in 1934 in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Of “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter,” Strand writes:
“Years ago I wanted to write a poem in which my father, though long dead, writes to me from an undisclosed location, admitting that he has been in hiding but is still alive. I could never figure out what he would say in such a letter. As I was writing
Almost Invisible
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), I suddenly remembered the poem about my father. I wrote ‘The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter' in one quick sitting.”

L
ARISSA
S
ZPORLUK
was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1967. She is an associate professor of creative writing and English at Bowling Green State University and is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book,
Traffic with Macbeth,
was published by Tupelo Press in 2011. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2003. She is a mother of three.

Of “Sunflower,” Szporluk writes: “This poem was written in the spring of 2009 when my newborn, Sebastian, was quite ill. Because I was mostly in the hospital during that time, the poem began in my head and never made it to paper until it was completely done. And it wasn't done until I realized that I wasn't in the poem at all, nor was Sebastian; I had just accessed some kind of dark little mystery play that was taking place somewhere and the poem just knew to end when the sunflower's honesty was being questioned.”