Julie Marie Wade<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 2001, I was heading to graduate school to pursue a Master\u2019s degree in creative writing.\u00a0 My Aunt Linda had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was moving home to live with her mother.\u00a0 We seemed to pass each other like ships in the night, or more precisely, like ferry boats in the Fauntleroy harbor.<\/p>\n
I wanted to give my aunt a gift that she would always remember.\u00a0 I tried to imagine what that gift might be.\u00a0 Aunt Linda, though shy about her artistic endeavors, had always loved painting and writing poems.\u00a0 The den at my grandmother\u2019s house was filled with her art books and brochures from museums she had visited in Europe.\u00a0 There were no poetry books that I could recall.<\/p>\n
On one of my last nights in Seattle, I browsed the shelves at Twice Sold Tales, my favorite used bookstore on Capitol Hill.\u00a0 There I found two copies of The Best American Poetry 2000.\u00a0 I did not know the series then.\u00a0 I sat on a stool and began reading the first poem in the anthology\u2014 Kim Addonizio\u2019s \u201cVirgin Spring\u201d\u2014which described in heartbreaking detail a film I had never seen.\u00a0 The final lines will always haunt me:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what to make of the sister. She\u2019s the one who knows the<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0world is brutal<\/span><\/p>\n and goes on, scattering seed for the hogs, the one who says nothing,<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0the one who survives.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I bought both copies of the anthology that night.\u00a0 One I kept for myself, and the other I gave to Aunt Linda, suggesting we read and discuss one poem each month by phone and email as a way of keeping in touch.<\/p>\n There are seventy-five poems in each issue of Best American Poetry.\u00a0 My aunt and I made it to forty before she died.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Guest editor Denise Duhamel writes in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2013, \u201cWalt Whitman knew that in order to have great poets we need to have great audiences.\u00a0 The readership of The Best American Poetry series is that audience\u201d (xxviii).\u00a0 While \u201cgreat,\u201d like \u201cbest,\u201d is an inherently subjective term, I like to think of my Aunt Linda and me as two distinctive facets of that audience.\u00a0 As a student, writer, and future teacher of poetry, The Best American Poetry series would soon become a staple of my education and an essential handbook for my literary career.\u00a0 (I know I am not alone here.)\u00a0 For Linda, the anthology was something else altogether\u2014an introduction to a world of contemporary poets she hadn\u2019t even realized was there.<\/p>\n \u201cIt sounds silly,\u201d she told me once, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t realize people still published poems.\u00a0 I thought American poetry died with Robert Frost.\u201d\u00a0 Sadly, I don\u2019t think my aunt is alone here either.<\/p>\n Like many people, she wrote poems and kept them to herself.\u00a0 When she read poems, they were always written by poets from long ago and far away.\u00a0 She had no context for the lively poetic conversation of the present day, which The Best American Poetry series both records and amplifies.\u00a0 I like to imagine if she had lived longer, our shared reading of Best American Poetry would have inspired her to write more poems, and perhaps one day, to send them out into the larger world.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Here are some facts about the 2013 edition of Best American Poetry that inspire me: 38 of the featured poets are female, 37 are male.\u00a0 As guest editor, Denise Duhamel selected the most female poets ever included in a single issue of the series.\u00a0 I value Duhamel\u2019s commitment to gender parity.\u00a0 Of the 75 poets she chose to include, 13 are \u201cemerging poets,\u201d having published only one poetry collection to date or no collections at all.\u00a0 I value Duhamel\u2019s commitment to literary potential, honoring the future of American poetry as well as its past.\u00a0 The new issue also includes the first collaborative poem ever to appear in the series, co-written by Angela Veronica Wong and Amy Lawless and compellingly titled \u201cIt Can Feel Amazing to Be Targeted by a Narcissist.\u201d\u00a0 Here especially, I value Duhamel\u2019s commitment to innovation as companion to tradition, and not its rival.<\/p>\n Denise Duhamel pledges in her introduction: \u201cThis edition represents excellence and inclusivity, neither at the expense of the other.\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s test this premise.\u00a0 What\u2019s your pleasure?\u00a0 Do you like epistolary poems?\u00a0 If so, then consider Traci Brimhall\u2019s \u201cDear Thanatos,\u201d which begins, \u201cI did what you told me to,\/ wore antlers and the mask, danced\/ in the untilled field, but the promised\/ ladder never dropped from the sky.\u201d\u00a0 Thematically, this poem might lead you to \u201cDeath\u201d by Kwame Dawes or \u201cThis Need Not Be a Comment on Death\u201d by Daisy Fried or \u201cThanatosis\u201d by Elizabeth Hazen.<\/p>\n Or perhaps Brimhall\u2019s letter poem will lead you to other intimate encounters with the second person, like Maureen Seaton\u2019s \u201cChelsea\/Suicide,\u201d which whispers to a close in the wistful subjunctive: \u201cIf you\u2019d lived you\u2019d be asleep now beside me, bent around me like an aura, keeping me safer than I ever thought I had the right to be.\u201d<\/p>\n For as much thanatos as you will find in this collection, there is also eros in abundance.\u00a0 Duhamel has assembled nothing if not a collection as balanced as it is bold.\u00a0 In \u201cI take your T-shirt to bed again\u2026\u201d, Amy Lemmon writes, \u201cI\u2019ve washed my clothes in your soap,\/ but that wasn\u2019t it\u2014there must be something sweet your pores\/pour forth.\u201d\u00a0 In \u201cSong,\u201d Dorianne Laux sings, \u201clet me touch\/ the rosary of your spine,\/ your wing nubs [\u2026]\u00a0 Let me hold you a moment longer\/ in my mortal arms and sway.\u201d\u00a0 Mortality, after all, is what love and death have in common.<\/p>\n Anna Journey\u2019s \u201cWedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned\u201d braids a private love story with a public tragedy through a series of elegant juxtapositions: \u201cThat night\/ we first met, I had another lover\/ but you didn\u2019t\/ care.\u00a0 [\u2026] \u201cYou whispered,\/ Guilt is the most\/ useless emotion.\u00a0 After Natalie rolled\/ into the waves, the wet feathers\/ of her down coat wrapped\/their white anchors\/ at her hips.\u201d\u00a0 Here they are again, paratactic: love and death.<\/p>\n You want an occasion poem, you say?\u00a0 What about Ed Ochester\u2019s \u201cNew Year,\u201d which begins \u201cafter calling our son & daughter\/ to wish them happy & good luck\/ we get to bed early but get\/ a phone call from my mother\/ who died in April.\u201d\u00a0 Or Paisley Rekdal\u2019s \u201cBirthday Poem,\u201d which begins, \u201cIt is important to remember that you will die\u201d but goes on to suggest, \u201cPerhaps the worst thing\/ in the world would be to live forever.\/ Otherwise what would be the point\/ of memory, without which\/ we would have nothing to hurt\/ or placate ourselves with later?\u201d\u00a0 Here love and death return for their second encore.<\/p>\n But what about a poem in a traditional form?\u00a0 What about a sonnet?\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 You might like Anne Marie Rooney\u2019s \u201cLake Sonnet,\u201d which is also a birthday poem and a love poem: \u201cIt was July.\u00a0 It was my birthday. I\/ was still drinking then.\u00a0 I went with the men\/ to a lake with no clothing on.\u201d\u00a0 If we look a little closer, we might even find it\u2019s a bit thanatoptic, too: \u201cThough from there the summer breaks\/ off it felt sharp and bright through that last hour,\/like glass fired to gold before it breaks.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh, you\u2019re teaching a class in Cultural Studies, you say?\u00a0 In Women\u2019s & Gender & Sexuality Studies?\u00a0 Does this book have anything to offer in the way of \u201cidentity poems?\u201d\u00a0 Why, yes!\u00a0 What about \u201cXX\u201d by Sally Wen Mao: \u201cThere my mother\/ was, half-asleep in her gender,\/ and there my sister\/ was, locked inside her purity panoply.\u201d\u00a0 Or Aaron Smith\u2019s \u201cWhat It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith,\u201d which engages you immediately, before you even realize you\u2019re in the presence of a poem: \u201cThough you would never admit it, you\u2019re still shocked by pubic hair in Diesel ads on Broadway and Houston, and you wonder what conversations lead up to a guy posing with his pants unzipped to the forest.\u201d\u00a0 Or Stacey Waite\u2019s \u201cThe Kind of Man I Am at the DMV,\u201d which my own students actually applauded when I read the poem aloud in class: \u201clearning the failure of gender\u2019s tidy little\/ story about itself.\u00a0 I try not to look at him\/ because, yes that man is a girl.\u00a0 I, man, am a girl.\u201d\u00a0 They make you want to read on, don\u2019t they, these fearless identity poets?<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say my Aunt Linda would like all the poems in this edition of Best American Poetry.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t like all the poems in the 2000 edition either.\u00a0 She thought some were \u201ctoo radical\u201d and others \u201ctoo weird,\u201d but what matters is that the poems spurred us forward in our conversations.\u00a0 They gave us something to mull over, sometimes something to debate about, and often something to mutually appreciate\u2014as pleasing as a sunset on a clear day over Puget Sound.<\/p>\n In this volume, I try to imagine what poem my Aunt Linda would say is her favorite.\u00a0 I\u2019m always partial to the meta-poems myself, like Adrienne Su\u2019s \u201cOn Writing\u201d or Major Jackson\u2019s \u201cWhy I Write Poetry.\u201d\u00a0 Su begins, \u201cA love poem risks becoming a ruin\u201d and later posits, \u201cWho cares about\/ a stranger\u2019s bliss?\u201d\u00a0 In his litany of reasons why he turns to poetry, Major Jackson presents a credible answer to Su\u2019s question: \u201cBecause I have not thanked enough.\u201d\u00a0 Isn\u2019t sharing your joy with others always a valid expression of gratitude?<\/p>\n I suspect my aunt would like these poems, too, though she might balk at the way they speak directly to the reader, poets as poets addressing the nature of poetry.\u00a0 She always favored poems that moved quietly, stealthily, poems that turned their gaze outward to the poetry of other people\u2019s lives.\u00a0 I think she would have liked Richard Blanco\u2019s inaugural poem very much.\u00a0 I think she would have looked at me and nodded, \u201cNow that\u2019s a poem\u201d before rising to refill her coffee.<\/p>\n I think of Aunt Linda especially as I read the final lines of \u201cAll-American\u201d by David Hernandez: \u201cSome of us sell flowers.\/ Some of us cut hair.\u00a0 Some of us carefully\/ steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.\/ Some of us paint houses.\u00a0 Some of us monitor\/ the power grid.\u00a0 Some of us ring you up\/ while some of us crisscross a parking lot\/ to gather the shopping carts into one long,\/ rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.\u201d\u00a0 She would have liked his perspective.\u00a0 She would have liked his attention to the people we often forget.<\/p>\n The closing image of Hernandez\u2019s poem is also an apt metaphor for what Denise Duhamel has done here: how she has assembled such vibrant and eclectic voices into one \u201clong, rolling, clamorous and glittering\u201d collection\u2014a collection as cohesive as it is diverse, as unique as it is unified.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Fourteen years later, Kim Addonizio appears on the first page of this edition, too.\u00a0 Her poem is \u201cDivine,\u201d another song of survival sung in a different key:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Something bad had to happen<\/p>\n because no trouble, no story, so<\/p>\n Fuck you, fine, whatever,<\/p>\n here come more black trees<\/p>\n hung with sleeping bats<\/p>\n like ugly Christmas ornaments.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As with all the great poems, all the best poems, I wasn\u2019t sure whether to laugh or cry.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Julie Marie Wade In 2001, I was heading to graduate school to pursue a Master\u2019s degree in creative writing.\u00a0 My Aunt Linda had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was moving home to live with her mother.\u00a0 We seemed to pass each other like ships in the night, or more precisely, like ferry boats 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