The Best American Poetry 2014
As for the poems themselves, it was the usual mixed bag of many I liked, and many I had no clue as to what they were trying to say. Rather than come off like an obtuse poser, I'll just comment on the poems I liked. Several of them have dynamite opening lines, such as Erin Belieu's "Birds":
"It's all Romeo and Juliet--
hate crimes, booty calls, political
assassinations.
Who's more Tybalt than the Blue Jay?
More Mercutio than the mockingbird?"
Or the simple opening declaration:
"It takes an American
to do really big things."
This is in the poem "Control" by Rae Armantrout, and in those nine words I felt the entire history of the Western world rush by me.
Or Traci Brimhall's "To Survive the Revolution":
"I, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed
all wrath and blessing and wearing
my husband's beard, whispers, tell me who
you suspect. He fools we the same way every time,
but never punishes me the same way twice."
My favorite opening line is from Marty McConnell's "vivisection (you're going to break my heart)," which is really nothing more than a breakup poem:
"the frog ready for inspection, skin flaps
opened and pinned back, organs
arrayed for the taking--this is how
I approach you"
Many of the poems reflect race in all its problems and manifestations, such as "News from Harlem," by Kwame Dawes, Camille Dunghy's "Conspiracy (to breathe together)":
"Last week, a woman smiled at my daughter and I wondered,
if she might have been the sort of girl my mother says spat on my aunt
when they were children in Virginia all those acts and laws ago."
There are poems from the Latin perspective, such as Ray Gonzalez's "One El Paso, Two El Paso":
"The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary
line between the living and the dead was erased years ago."
And even from the ironic white point of view, Tony Hoagland's "White Writer":
"It's been pointed out that my characters eat a lot
of lightly-braised asparagus
and get FedEx packages almost daily.
Yet I dislike being thought of as a white writer.
I never wanted to be limited like that."
A few of the poems are ingenious word puzzles. I have no idea what Anne Carson's poem "A Fragment of Ibykos Translated 6 Ways" is about, but I was intrigued by it. Ibykos was a poet of antiquity, and we get several different translations of one of his poems, although each gets filtered through something increasingly more surreal, such as Brecht's FBI file, a piece of Samuel Beckett's End Game, signs from the London Underground, and from the author's manual for a microwave oven.
And I really liked Jon Sands' "Decoded." I can't really quote anything from it, because it exists really only in its totality, but it is two poems in one, with each line separating a pair of words by a slash, so you can read each poem down, rather than across. "OK Cupid," by Major Jackson, is shaggy dog of a poem, that reminds me of the nursery rhyme "Mockingbird," which never ends. Jackson's poem is a series of comparisons about dating:
"Dating a Catholic is like dating a tribe
and dating a tribe is like dating a nation
and dating a nation is like dating a football star
and dating a football star is like dating a new car"
And so on, for another few hundred lines. It's a gas.
My two favorite poems of the collection are, in reverse order, Sandra Simonds' "I Grade Online Humanities Tests," which is at first whiff seems like a funny poem about the travails of a grad student, but has a real bite to it:
"I grade online humanities tests
at McDonald's where there are no black people
and there's a multiple choice question
or white people about Don Quixote
or Asian or Indian people."
As you can see, it's stream of consciousness, and mentions a poem by James Franco, Elliott Smith, and the Crown Vic.
The best poem, in my estimation, is Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke." I actually had heard of this poem, as Lockwood's youth and sex appeal had helped her get a lot of publicity in places where poets are usually verboten. It's obviously about an incident in her life that must be painful to deal with.
"The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee."
Lockwood is telling her story in the context, I think, of the controversy about whether "rape jokes" can be funny. By doing so, she slyly puts humor in the poem:
"The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke."
Lockwood is also aware of what writing this poem, which by my guess was the most famous poem written in 2013:
"The rape joke is if you write a poem Rape Joke, you're asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you."
Just last night I went to a social gathering of a writer's group I recently joined. Some people there wrote poetry, something I have never seriously attempted, because when I even think about it I can sort of imagine how horrible it would be. If I did write poetry, it would have to be the regimented kind, that rhymes and whatnot. I read these poems and see how every detail must be sweated over--the way the line breaks, whether capitalization is used, the indentations (I have attempted to reproduce my samples as closely as possible). All of this is done with the greatest forethought, and it all mystifies me.
Perhaps this line is the closest to the poet's creative life, from Greg Wrenn's "Detainment":
"In the undisclosed desert facility,
They strapped me to a steel table
and told me to recite the poem that
would save the world."
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