The Best American Poetry

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: JANUARY 4, 2023

Today’s poem is by Anjanette Delgado—a powerhouse of a Miami writer. She has mostly written prose—the novels The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, with a third novel and a short story collection forthcoming in 2024. She’s also the editor of the multi-genre anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness. Please welcome her to poetry-land!

SUICIDE BLOUSE

The blue silk blouse 
breaks before it 
grazes my ribs. 

I don’t want to die. 
I want to kill 
myself, my elbows 

splayed above, up, 
over my head stuck 
in the textile, in its steel, 

my fat—trapped—as if 
I were praying to the skinny 
girl, all B cups and bones, 

I’m told lives inside 
my excess brown 
pounds forced to wear 

Lycra. That girl stretches, 
then screams, this is no way 
to breathe, or be— 

still, why can’t silk 
slide, graceful, on its way 
down? A lovely puddle 

of blue, diving, unworn, 
headfirst into the ground 
beside my feet. 

It’s art, says the skinny 
girl then, and she’s not 
talking about me.

(first published in SWIMM, December 15, 2022)

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: DECEMBER 28, 2022

Happy New Year, everyone!  Here is a poem by Ted Kooser.

 

YEAR'S END 

Now the seasons are closing their files

on each of us, the heavy drawers

full of certificates rolling back

into the tree trunks, a few old papers

flocking away. Someone we loved

has fallen from our thoughts,

making a little, glittering splash

like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.

Otherwise, not much has happened;

we fell in love again, finding that

one red feather on the wind.

 

"Year's End" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: DECEMBER 21, 2022

For today’s post, I point you in the direction of Chard deNiord’s “Tablet” which explicates/expands upon the surviving tablets of the epic poem Gilgamesh. Using anaphora, permutations of language, and big “what if” questions, Chard brilliantly opens up this epic for yet another generation.

Tablet

          All that is left to one who grieves
          Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual
          Conversion, for the heart has changed
          And the soul has been converted
          To a thing that sees
          How much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
                       —Gilgamesh, translated by Herbert Mason

Had the king of Uruk never wrestled Enkidu,
the wild man of the steppe, and just barely defeated him
on points, he never would have fallen in love with him
with a love that was greater than that for a woman,
nor asked him to go hunting with him in the Sacred Forest
for the monster guardian, Humbaba, the beginning
of history as an ageless story would never have happened.

Had the king never suffered the loss of himself
in another, he never would have known himself
as someone less than himself without his beloved,
nor hurt with a grief that rendered him listless,
although he called his suffering “nothing” with a smile
to the face of the Queen of Heaven, who craved
his devotion but couldn’t have it—his only solace
for being human.
                                  Had he not grieved so deeply,
he never would have grown into the comedian he did,
nor swum to the bottom of the Sacred River to pick
the flower that the shaman said would bless him forever,
nor almost drowned while diving for that blossom
with a godlike breath, nor tasted the salt in the river
that cursed him with a thirst for wine and hatred
of mirrors, nor mastered the art of curling his tongue

around the diphthong in death, nor learned
how to say the single sound of e, a, and u
at the center of beauty, nor loosened his grip
on the thorny flower as he slept on the beach
oblivious of the snake traversing his body,
then hissing to the darkness, “Only I am eternal,”
nor dreamed of grilling a gazelle stewed in garlic,
then eating it with his wife and children
in a joyous reunion at the marble table
in his hyacinth garden.
                                         Had he never slept
so deeply, he would have felt the serpent absconding
with his flower into the forest where she devoured
it whole, then shed her skin, he never would have made
his way back home with his grief for his friend,
nor gained the knowledge of how to read the text
of the clouds as one long sentence that spelled his end,
nor discovered the secret of how to string
the smallest things together as he spent the rest
of his life ruling his kingdom, building a wall around
his city, telling stories to his brilliant children, planting
his garden throughout the morning, happy with his title
Comedian King, lying in his hammock, dreaming
and waking, waking and dreaming.

from Issue #240, Summer 2022, Paris Review. 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: DECEMBER 14, 2022

Stephanie Burt's We Are Mermaids was published earlier this year. It's a delightful look at the emotional difficulties and triumphs of girlhood, the places of watery air and airy water, the brackishness of in-between spaces. The gorgeous poems are about trans identity, yes, but also about all the ways everyone—trans or not—has inner superpowers wanting to be unleashed. Below is Stephanie's poem "My 1994" (first published on Scoundrel Time) as a sampler. Congratulations, Stephanie!

 

MY 1994

I didn’t know. But I knew. I took off the dress
Kay offered and apologized for my striped boxers.

I called myself a kid in a candy store
When I was a teen in a lingerie store. I wanted

To move to a place I knew secondhand, from TV,
To Top Shop, Boots, postcodes in England-land. I had mixed up

The opposite of nostalgia—a longing to be
Some place I could never call home—with my wish

To become someone new. There’s a wasp between
My windowpane and its wire-mesh screen. She wants

To get out. She hovers and dives towards some
Way, not knowing there can be no

Way unless someone unlocks the glass and lifts
The window itself and lets the wasp into the room.

For you read me. I wanted to write a book and I told
Everybody I knew that I wanted to write a book

About the softest pop groups I could find:
The boys wore striped sailor shirts and they sang

Like girls and the girls wore striped sailor dresses and sang
Like every first kiss was simultaneously

The Holy Grail and no big deal, which was true
And is true. The Field Mice. Heavenly. Blueboy. I loved

Them all. I love them all. The demand that we shed
Our previous selves is garbage. We are not wasps

And need not leave our shells behind. I had
To move to England to see them where they lived.

They said that love could break a boy’s heart,
Keith Girdler sang. I think there’s no such thing.

I wore the sailor shirts but not the floppy collars.
My then-best friend gave me bad advice about passing,

Telling me women dress for one another.
Never for ourselves. My then-girlfriend needed

To date a boy. I was glad to help her find one.
I didn’t know. But I knew. Maybe everyone did.

The wasp rams the glass, black and gold. I thought I wanted
To free myself from my body, which was

Not possible. Land
On this windowsill with me.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: DECEMBER 7, 2022

As the year draws to an end, I’m thinking of other kinds of endings. Victoria Redel's  “Ode to Menopause” was first published in SWWIM on November 7, 2022.  And Lucille Clifton’s poem “to my last period” is from Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton.

 

Ode to Menopause

Victoria Redel

I miss the blood.
The plush, thick insistence. Lunar declaration, my flag.
Then years living together, mysterious reconciling,
not that we were always a sister nation,
didn’t bitch, get bitchy, blame everything
on a knot that bellied down, rumped me to my knees.
& those gym passes, Coach too embarrassed
to challenge how it stretched on for weeks.
Now I’m missing cash registers where I averted my eyes,
the rectangle box a public admission, & yes,
let’s bless the shyness of teenage boys bagging,
handing back change & what happened
between us, a moment, electric—what was it?
—cringe, tease, apology, brag—
that we were actually bodies walking around
with the whole screwy, beautiful, damaged
human history of bodies. & bless too,
the anti-corporate, vinegar-cleansed sponges
& menstrual cup years I bannered to take back
body and night. & let this be praised:
how his cock looked crimson sheathed,
how his face came up smeary & I tasted iron on his tongue.
Destroyers, we were—sheets, mattress,
my own sticky fingers—our carnage, &
oh, that muscled relief of coming.
& then the just-after, cleaned-out days,
follicular, ovules burst, dropping luteal.
Call this bat shit nostalgic, but here’s to the crazy-making
late months, that haze of calculation & fret,
stalled in doorways practicing conversations I didn’t want.
Once, on my knees in a summer field, I prayed.
Then the stain of forgiveness, like blessing.
Here, right now, an official thank you
to every public library, office, gas station, airplane,
restaurant, concert port-o-potty, state park bathroom
where, behind latched stalls, I angled in
smooth cardboard & also, too, to strangers,
ladies who helped when I was an empty purse,
not a scrounged coin to turn the metal dispensary
for this nest I shed month after month
after year after decade like it was nothing,
a tag-along, the occasional phew, other times the rebuke,
fertility failure, but never once did I acknowledge
did I really consider, what it gave the rest of me:
brain, skin, bones, tissues, memory, sleep, mood,
until it was gone. For months. Then back.
Back out of whack rollercoaster of a coda,
odd day, whole month wallops uncontainable,
dinners or meetings unfinished before torrent,
final rampage, this sorcery of woman
the ancients believed could stop lightening.
And then it stopped. Really. Forever. Period.

 

You can read Lucille Clifton's "to my last period" here: 

https://poets.org/poem/my-last-period

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Edward Hirsch’s 100 Poems to Break Your Heart hurts so good, as John Mellencamp once sang.

This anthology collects poems from Wordsworth (1815) to Meena Alexander (2018) in order to showcase grief in its many manifestations. Hirsch provides mini-essays following each poem to contextualize the work, including information on the author’s life and the social/political times in which it was written. Hirsch includes not only poets who write in English but translations from the Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. It is estimated that as of today the world has lost 6.62 million to Covid-19—and the real number is likely higher. We all are grieving someone or something, a tradition or a pre-Covid ritual now gone. 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is in line with Hirsch’s poetry advocacy, a continuation of his How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Ecco, 2000) as well as his own stunning elegiac Gabriel: A Poem (Knopf, 2014). Included in 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is one of my favorite poems by Muriel Rukeyser:

 

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

 

I lived in the first century of these wars.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE NOVEMBER 23

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy Richard Blanco’s poem “America,” which portrays how his family celebrated the holiday.

https://richard-blanco.com/book/city-of-a-hundred-fires/america/

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: NOVEMBER 16, 2022

In the latest issue of Persimmon Tree, Cynthia Hogue curates a suite of poems on “Lament, Rage, and Resistance” focusing on the voices of second wave feminist poets Karen Brennan, Aliki Barnstone, Patricia Spears Jones, Kathleen Winter, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Frances Payne Adler, Monifa Love, Pamela Uschuk, Ronna Magy, Mary Gilliland, and Tess Gallagher. Check out Tess’s exquisite poem.

THE POETS DECIDE TO KEEP THE MOON

Although the general imaginative capacity
might seem to have been plundered by a man
having set foot on the moon, poets decided,
without deciding, to just keep dropping it
into their poems as if nothing much had
happened. They let it shine down on lovers
as an ancient power and, in the bedtime stories
of children, you still had to say goodnight
to it. My part Cherokee mother was alive

at the time this man-step took
place. I remember her black hair falling
to her waist like a horse-hair shawl when
she took it in: “So a man walked on the moon,”
she said. “They have been walking on women
for years and haven’t discovered them. I
think the moon is safe.” She could be severe,
like someone who would leave you to die

on the mountain when your time came. “The moon
carried your great-grandmother out of a river once
when it flooded her bed in the night,” she said.
“She climbed on its back and it floated her
to shore.” Then my mother went back to her
astonishment that while men could walk on the moon
they continued to walk on women, years into
years, moons into moons, without realizing
step into step, they were on sacred
soil, the far off flesh of their birth into death into

birth mothers. We sat silent together
trying to take in such ignorance and star-fall.
Soon it was time for breakfast. The moon
had forgotten us altogether. I shook out some
Cheerios into our bowls, those dependable moons
with holes in the middle that miraculously
float in milk. We took up our spoons
like two planetary insurgents, women
brave enough, every day, for the journey.

You can read all the poems here:

https://persimmontree.org/special-issue-2022/poetry/

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: Jill Bialosky's "The Deceptions"

POET AS PROTAGONIST: JILL BIALOSKY’S THE DECEPTIONS

Jill Bialosky’s latest novel is driven by a poet narrator—her ambition, her intelligence, her desire and all that has been squelched. This protagonist will fascinate any reader who has felt marginalized, belittled, and erased by the patriarchy. THE DECEPTIONS unfolds as a narrative of awakening, an education in Greek gods and goddesses (including photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and a literary critique. The poet is a spouse and mother (a new empty nester), a teacher, a daughter to an ailing mother, and a mentor to a young literary neighbor. The poet’s world is upended when a more famous Visiting Poet comes to the all-boy’s school where she works. She shares with him her ambitious book manuscript, sonnet crowns which reimagine Leda and Zeus. Bialosky’s protagonist is in conversation with Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” (with which the books opens) and, in many ways, also with Maxine Kumin’s “Pantoum, With Swan.”

https://www.poemist.com/maxine-kumin/pantoum-with-swan

I’m hesitant to say much more than this as the twists and turns lead to an explosive conclusion of THE DECEPTIONS. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Congratulations, Jill! -- Denise Duhamel

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE

Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On was published yesterday. The book engages with the perilous now—the climate crisis, political cruelty, marginalization—while reaching back in time (the comfort women of World War II, for example) to speculations of the future. Choi’s vision is wide-eyed, giving us one horrific apocalyptic gesture at a time, rather than a big “end of the world” moment. They point out generations who have already lived through their own apocalypse in such poems as “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Fuel.” When reading Choi’s book I was reminded of Danielle Moodie aka @DeeTwoCents. In her post “Thoughts this morning on the end of the world,” she says “This is actually the worst part…I gotta work through this shit?”

https://twitter.com/DeeTwoCents/status/1578404945874886657?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

While Danielle Moodie is darkly funny, Franny Choi writes with reverence and tenderness as demonstrated in these lines: We knew the end was/coming here./We knew it/and like idiots—like perfect idiots—/we stayed.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a wise and engaging collection. You can read Choi’s title poem here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151513/the-world-keeps-ending-and-the-world-goes-on

Congratulations, Franny!

Wednesdays with Denise

VOODOO LIBRETTO AND THE SEIBLES’ VILLANELLE

In February of 2022, Tim Seibles published Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems. This essential volume—close to 300 pages of veracious verse--spans the cutting edge career of a self-described “black baby boomer.” Terrance Hayes has written a wonderful review in the form of a board game. Hayes includes a charts contextualizing Seibles’ poems with cultural shifts or “the measure of time in the body of work and in the body of Tim Seibles in America, and the spirit of his poems on earth.”

https://yalereview.org/article/terrance-hayes-tim-seibles

One of the most glorious poetic gestures Seibles employs is what I call “the Seibles Villanelle.” In these poems, he elongates the villanelle to 25 lines and combines it with the blues for stunning results:

https://poets.org/poem/all-time-blues-villanelle

Congratulations, Tim!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE (October 19, 2022): NEW OHIO REVIEW

Did you ever get an issue of a literary magazine that you find yourself returning to again and again? For me, that is New Ohio Review, Issue 31 published this summer. When first getting NOR in the mail, I scanned the TOC and immediately went to Jeffrey Harrison’s poem “A Message from Tony Hoagland.”

https://newohioreview.org/2022/08/26/a-message-from-tony-hoagland/#more-27207

Tony passed away four years ago now, on October 23, 2018. This same volume of NOR also contains two of Tony’s poems as well as two by Kathleen Lee, Tony’s beloved widow.

https://newohioreview.org/2022/08/18/sad-as-is/#more-27265

https://newohioreview.org/2022/08/19/late-dark-and-windy/#more-27243

The issue ends with Dean Young’s poem “O Youthfulness.” Dean passed on August 23, 2022, shortly after this NOR issue was published.  He and Tony were friends and wrote poems in which each other appeared as characters.  Tony’s and Dean’s poems do not appear on the NOR online site, but the print issue is more than worth the price!

Here are earlier poems Tony and Dean wrote to each other…

https://whatnarcissismmeanstome.tumblr.com/post/3623714914/when-dean-young-talks-about-wine-tony-hoagland

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=48665

Wednesdays with Denise (October 12, 2022): The Prose Poem

T This ‘Wednesday with Denise” is devoted to the prose poem, such as those included in Short (edited by Alan Ziegler) or, if you can find it, Michael Benedikt's anthology The Prose Poem.

I encourage you, too, to take a trip around the world via the prose poems in ARC. Prose poets in this anthology—from England, Ireland, the Philippines, Iraq, Nigeria, Australia, and Tunisia—appear alongside names more familiar to an American audience like Joan Mazza, Rikki Santer, and Ron Padgett. Dr. Pragma Suman, ARC’s editor, includes an interview with featured poet Peter Johnson.

https://www.arcmagazine.co.in/_files/ugd/7b4db6_376a3a14987649e4a57b8cd1b4441b24.pdf

Peter Johnson is also the editor of the seminal magazine The Prose Poem: An International Journal, which was published from 1992-1999. The archives are available here:

https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/about.html

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE
October 5, 2022

Sharon Olds’ latest book BALLADZ was published yesterday. It is a tour de force of mature, startling, haunting poems that reach over time from the speaker’s childhood to the recent pandemic, from first loves to present day romance and loss, concluding with a series of wise, powerful elegies. The book also plays homage to poetic lineage, most notably a suite of poems in conversation with Emily Dickinson. Olds also acknowledges a slew of poetry friendships and their sustaining power. Here is just one example in which she writes a poem “like a mate for Galway’s ‘Bear.’”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/a-song-near-the-end-of-the-world

And here is the late Galway Kinnell’s poem:
https://poets.org/poem/bear

Congratulations, Sharon!

In the photo above, Sharon Olds (right), David Lehman (center), and Gerald Stern (left) prior to the "Best American Poetry" launch reading of 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.