The Best American Poetry 2002

by Creeley, Robert; Lehman, David

• ISBN13: 9780743203869
• ISBN10: 0743203860
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-17
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

Since its inception in 1988,The Best American Poetryseries has achieved brand-name status in the literary world as the preeminent showcase of each year's most important contributions to American poetry. This year's exceptional volume, edited by Robert Creeley, a figure revered across teh wide spectrum of American poetry, features a diverse mix of established masters, rising stars and the leading lights of a younger generation. The pleasure of the poems selected here, Creeley explains in his introduction, is "that they caught my fancy, some almost outrageously, some by their quiet, nearly diffident manner, some by unexpected turns of thought or insight, others by a confident authority and intent." With comments from the poets elucidating their work, a thought-provoking introduction from Creeley, and Lehman's always popular foreword assessing the current state of poetry,The Best American Poetry 2002will prove as irresistible to new readers as it is indispensable for poetry fans everywhere.

Author Biography

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1926. In the 1950s he taught at Black Mountain College and edited The Black Mountain Review. Since 1966 he has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Creeley was New York State Poet from 1989 to 1991, and his many volumes of poetry include For Love, Pieces, and Memory Gardens. He lives in Buffalo, New York, and in Waldoboro, Maine.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
David Lehman
Introduction	xvii
Robert Creeley
``Up to Speed''	1	(2)
Rae Armantrout
``The Pearl Fishers''	3	(2)
John Ashbery
``The Golgotha Local''	5	(2)
Amiri Baraka
``12''	7	(3)
Charles Bernstein
from Zero Star Hotel	10	(5)
Anselm Berrigan
``Injunction''	15	(1)
Frank Bidart
``The Body''	16	(9)
Jenny Boully
``Ballad of the Comely Woman''	25	(2)
T. Alan Broughton
``What I Threw into the Grave''	27	(2)
Michael Burkard
``Opposed Glimpse of Alice James, Garth James, Henry James, Robertson James and William James''	29	(1)
Anne Carson
``On the Screened Porch''	30	(1)
Elizabeth Biller Chapman
``Lullaby for Cuckoo''	31	(1)
Tom Clark
``Corpus Delicti''	32	(1)
Peter Cooley
``Traced Red Dot''	33	(1)
Clark Coolidge
``Long after (Mallarme)''	34	(2)
Ruth Danon
``Midsummer''	36	(1)
Diane di Prima
``Moon Cornering''	37	(1)
Theodore Enslin
``O Patriarchy''	38	(1)
Elaine Equi
``Animals out of the Snow''	39	(3)
Clayton Eshleman
``Drones and Chants''	42	(2)
Norman Finkelstein
``To a Student Who Reads `The Second Coming' as Sexual Autobiography''	44	(1)
Jeffrey Franklin
``Independence Day''	45	(1)
Benjamin Friedlander
``Surreal Love Life''	46	(3)
Gene Frumkin
``Carried Across''	49	(7)
Forrest Gander
``Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil''	56	(2)
Peter Gizzi
``Reunion''	58	(1)
Louise Gluck
``The Gold Star''	59	(1)
Albert Goldbarth
``Affirmation''	60	(1)
Donald Hall
``TCAT serenade: 4 4 98 (New Haven)''	61	(2)
Michael S. Harper
``you: should be shoo be''	63	(6)
Everett Hoagland
``9--11-01''	69	(1)
Fanny Howe
``Poem'' (``across dark stream'')	70	(1)
Ronald Johnson
``Flying''	71	(2)
Maxine Kumin
``Great''	73	(1)
Bill Kushner
```Broken World' (For James Assatly)''	74	(3)
Joseph Lease
``Felix Culpa''	77	(1)
Timothy Liu
``On Antiphon Island''	78	(2)
Nathaniel Mackey
``And Even You Elephants? (Stein 139/Titles 35)''	80	(2)
Jackson Mac Low
``Perfect Front Door''	82	(1)
Steve Malmude
``Address to Winnie in Paris''	83	(2)
Sarah Manguso
``Butter & Eggs''	85	(4)
Harry Mathews
``The quarry (1--13)''	89	(15)
Duncan McNaughton
``To My Father's Houses''	104	(1)
W. S. Merwin
``Ashberries: Letters''	105	(3)
Philip Metres
``Trail''	108	(10)
Mong-Lan
``Behind the Orbits''	118	(3)
Jennifer Moxley
``Sympathy''	121	(2)
Eileen Myles
``Sunday Night''	123	(1)
Maggie Nelson
``Sonnet''	124	(1)
Charles North
``Haunt''	125	(3)
Alice Notley
``Snapshot from Niagara''	128	(1)
D. Nurkse
``Frontis Nulla Fides''	129	(2)
Sharon Olds
``Twenty-six Fragments''	131	(5)
George Oppen
``Starred Together''	136	(2)
Jena Osman
``Fretwork''	138	(2)
Carl Phillips
```A roof is no guarantee...'''	140	(1)
Pam Rehm
``Ends of the Earth''	141	(1)
Adrienne Rich
``Les Demoiselles d'Avignon''	142	(2)
Corinne Robins
``Tenets of Roots and Trouble''	144	(4)
Elizabeth Robinson
``Self Portrait with Critic''	148	(2)
Ira Sadoff
``I Do Not Know Myself''	150	(2)
Hugh Seidman
``You Also, Nightingale''	152	(2)
Reginald Shepherd
``For Larry Eigner, Silent''	154	(3)
Ron Silliman
``Poem after Haniel Long''	157	(2)
Dale Smith
``In Way of Introduction''	159	(2)
Gustaf Sobin
``Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours''	161	(4)
Juliana Spahr
``Call''	165	(1)
John Taggart
from Raton Rex Part I	166	(4)
Sam Truitt
``Do flies remember us''	170	(1)
Jean Valentine
``Eye Contact''	171	(5)
Lewis Warsh
``Return to Saint Odilienberg, Easter 2000''	176	(2)
Claire Nicolas White
``In Charge''	178	(1)
Nathan Whiting
``Illumined with the Light of Fitfully Burning Censers''	179	(2)
Dara Wier
``Nostalgia II''	181	(1)
Charles Wright
``A Sheath of Pleasant Voices''	182	(3)
John Yau
Contributors' Notes and Comments	185	(42)
Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published	227	(2)
Acknowledgments	229

Excerpts

FOREWORD

by David Lehman

The year 2001, like the year 1984 before it, arrived with heavy baggage. Both had existed (and do exist) outside of time as visions of tomorrow. Readers of George Orwell's1984may forever associate that eponymous year with the dystopian universe of Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak, Hate Week, and Doublethink. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie2001: A Space Odysseymade the millennial turn seem synonymous with the sci-fi future, antiseptic but threatening, where spaceships dance to theBlue Danubeand astronauts lose at chess to a sinister computer with a mind of his own. But where the actual 1984 came and went, a year vastly less memorable than Orwell's totalitarian prophecy ("a boot stamping on a human face -- forever"), the year 2001 transcended the advance aura that Kubrick's amazing juxtapositions had produced.

The destruction of the World Trade Center and the massacre of the innocents was not only a catastrophic event in American history. It was also a revolutionary event in American consciousness. The day now marks a boundary: what was written, said, done, created before September 11 is seen as vitally different in kind and status from what since. It's as if history has returned to ground zero. The chalkboard has been wiped clean. But with the fresh start comes a new responsibility. Variants on Theodor Adorno's famous rhetorical question -- How can there be poetry after Auschwitz? -- were asked often against the backdrop of the blaze and rubble of downtown Manhattan. The spontaneous answer given by many was: How can there be not?

In their shock and grief, people everywhere looked instinctively to poetry. One poem more than any other was cited, recited, copied, e-mailed after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" circulated electronically like one of the messages that "the Just / Exchange" in the form of "ironic points of light" (to borrow phrases from the poem's final stanza). Auden, a recent arrival in New York, wrote this ninety-nine-line poem on the day Germany invaded Poland and World War II commenced. The poem begins in "one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street" in Manhattan. Much of it seemed freshly apposite now: the "blind" skyscrapers in their verticality proclaiming the might of "Collective Man"; the commuters, addicted to their "habit-forming pain," occupying solitary stools in bars. The first stanza ends with lines that resonated eerily in the noxious air:

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Friends and strangers in chat rooms quoted this complex, difficult, ambiguous poem. So did sobersided CEOs. Newspapers coast to coast, from theSan Francisco Chronicleto theBaltimore Sunand theBoston Globe,reprinted the entire poem on their editorial pages. It was e-mailed to me at least five or six times by, and I enjoyed the benefit of a correspondence with the poet and Williams College professor Lawrence Raab about the poem's rich but vexing penultimate stanza, which poets and critics have argued about for years:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Was one example of the "folded lie" a newspaper? Did the colon after "sky" imply that the lines that follow are types of lies? The most vexing question had to do with the stirring last line. Was it mendacious to the precise extent of its rhetorical effectiveness? In what sense can love prevent or save us from death? Of what use was such a declaration -- or was it a piety -- in the face of Nazi military aggression? (As Maggie Nelson wrote in a different context, "you can't hug / a Nazi and hope / he'll change.") Auden, who took self-criticism seriously, so despised the stanza's final line (for some the poem's best) that he changed it to the unsatisfactory "We must love one another and die," and later decided to disown the poem altogether. "It may be a good poem, but I shouldn't have written it," he maddeningly said.

The wild popularity of "September 1, 1939" was that rare thing, a phenomenon that had erupted on its own without orchestration or hype. The poem's apparent ubiquitousness was analyzed almost as much as the poem itself. "It is the poem for our present pain," Eric McHenry wrote inSlate,in part because it seems "weirdly prescient" and in part because of its mood of doubt. Sven Birkerts in theNew York Observercalled it Auden's "most sustaining" poem, an example of poetry as "the reverse of the terrorist act." I would add that Auden's poems -- not only the one in question but such others as the elegies for Yeats and Freud, "Caliban to the Audience" and "In Praise of Limestone" -- attract readers who value the poetry of civilized discourse and believe in the power (and the limits) of human reason. For Dana Gioia inThe Dark Horse,the immediate resort to "September 1, 1939" helped make the case for poetry's civic, public, and ceremonial uses. It reinforced, in his view, the priority of "expressive power" over "stylistic novelty" as a poetic virtue. On the other hand, Daniel Swift, reporting on the American scene for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement,was not alone in recoiling from the "trace of something almost nasty in this poem," either a whiff of self-congratulation (Swift) or evidence of "incurable dishonesty" (Auden). Unsurprisingly there was as little agreement on the cultural meaning of the phenomenon as on Auden's unorthodox use of colons and unusual adjectives ("clever hopes," "the conservative dark") within the poem itself, thus demonstrating that poetry as an essence precedes and supersedes the contestation of meanings and interpretations to which it gives rise.

"September 1, 1939" was not the only poem to hit the bulletin boards. OnSlateRobert Pinsky recommended Marianne Moore's "What Are Years?" as well as poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Czeslaw Milosz, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Alicia Ostriker on the MobyLives Web site picked the same sublime Moore poem plus works by Yehuda Amichai, Stephen Dunn, and Hayden Carruth. The hunger for poetry and the need for elegy resulted in impromptu or hastily arranged public readings with overflow audiences. On an October evening, more than a thousand people crowded into the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York to listen to poems "in a time of crisis." Newspapers ran numerous articles on poetry's power to heal and console. Anthologies comprising "responses" to September 11 or poems from "post-9/11 New York" were planned. For the poets themselves, all this attention was not an unmixed blessing: the pressure to write poetry equal to an occasion can sometimes lead to an outpouring of mediocre verse. A bad poem is no less bad for the nobility of the sentiments expressed. "You can't approach something like this frontally in a poem -- at least I can't," Billy Collins told a reporter. "It will knock you over. It is like walking into a big wave. You will fall on your bathing suit." Collins clarified his position inUSA Today."It's not that poets should feel a responsibility to write about this calamity," he wrote. "All poetry stands in opposition to it. Pick a poem, any poem, from an anthology and you will see that it is speaking for life and therefore against the taking of it. A poem about mushrooms or about a walk with the dog is a more eloquent response to September 11 than a poem that announces that wholesale murder is a bad thing."

No stranger to this anthology series -- his work was chosen by guest editors Charles Simic, Louise Gl¼ck, James Tate, John Hollander, Robert Bly, Rita Dove, and Robert Hass -- Collins was tapped in June to succeed Stanley Kunitz as the nation's poet laureate. "We should notice that there is no prose laureate," Collins said at the news conference, "although they will probably be lobbying for equal treatment." The new laureate's populist appeal is beyond dispute. You can coerce people to do many things, but buying books of poetry isn't one of them, and people buy Collins's books in quantity. He has real readers, readers who aren't themselves poets, who obey the pleasure principle when it comes to buying a book. But theNew York Timesin a front-page story anointed him as "the most popular poet in America" and he has since become a magnet for envy. In an application of what I've come to call the Resentment Index, I realized that Collins had truly made it when I began hearing his work disparaged regularly. The Fall 2001 issue of theMelic Reviewcontained no fewer than four poems satirizing the poet's geniality and embrace of the quotidian. (One dastardly fellow's parody would, however, "direct you to that lampshade / made of human skin and tell you / to concentrate on the warm glow // and forget the camps." Even bad taste should have its bounds.) Collins's poetry was too easy for theNew Republic'sAdam Kirsch, who complained: "Nothing in his work suggests that he even acknowledges that there is a place for difficulty in poetry. His amused indifference resembles wisdom only as death resembles life." Of course, nothing in Collins's work denies a place for difficulty in poetry, or implies even remotely that he aims to dictate what other poets do, but that's not the point. The inflated simile ("as death resembles life") suggests the vehemence of the critical antagonism that a poet of humor and warmth, ease of manner, and above all a large audience can expect. Well, critics will be critics, though the public at any rate clearly counts neither Auden's difficulty nor Collins's accessibility as strikes against them.

Adoring fans weighed in elsewhere. The magazineWhetstonepublished an unconventional marriage proposal in the form of Lisa Beyer's poem "Billy Collins's Wife," the title indicating what she, author or speaker, would yearn to be if there were a vacancy. ("For this to be so / Billy Collins's wife / must die a death / both quick and painless, / but especially quick, / so I will still be 32 / and possessing whatever / loveliness I ever possessed, / for what else can I offer such a man?") As the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda heated up, the novelist Ira Levin suggested that our poet laureate ("what's he there for?") be asked to propose code names superior to the widely deplored monikers Operation Infinite Justice and Operation Enduring Freedom. Collins soon disclosed "Poetry 180," his own sensible idea for how best to use his office. He crafted a list of 180 poems, one for each school day, in an initiative to get poetry read aloud daily in high schools.

It was poetry as usual for much of 2001, "usual" in this case signifying its opposite, and "poetry" here referring to anything that claims to be such. There were reminders that April, National Poetry Month, begins with a day that honors the fool. In Alaska, the arts council launched a poetry initiative that prompted the Borealis Brewery to print poems on beer bottles. A more dubious second result was that 250,000 Alaskans, or 40 percent of the state's population, opened their telephone, water, and sewer bills in April and found a poem stuffed inside as filler. (It was Tom Sexton's "Beluga," about the white whales that swim Cook Inlet off Anchorage each June.) Later in the year, Oprah Winfrey demonstrated that her awesome marketing muscle applies as well to poetry as to fiction. When she praised the poems of Mattie Stepanek, an eleven-year-old boy who suffers from muscular dystrophy, she did so rhapsodically, with a tear in her eye. "If ever I had a book to recommend, it's Mattie's. If ever you were going to buy a book, I recommend it; this is the one, my friends." (Mattie had previously stolen the show at the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon.)Journey Through Heartsongspromptly sold 170,000 copies, and a second Stepanek book soon joined it on the best-seller list. An anthology of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis'sBest-Loved Poems,also a best-seller, included several of Jackie's youthful efforts in verse, which did nothing to diminish her iconic status.

On June 11, Timothy McVeigh, facing execution for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, chose to make no personal statement but instead referred the media to W. E. Henley's "Invictus," a nineteenth-century warhorse that schoolchildren used to have to memorize. "My head is bloody, but unbowed," wrote Henley, who suffered from tuberculosis and had to have a leg amputated. The poem concludes: "I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul." I went on a local New York TV newscast to infer that McVeigh remained unrepentant. In the green room before going on the air I could see the monitor and how I was billed. No name; it just said "execution poem expert." Meanwhile aNew York Timesreporter asked poets and critics which poem they would choose to help them "embrace the moment" if they "knew the hour of their death in advance." The seventeenth-century poet George Herbert won. Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, and Helen Vendler all picked a Herbert poem, though Dana Gioia held out for Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and Richard Howard for Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

Since its inception as an annual anthology in 1988,The Best American Poetryhas acted on the notion that the best way to honor excellence in poetry is to enlist a poet of distinguished stature to do the choosing each year. By this means each volume in the series necessarily differs from its predecessor, and the books taken together chronicle the taste of some of our leading poets. Robert Creeley, this year's editor, is esteemed among fellow poets across the board irrespective of affiliation and orientation. Donald Hall, who made the selections forThe Best American Poetry 1989,once said that the poet of his generation he admires most is Creeley: "I love his marching ear and the delicacy of his nuances." Like others I first fell under Creeley's spell when I read Donald M. Allen'sNew American Poetryin the 1960s. His poems had an easy intimacy; they advanced their propositions tersely and without pomp ("If you never do anything for anyone else / you are spared the tragedy of human relation- // ships"). Creeley is universally admired for his skill at line breaks. Trying to explain his magic, I wrote: "it / doesn't matter / what he says / what matters is / the way the lines / break at just / the right moment / each time / uncanny." Few editors in my experience have been as decisive and confident as Creeley. It was, as I could have predicted, a pleasure to work with him.

Clever former English majors continue their subversive campaign to insinuate poetry into popular culture, sometimes to brilliant or hilarious effect. In the movieThe Anniversary Party,Kevin Kline, playing an actor, quotes the conclusion of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" ("Ah, love, let us be true to one another...") as a toast to the reconciling Hollywood couple whose anniversary it is. It is solemn, deadpan, and completely inappropriate -- quite as if the movie had taken to heart Anthony Hecht's parody of Arnold ("The Dover Bitch") and realized how odd it must feel to be "addressed / As sort of a mournful cosmic last resort." Poetry is a great prophetic warning of "ignorant armies" on contested beachheads, but it is also the lampooning of that impulse. And it is passion, or an adolescent's intense longing for it: the plot of the French thrillerWith a Friend Like Harryhinges on a poem the hero wrote for hislycéeliterary magazine, which his curious "friend" still knows by heart though many years have elapsed.

Poetry, the art of articulation, renders us inarticulate when it comes to defining it. Purists would discourage us from considering poetry as an essence, or as anything apart from individual texts, but there remains the obdurate attachment to poetry as not only an art but a quality in itself that a person or a work of art may have. "I'm not just a suit," said Gerald Levin when he retired as CEO of AOL Time Warner last December. "I want the poetry back in my life." Similarly, Woody Allen, accounting for his preference in movie westerns, said,"Shaneachieves a certain poetry thatHigh Noondoesn't." It is tempting to conclude that poetry remains the touchstone art, a supreme signifier, emblematic of soulful artistry, the adventurous imagination, and the creative spirit.

Foreword copyright © 2002 by David Lehman

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Excerpted from The Best American Poetry 2002 by Robert Creeley, David Lehman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.