The Best American Poetry 2015
Read The Best American Poetry 2015 Online
Authors: David Lehman
Praise for
The Best American Poetry
“Each year, a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable: and over the years, as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.”
âRobert Pinsky
“The
Best American Poetry
series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year's âbest' poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone; combined with [David] Lehman's âstate-of-poetry' forewords and the guest editors' introductions, these anthologies seem to capture the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry.”
âAcademy of American Poets
“A high volume of poetic greatness . . . in all of these volumes . . . there is brilliance, there is innovation, there are surprises.”
â
The Villager
“A year's worth of the very best!”
â
People
“A preponderance of intelligent, straightforward poems.”
â
Booklist
“Certainly it attests to poetry's continuing vitality.”
â
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A âbest' anthology that really lives up to its title.”
â
Chicago Tribune
“An essential purchase.”
â
The Washington Post
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Introduction by Sherman Alexie
Derrick Austin
, “Cedars of Lebanon”
Desiree Bailey
, “A Retrograde”
Melissa Barrett
, “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One”
Jessamyn Birrer
, “A Scatology”
Emma Bolden
, “House Is an Enigma”
Dexter L. Booth
, “Prayer at 3 a.m.”
Rachael Briggs
, “in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler”
Rafael Campo,
“DOCTORS LIE, MAY HIDE MISTAKES”
Julie Carr
, “A fourteen-line poem on sex”
Chen Chen
, “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me”
Susanna Childress
, “Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair”
Yi-Fen Chou
, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve”
Erica Dawson
, “Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale”
Danielle DeTiberus
, “In a Black Tank Top”
Natalie Diaz
, “It Was the Animals”
Thomas Sayers Ellis
, “Vernacular Owl”
Emily Kendal Frey
, “In Memory of My Parents Who Are Not Dead Yet”
James Galvin
, “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses”
Madelyn Garner
, “The Garden in August”
Amy Gerstler
, “Rhinencephalon”
Louise Glück
, “A Sharply Worded Silence”
Terrance Hayes,
“Antebellum House Party”
Rebecca Hazelton
, “My Husband”
Jane Hirshfield
, “A Common Cold”
Bethany Schultz Hurst
, “
Crisis on Infinite Earths
, Issues 1â12”
Saeed Jones
, “Body & Kentucky Bourbon”
Joan Naviyuk Kane
, “Exhibits from the Dark Museum”
Laura Kasischke
, “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike”
Douglas Kearney
, “In the End, They Were Born on TV”
Jennifer Keith
, “Eating Walnuts”
David Kirby
, “Is Spot in Heaven?”
Andrew Kozma
, “Ode to the Common Housefly”
Hailey Leithauser
, “The Pickpocket Song”
Dana Levin
, “Waching the Sea Go”
Patricia Lockwood
, “See a Furious Waterfall Without Water”
Airea D. Matthews
, “If My Late Grandmother Were Gertrude Stein”
Jamaal May
, “There Are Birds Here”
Laura McCullough
, “There Were Only Dandelions”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
, “Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog”
Alan Michael Parker
, “Candying Mint”
Catherine Pierce
, “Relevant Details”
Donald Platt
, “The Main Event”
Raphael Rubinstein
, “Poem Begun on a Train”
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
, “Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez”
Charles Simic
, “So Early in the Morning”
Sandra Simonds
, “Similitude at Versailles”
Susan Terris
, “Memo to the Former Child Prodigy”
Michael Tyrell
, “Delicatessen”
Wendy Videlock
, “How You Might Approach a Foal:”
Sidney Wade
, “The Chickasaw Trees”
Cody Walker
, “Trades I Would Make”
LaWanda Walters
, “Goodness in Mississippi”
Afaa Michael Weaver
, “City of Eternal Spring”
Candace G. Wiley
, “Dear Black Barbie”
Terence Winch
, “Subject to Change”
Monica Youn
, “March of the Hanged Men”
Contributors' Notes and Comments
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
About Sherman Alexie and David Lehman
David Lehman was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling's research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including
New and Selected Poems
(2013),
When a Woman Loves a Man
(2005),
The Daily Mirror
(2000), and
Valentine Place
(1996), all from Scribner. He is the editor of
The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(Oxford, 2006) and
Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
(Scribner, 2003), among other collections. Two prose books appeared in 2015:
The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988â2014
(Pittsburgh), comprising all the forewords he has written for
The Best American Poetry
, and
Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World
(HarperCollins).
A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs
(Nextbook/Schocken) won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. He teaches in the graduate writing program of The New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.
by David Lehman
When you write an annual column for nearly three decades, you may, in effect, be writing a book in discontinuous increments. But you're not necessarily conscious of it. You don't consult the previous year's report before writing the present one, so when you put them together and reread the lot, you're likely to be in for a few surprises.
In 2015 the twenty-nine “forewords” that had appeared to date in
The Best American Poetry
were gathered in
The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988â2014
and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Rereading the pieces in consecutive order, I was struck not only by unconscious repetitions (Wordsworth on pleasure and the formation of poetic taste, “abundance” as the defining trait of American poetry, W. H. Auden's observations, Oscar Wilde's paradoxes) but also, for example, by my evident partiality for the “not only/but also” rhetorical formula.
My pet peeves never let me down. I seem always to have been aghast at ad hoc pronouncements that pass for critical judgments and can rarely let it go unremarked when somebody lowers the limbo bar even in the act of elegizing some aspect of the poetry he despises. The December 2014 issue of
The Atlantic
provided a perfect illustration: a piece by James Parker lamenting, in the year of the Welsh poet's centenary, the loss of Dylan Thomas. The article's title states the theme: “The Last Rock-Star Poet.”
1
As the last of that Bardic breed, Thomas (Parker says) was worthy of our attention if not our unequivocal acclaimâexcept that as a poet he didn't amount to all that much. In Parker's words, “Â âFern Hill' is gloop; âDo not go gentle into that good night' is inferior Yeats.” That sentence, those judgments, are backed up by nothing. They are not even discussed, let alone substantiated, explained, argued. They
are merely stated as if they were beyond disputeâarticles of received wisdom elevated to self-evident propositions. I wondered whether the writer had taken the time to reread “Fern Hill” or was he merely, as was possible, revolted by the memory of a younger version of himself, who had a deep crush on Thomas, having been smitten, as he admits, by “the charm of the man, the charm of the boy, the shock-headed cherub-troll who'd come waddling down to London from Swansea with a cigarette between his lips and a brown beer bottle in his pocket.”