The Best American Poetry 2013
I have a confession: I often don't get poetry. I'm a fairly literate guy, and I love the idea of poetry, of the romantics like Byron and Shelley, the debauchery of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Beat Allen Ginsberg. But when I try to read it my eyes glaze over. I'm not quite sure that is, but don't think I'm alone. I just think I never learned how to read a poem.
But I rolled up my sleeves and read the 75 poems in this volume. As one might expect, they were all over the map. I liked some of them a great deal, and others might as well have been written in Urdu. Philistine that I am, I prefer poems that have a set structure, or that rhyme, and there were few of them here. But a good number of them I found intriguing.
Death was a pretty common subject. There were poems titled "Dear Thanatos" and "Thanatopsis." Two poems were about dead cats, including "Death," by Kwame Davis, which includes the lines:
"...you coax a black
cat to your fingers. You let it lick
milk and spit from your hand before
you squeeze its neck until it messes
itself, its claws tearing your skin,
its eyes growing into saucers.
A dead cat is light as a live
one and not stiff, not yet. You
grab its tail and fling it as
far as you can. The crows find
it first; by then the stench
of the hog pens hides the canker
of death."
Many other subjects were broached; it was something startling to see how many different subjects one can write a poem about. Titles of some of the poems are "George W. Bush," "Blazing Saddles," and "Albert Einstein." One of my favorites of the collection are a series of haikus by David Trinidad (I love haikus, one of the easiest and hardest forms to write) by all dealing with episodes of the TV series Peyton Place, one for each episode. Two of the best:
"Would you want Charles
Dickens read to you if you
were in a coma?"
"Amnesia might be
a blessing--best to forget
she's part of this script."
Some of my other favorites were "Divine," by Kim Addonizio:
"You lived on grapes and antidepressants
and the occasional small marinated mammal.
You watched DVDs that dropped
from the DVD tree."
Stephen Dunn's "The Statue of Responsibility"
"Imagine it's given to us as a gift
from a country wishing to overcome its own hypocrisy.
I can see someone standing up at a meeting
and saying, Give it to the Americans, they like
big things for their people, they like to live
in the glamour between exultation and anxiety.
Instead of an arm raised with a torch, let's insist
they cement its feet deep into the earth, burden it
with gigantic shoes--an emblem of the inescapable."
"Book of Forget" by Rebecca Hazelton
"I danced after the knife thrower threw
his blades and before the velvet clown kicked away
his chair and hung himself, his tongue thick and purple,
urine dribbling down to the boards."
Some of the poems had just one line that grabbed me, such as "All-American" by David Hernandez: "Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom's keyhole," and "I don't hunt but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back." Or "Five One-Minute Eggs," by Andrei Codrescu: "The German economy thrives because Germans make 'the thing that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.'"
My other favorites include "Pink Is the Navy Blue of India," by David Kirby, "Eggheads," by John Koethe, "Sugar Maples," by Richard Wilbur (it actually rhymes), and "Florida Poem," by Emma Trelles, which I quote in its entirety:
"After summer rains,
marble thumb snails and beetles
blot the window screens
with pearl and drone. Gardenias swell,
breathing is aquatic and travel
a long drawl from bed to world.
During drought,
the heat becomes a devil
girl with oven-red lips
who wants your brain puddled
in a brass-capped mason jar,
who wants the silver stripped
from your tongue, the evening pulse
between your legs, yes, she wants
everything from you."
The longest poem was "Joe Adamczyk," by Mitch Sisskind, about a Chicago bartender who late in life becomes an intellectual. It could be made into a lovely short film, as he leaves his wife, becomes absorbed in philosophy, and ends up having sex with the pizza delivery girl. A few standout stanzas:
"Also available were White Owl cigars,
And Cubs' home runs were called
White Owl Wallops by Jack Brickhouse
On the TV set above the bar.
But the Cubs lost during the 1950s."
and
"He gamahuched Karen Schmolke with startling
Enthusiasm. Cunt, slut and similar words
Eddied and swirled in his brain. Yet a logos,
A telos, was also disclosing itself, cleverly
interweaving his fucking with philosophy."
Gamahuched? What a great word! That's the thing about poets is that I learned by reading this book. No one makes a living as a poet--this is a labor of love. I'm frankly surprised that there is such a number of journals and magazines that publish poems. But they take things seriously, using their words extremely carefully, and the way the lines are structured, it's almost like an art.
Series editor David Lehman writes: "In America we have had stereotypes of the poet as clown prince, beatnik, nervous wreck, nature-loving recluse, world-besotted aesthete. Formerly an eccentric spinster, she may now be a self-actualized role model and possibly even a concerned citizen on PBS or NPR." Bless them all.
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