I approached reviewing this book with a stratagem—blinding the names—and then I read the poems randomly. It was liberating to concern myself only with the lines and not to focus on the authors and their accolades. I couldn’t see who wrote what and I did not read the introduction. I still recall the 2015 anthology, which included a poem that fooled editor Sherman Alexie because a white poet had used an Asian-sounding name.
All I knew going in was that the editor of this particular book in the series is Natasha Trethewey.
On the whole the poems in this installment of the Best American Poetry series work beautifully—readers are reminded of these dire times in some truly memorable lines. In “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz” (p. 100) the sparest lines recount what we’ve all been reading in the news. If lasting poetry is news that stays news, this poem doesn’t expend energy on embellishment and hits the mark like a stray bullet to the heart. I was wounded anew as a witness reading
Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?
Those same children
also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing
on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs
as they eat at McDonald’s.
They shouldn’t have to stop
to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might
reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,
I had one student
who opened a door and died.
The ending provides nearly the only poetic device, a metaphor: “The deadbolt of discourse/sliding into place.”
Like many of the poems in this book this is a necessary poem of witness. It illustrates our terrible situation as a nation dealing with the two-headed monster of racism and gun violence, recounting a litany of school shootings and the lack of resolution in dealing with the problem as gun violence rages again and again.
The late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, a poet I admire, haunts this anthology. He wrote “What is poetry [that] does not save nations or people?” Many of the poems in this book aim to do both through the ancient arc of song and narrative storytelling.
The poem “Emanations” (p. 117) seems like a lone outcropping among the other poems because it doesn’t deal with the weighty themes in much of the rest of the book. Its long laborious lines are riddled with ampersands and general observations. Whitmanic in its intent, this poem is journalistic, and although it aspires to some rhythmic driving force, it has little, so this excerpt of what may have been a longer poem seems prosaic. As a meditation on a journey to Big Sur—the land of Robinson Jeffers—it holds our interest nevertheless.
"Infinitives” (p. 163), one of the best poems in the anthology, “is a list of the aforementioned grammatical constructions."
...To walk around all day buttoned wrong.
Light is coming from rocks, the little froggie
jumps even though he hasn’t been wound up.
Here’s where the wolves before us drank.
Too long, we have cock-blocked
day from mating with night.
The world is bluer than I thought.
To be stopped at security
for sobbing.
This anthology contains gems revealed after repeated readings. Some of the confluences became more apparent —finding the word “tor” in the poem “Elegy with Gold Cradle” (p. 20) after reading the poem about Jeffers (p. 117) that ends with a visit to his beloved Tor House. These details provide a continuity that make the book cohere as a whole. It is an excellent read.
Quite a few poems in this anthology are imbued with a haunting musical quality. Some are redolent of the blues and others remind this reader of the passion and reverence of a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
As in “Money Road” (p. 164), things in America are not always what they seem and the past hasn’t passed although many in white America would like to ignore that fact. Driving along in the poem
On the way to Money,
Mississippi we see little
ghosts of snow, falling faint
as words while we try to find
Robert Johnson’s muddy
maybe grave. Beside Little Zion,
along the highwayside, this stone
keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana
Hot Sauce—the ground giving
way beneath our feet.
The blues always dance
cheek to cheek with a church—
“Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds” (p. 89) is a sort-of double helix of a poem because of its extreme attentiveness to enjambment. The title bleeds directly into a first-person account of a bird encounter that morphs into a rambling series of associations. The poem doesn’t quite cohere, although it does swoop into and out of a multiplex of memories.
Later I came upon a poem titled “Double Helix,” which does not resemble a double helix in formal structure. In fact, it consists primarily of paragraph blocks.
So we, the Jewish son and African daughter, mouths bursting & soured
with flowers & fauna, rotting leaves & peonies & men banging at the
midnight door, stood as an ecosystem of gas & fire, double helixes &
light, the story of-, the choices of-, our fathers knotted between us.
& because I wanted to touch his face as my own, & because I felt his
skin shudder as my own, understood his father’s stubble as my own &
because what are we if not our brothers? & because there has always
been binding & burning & escaping & enduring & because I know no
better way to understand the history of humans than to tell you the
story of my father’s choice to be a raft on a lake, which, no matter what
more you might be told, is the true story of black thought, black life,
black people in America.
These stories of how America mistreats its citizens left me angry and wanting to do more to become involved in finding solutions. And the mode for this prognosis essentially fits most readily into a first-person account—abstraction would muddle it. So these songs create a bridge directly to the reader to provide urgency and immediacy. Form follows function.
There’s a healthy dose of skepticism in a few of the poems. Some take aim at “modernism” itself, although advances in poetics, ie theory, have less to do with the confines of aesthetics than they once did. I wasn’t exactly sure how literary modernism is being characterized in the following:
In “Commotion of the Birds” (p. 5)
It’s good to be modern if you can stand it.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare.
This latest installment in the Best American Poetry series is intellectually rigorous and also packs a visceral punch. Light on abstraction it relies on concrete particulars, and its pitch and yaw sent me flying. I was impressed by its multitude of voices. Given these perilous times this anthology should be required reading.
_____
Poet and editor Larry Sawyer has curated the Myopic Poetry Series in Chicago since 2005 and is the co-director of The Chicago School of Poetics. His books include Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Press), Breaking Lorca (White Hole Press), and Vertigo Diary (BlazeVox Books).
Comments