The Best American Poetry

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Terrance Hayes

A Small Novel

The protagonist spends the first twenty pages
crossing a bridge wearing nothing but red
swimming trunks and sneakers with no socks.

I can remember standing naked
outside my neighbor’s window at fourteen
when I read the paragraph about the placard of night

held up by pine trees.
Where ever there is a mention of solitude or desire
I think, without wanting to, of Race. Race

when the protagonist spends a page long sentence
trying to work free a knot of shoe string
in his basketball sneaker. Race

when he spends the hot seasons of his twenties
like a beggar with no mouth. Race
when he tells his wife: “There are no Open Houses

on Easter.” Late in the book he feels himself
becoming a shadow. On page 113 just as I reach
the final sentence about traffic like the sound of wind

like the sound of water, a horn yelps somewhere.
“It was all he’d ever known of rivers…”
I pencil L.H. in the margin. I think, without wanting to,

That they will find this book someday
and turn its muddy bosom all golden in the sunset.
On its blank last page I write the poem

“The Blue Langston” which begins:
“O Blood of the River songs, O songs of the River of Blood,”
and ends: “There was nothing I could do about Race.”

-- Terrance Hayes

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no.
and Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)

_________________

Note by Judith Hall

         The poem amalgamates so elegantly the fictive and the lyric; and by “elegant,” I mean, etymologically, legible and then graceful.  It clearly, gracefully shows the act of reading as a defining act -- one capable of altering despondency into a poem about despondency.
          Hayes’ tone here is not entirely unlike Mark Strand’s comic angst in “Chekhov: A Sestina” -- another poem wherein a character contemplates what a characteristic act might be in both an unsympathetic world and a contestable form.
          Langston Hughes, though, is the key predecessor, the Hughes of The Big Sea (1940) and The Weary Blues (1926) and the Hughes who wrote, “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”  Let a young man’s “novel” leave the hard laughs to elders, if it shines by despondency alone. Yes?

Judith Hall presents a poem by Dorothea Tanning

EVENING

He told us, with the years, you will come
To love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
And comforted them.

-- Dorothea Tanning

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no. 1
and A Table of Content (Graywolf, 2004)

_________

Notes by Judith Hall

1. A note should not be longer than a poem.

2. Tanning’s “o” sounds -- her “come,” “love,” “comforted” struck against the longer “told” and “souls” – counterpoint with sonic half-companions despair. Music, though, does not ease affect, and the poem persuades, at least this reader, by suspending resolution.

3. Modest assonance? Is assonance modest? Erotic?

4. A note should spur – inspire? – a reader to reenter the poem.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Andrew Zawacki

Agrapha

Giving up isn’t giving in, but a different kind of poverty

And if we didn’t mention them all in order, it wasn’t our fault:

Our strength gave out before the daylight tapered,

Schedules were strict, the weddings obliged to go forward

Even with strangers involved, and sisters and mothers of strangers,

Playing Russian roulette with five bullets coughed into the chamber

And swallow the razor and other old parlor games,

Keeping appointments with overcoats and nautical charts of the crime

While someone kept telling lies about factory bylaws, saying

Don’t be afraid, I have called you by name, you are mine

And almost believing it, a survivor peddling insomnia’s cure,

Calculating which bridges to burn, which heretics, which beds:

A package that never arrived from a mispronounced province

Or a lightswitch left on overnight at the back of the hall,

Rehearsing the wreckage of telegrams, padlocks, and skeleton keys

And storms on the coast with other betrayers to please.

-- Andrew Zawacki

from The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, v. 57, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review often publishes poets who are “little known,” whose poems rise on their own merits out of immense slush.  So it was with “Agrapha,” one of  Andrew Zawacki’s first publications.

When it appeared later in his by reason of breakings (Georgia, 2002), the poet included a note on the title: “Agrapha is Greek for ‘the unwritten places.’  The italicized line is from Isaiah 43:1.”  The title thus introduces a paradox in space, and the italics confirm his uncanny tone – wry, sacred, both.

Posted above is the poems as it originally appeared. All inaugural capital letters -- except the first and the Isaiah -- were removed in by reason of breakings. To me, the capitals support line autonomy, increasing tension, by additionally resisting "unwritten places." Any comment? Debate? Dear reader?

Judith Hall presents a poem by Reetika Vazirani

Ghalib Speaks of His Poet Friends

All my life I’ve been amending their verses.
Now that I’m ill they write,
“You have not replied to my letter.”  As if I
could make their couplets rhyme,
          or rhyme slightly better.
Do they think I should live only
          to correct their verses!
Shah Alam Sahib and Tufta, they’re peevish
to the end: they think my ill health
          is a poetic exaggeration.

Without me they can versify or not versify;
it’s not for me to prod grown men
          at the eleventh hour.
If I’ve lost my tact, I’ll offend them,
but all my life glad comments on loose verse
offended me.  Now in pleasing myself,
I’ve lost the pleasure.  But hell with these grudges
          of the day, these small sentiments.
Let the newspapers print that I’m near death.
I’m not up to correcting the ghazals of a Tufta.

– Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003)
from The Antioch Review, Winter 1996, v. 54, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall 

          In 1995, I entered service as poetry editor of The Antioch Review. Much to my relief, my predecessor, David St. John, had already accepted poems for issues well into 1996.  Vazirani’s is one of his I claim.

          Her “Ghalib” is surely the 19th century poet who wrote in Urdu under that name.  “Ghazal”, an intricate Arabic form, is probably familiar to BAP readers; the word also means, according to Agha Shahid Ali, “the cry of the gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it will die.”  Form follows word here, and while a romantic editor would link this image to this poet. I will not. The complaints and witty tittle-tattle of Vazirani's Ghalib charm and need no justification.

         For the next several weeks, I will be your Sunday editor, succeeding the estimable Bruce Covey in this role. I hope you will enjoy the Antioch poems coming your way.