Best American Poetry 2016
Note: Số này,
có nhiều bài quá OK, Tin Văn đã giới thiệu 1 số bài, nay đi thêm 1 nhà thơ, cùng
lời còm của chính tác giả, về bài thơ của mình, và bài Intro của Edward Hirsch,
guest editor, khá dài, nhưng rất quan trọng, theo GCC.
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN
Sentence
000
No one
predicted we'd be sitting there,
just come in
from a blizzard to that bar,
and three
beached fishermen in the corner
would
interrupt their beans to stare at us,
then return
to eating, since we were strange,
but cold
enough to be left alone,
and that to
expect their calm dismissal
of our being
there showed we understood
how things
worked then, in the dead decades,
after most
of the city had vanished
on trains,
or had been drowned in foreign ports;
and
therefore, when the priest arrived
with his
ice-crusted shawl and frozen cross,
crooning
mangled hymns, his head gone to praise,
we'd think
it right to offer him a seat,
would carry
his stiff gloves to the fire,
and fill his
glass with wine and pass him bread,
and would
suffer the blessings he put
upon the
empty wombs of our soup bowls;
and who knew
we'd pretend to sing each verse
of the tune
he'd use to condemn us,
but would
have no answer to his slammed fist,
nor the
thing he'd yell to be overheard
by everyone
there-when you stand this close
to the other
side, don't embarrass yourselves
with hope-as
if that would be saying it all,
as if he
knew we already stood there,
as if we
could mount some kind of defense
before snow
turned back to water in his beard.
from Birmingham Poetry Review
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES AND COMMENTS
CHRISTOPHER
BAKKEN was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967. He is the author of three books
of poetry: Eternity & Oranges (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016), Goat Funeral
(Sheep Meadow, 2006), and After Greece (Truman State University Press, 2001).
He has also written a book of travel writing, Honey, Olives, Octopus:
Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press, 2013), and he is
co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (Truman
State UP, 2006). A former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest, he
teaches at Allegheny College and is director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki
and Thasos.
Of "Sentence," Bakken writes: "This poem was
written during a very cold night at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
An ice storm arrived during my residency and the power went out-so we had no
heat. I could see my breath inside my little studio, but words were coming to
me and so I stayed put, layering on every item of clothing I had with me, and
writing by flashlight at night. I'd been thinking about Greece, as I almost
always am, specifically about the winters there, when tourists depart, and the
rhythms of life and labor slow almost to a halt and the Greeks are left to
themselves.
"The encounter described in the poem was in part
remembered from the winter of 1993, when I lived in Thessaloniki, a beautiful, haunted
city, in the final decade of a brutal century-one that had brought to
Thessaloniki the devastations of the Holocaust, not to mention more recent
outbursts of xenophobia and violence. Just a few hours north, war was raging in
a place that had once been called Yugoslavia.
"As the poem's long, single sentence gathered momentum,
bringing new things to bear upon the scene, the frozen priest arrived and I let
him thaw."
Edward
Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the
University of Pennsylvania, where he received a PhD in folklore. For the
Sleepwalkers (1981), his first collection of poems, received the Delmore
Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets
Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wild Gratitude (1986), his second
book, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published seven
additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On
Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), The Living
Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length
elegy that received the National Jewish Book Award. He is the author of five
prose books, including A Poet's Glossary (2014), Poet's Choice (2006), and How
to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He
taught for six years in the English department at Wayne State University and
seventeen years in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
He is now president of the Guggenheim Foundation. He has received a MacArthur
Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential
Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He
lives in Brooklyn, New York
INTRODUCTION
by Edward Hirsch
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The lyric
poem has been practiced for more than four thousand years, and yet its history
is still unfolding today. It is very much alive. It has been spoken, chanted,
sung and written, compacted and compressed, expanded and enlarged. It has been
pictorialized on tablets, inked into papyrus, typed onto paper, generated in
virtual space. It is a non-utilitarian form of language sometimes put to
utilitarian ends, used to build nations and to undermine them, to reinforce
power and to protest it. In our era, it has been radically wrenched and
questioned, turned and twisted, stretched nearly beyond recognition, reframed,
reformed, hybridized, ecologized, politicized, erased-its difficulties are
notorious-and yet it continues to speak from the margins, to move and tell stories,
to disturb and console us. It engages our interior lives, social experiences,
planetary woes.
There are so many whirling crosswinds in contemporary
American poetry, so many voices and schools vying for attention in our cultural
noise that it can be difficult to sort things out, to understand the various issues
at play. Some of the conversation around contemporary aesthetics is serious,
much of it distracting or frivolous. What is the principle of our work, what is
the task, what is at stake for poetry now? I have often turned to the history
of poetry to try to comprehend our current situation. Perhaps it can also help
us figure out where we are going.
Lyric poetry has its roots in the Egyptian hieroglyph and the
Chinese ideogram, the Hebrew letter, the Greek alphabet. The Greeks defined the
lyric as a poem to be chanted or sung to the accompaniment of a lyre (lyra), the instrument of Apollo and
Orpheus, and thus a symbol of poetic and musical inspiration. It emerged from
religious ritual, tribal practice. "Poetry everywhere is inseparable in
its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance," the
linguist Edward Sapir writes. The first songs were most likely created to
accompany occasions of celebration and mourning. Prayer, praise, and
lamentation are three of the oldest subjects of poetry. We still recognize them
in various forms, such as psalms, odes, and elegies.
Aristotle distinguished three generic categories of poetry:
lyric, drama, and epic. This categorization evolved into three types or classes
determined by who is supposedly speaking in a literary work. The lyric, a poem
uttered through the first person, was distinguished from the drama and the epic
or narrative. It took the form of monodies, sung by individuals, or choral
odes, simultaneously sung and danced by a group of performers.
The lyric, especially the monody, was counter-posed against
the epic. Whereas the speaker of the epic acted as the deputy of a public
voice, a singer of tales narrating the larger tale of the tribe, the speaker of
the monody was a solitary voice speaking or singing on his or her own behalf.
The lyric poem thus opened up a space for personal feeling. It introduced a
subjectivity and explored our capacity for human inwardness. The intimacy of lyric
stood against the grandeur of epic, its exalted style and heroic themes, its
collective nostalgia. The short poem asserted the value and primacy of the
singular witness. Here was the quotidian and the sublime. Ever since Longinus
cited it as a supreme model of poetic intensity, we recognize the ferocity of Sappho's
poem of jealousy, her lyric meltdown phainetai
moi. And I can still hear the chirping of a cricket under the window of a
Chinese poet a thousand years ago.
The textbook division between lyric, drama, and epic is
helpful but flawed. "Like all well-conceived classifications," the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa writes in "Toward Explaining
Heteronymy," "this one is useful and clear; like all classifications,
it is false. The genres do not separate out with such essential facility, and,
if we closely analyze what they are made of, we shall find that from lyric
poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect, and going
right to the origins of dramatic poetry-Aeschylus, for instance-it will be
nearer the truth to say that what we encounter is lyric poetry put into the
mouths of different characters."
The lyric shades off into the dramatic utterance. Poems
become dramatic when we get the sensation of someone speaking, when we hear a
poem, in Robert Frost's words, "as sung or spoken by a person in a
scene-in character, in a setting." That can be the case even when the
author seems to be speaking in his or her own voice. ''When I state myself, as
the Representative of the Verse," Emily Dickinson cautioned Thomas
Higginson in a letter, "it does not mean-me-but a supposed person."
That's why Dickinson's assertion is as true for Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath,
so-called confessional poets who intentionally collapsed the distance between
the persona and the writer, as it is for Robert Browning, the master of what he
termed "dramatic lyrics," and I Ezra Pound, whose book Personae
established the masks at the center of his work. Creating a persona, even a
close or naturalistic one, is a way of staging an utterance, and there is
always a difference between the writer who goes to work and the speaker who
emerges in the text. In poetry, selfhood is a constructive process.
Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against
death. During the Renaissance, English writers began to write their lyrics for readers
rather than composing them for musical performance. The words and the music
separated. Song is vestigial, but writing offers a different space for poetry.
It inscribes it, whether in print or on a screen, and thus allows it to be
read, lingered over, reread. It also gives the poem a spatial dimension, a
defined visual as well as auditory life. It appeals to the eye as well as to
the ear. And it appeals to unique as well as common experience. Poetry becomes,
as Allen Grossman asserts, "a principle of power invoked by all of us
against our vanishing."
Poetry gives us the logic of imagination. Neither a form of
visual art nor a mode of music, it borders both, moving toward concrete visualizations
on one side, the materiality of language (think of pattern poems), and
soundscapes on the other, something meant to be listened to, heard, beyond
language (think of wordless verse). It has elements of the fictive, the
subjective, the irrational, and taps deep into the well of the unconscious. It
can be broken down into its constituent parts, to sounds and syllables, to
nonsense words, which may have a shamanic power. "If we think of the soul
as split between the government of intellect and a stormy population of
feelings," the Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov wrote in his essay
"On Poetry" (1919), "then incantations and beyond sense language
are appeals over the head of the government straight to the population of
feelings, a direct cry to the predawn of the soul!. ... "
As contemporary American poets, we are inheritors of the modernist
impulse in poetry, a lacerated language. We recognize as our own an acutely
self-conscious mode of writing that breaks the flow of time, leaving gaps and
tears. We grew up on the discontinuous texts of modernism, collages and
mosaics, fragmentary structures, such as The
Waste Land, a poem without a fixed center, without a single narrator or
narrative thread to hold it together. It contains scenes and vignettes from a
wide variety of times and places: agitated scraps of conversation, parodies,
intertextual allusions, unattributed and often drifting quotations-a dark
medley of radically shifting languages, a disturbing cacophony of voices. There
is also "The Bridge," Hart Crane's fullscale reply to Eliot, a kind
of broken epic, a "mystical synthesis" of the American past, present,
and future, a wavering embrace of contemporary life. We internalized the
recurrent strategies of the modernist poets, their many ways of using a-syntactical,
nonlinear language to create new semantic relationships. We studied their
ruptures. We shored these texts against our ruins.
We are also inheritors of postmodernism in poetry. We have
taken as a salutary corrective the idea that language is the author of any work
of art; all narratives can be split open and deconstructed; what seems determined
by nature is actually determined by culture. Reality is a construction,
everything is interpreted. Postmodernism ultimately takes a skeptical position
that denies the existence of all ultimate principles and truths, leading to an
ironized attitude toward experience. We have been challenged and stimulated by
its distrust of universalities, its misgivings about theories and ideologies,
its commitment to indeterminacy, undecidability. In his "Postscript to The
Name of the Rose," Umberto Eco distinguishes between the avant-garde,
which historically wanted to deface and destroy the past, and postmodernism,
which "consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be
destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but
with irony, not innocently." There is no privileged or objective position
from which to speak. We question the stability of truth. Since we are working
in the wake of postmodernism, I would say that there is an even greater vertigo
in contemporary poetry, a more extreme destabilization, sometimes cool-and
giddy, sometimes desperate for insight.
And yet it is also striking how many contemporary American
poets experiment with the various traditional forms of poetry, the different shapes
a poem can take, some prescribed or fixed, others organic. The poetic line
still matters as a basic unit of meaning, a measure of attention, and the
stanza, sometimes symmetrical or isometric, sometimes asymmetrical or
heterometric, is still one of our most compelling ways of structuring a poem.
There is fuller recognition now that the very division of poems into lines and
stanzas has always created logical leaps and fissures, which distinguish poetry
from prose. It is disjunctive, like a torn papyrus, and can accelerate with
dizzying speed. Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into
units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to
knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward
but resolute path. Or as John Keats wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey in
1817: "I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known
for truth by consequitive reasoning."
Our poets today are more eclectic than ever and draw on a
plethora of sources, high and low, popular and literary. It may be that these
divisions no longer apply. Surface and depth collapse. We employ the discontinuities
of collage, its elisions and dramatic juxtapositions. And we also d raw on more
discursive modes of poetry, a way of putting things in rather than leaving them
out, rapidly associating, making connections. Some poets adopt more narrative
strategies, taking time as their latent or underlying subject. They do not
fully narrate a story so much as they infer or imply one. Other poets, taking a
cue from Wallace Stevens's late poems, such as "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction," have created a more meditative and inclusive poetry of
consciousness.
As a result, the old modernist and postmodernist divisions
now seem a bit anachronistic. The various schools, the polemical
"isms," which defined so many twentieth-century poetry skirmishes and
battles, are on the wane. One can read syncretically, combining, say, William
Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, George Oppen,James Wright,
Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frank O'Hara. Is there a single poet who isn't influenced
by poets from other languages, poets they read in translation, such as Rilke,
Cavafy, and Celan, Milosz, Herbert, and Szymborska, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and
Mandelstam, who believed that poetry is a form of recognition and that poets of
all ages echo each other? What about Lorca, Vallejo, and Neruda, what about
Basho, Rumi, and Mirabai, what about the poets of the Tang Dynasty, such as Li
Po and Tu Fu? What about Darwish, the breath of a people, and Cesaire, the
instigator of Negritude? I love the severe austerities of Montale, the reckless
metaphors of Amichai, whose tenderness is startling. Apollinaire still seems
utterly fresh to me, and I think often of his verdict on "that long
quarrel between tradition and invention / Order and Adventure" ("The
Pretty Redhead"). I wish I could talk to Stephen Berg again about his
versions of the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, and Mark Strand about his
translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. We choose our own ancestors,
our own influences-or perhaps they choose us. Everything, everyone, is
potentially part of the mix. "The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors," Borges
teaches us in "Kafka and His Precursors." "His work modifies our
conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
The old divides, many of them holdovers from the 1960s, no
longer seem relevant. Does anyone still need to choose between, say, image or
narrative, metrical or free verse, traditional or nontraditional forms? Projective
Verse, Deep Image, Naked Poetry-these are all part of our inheritance. It is no
longer necessary to select exclusive anthologies, singular traditions. We could
use a more synthetic reading, a more encompassing and inclusive history, of the
poetic past. Poetry is not a competitive sport with different teams playing
against each other. Does anyone still remember Philip Rahv's description of
American literature as a cultural split between patrician writers, who moved in
"an exquisite moral atmosphere," and rebellious frontier spirits,
so-named "palefaces and redskins"? That language comes from another
century.
The commitment to an individual voice, an unauthorized
testimony, an eccentric viewpoint, is still one of the things that I value most
about American poetry. In our age of suspicious reading, we no longer trust the
claims of lyric poetry-its faith in the first person, its sense of a unified form,
its very musicality-and yet some of our poets continue to write out of desire
and experience, constructing things with urgency, out of necessity. They
respond to our existential perils and predicaments, our hesitations, our
uncertainties. They move between speech and song, combining lyrical and
narrative values, inventing and describing things, formalizing them, referring
to other poems, learning from other poets far and wide, those who have come
before us, and seeking a personhood.
There is nothing like reading hundreds of literary magazines,
thousands and thousands of poems in a given year, to unsettle and clarify one's
judgment. I am grateful to David Lehman for our illuminating exchanges about
the poems. One tries to be disinterested, but all reading is subjective. What
was I looking for?-I wasn't always sure. What I found myself responding to,
what continued to compel me, was precision and surprise. Memorable lines, craft
deployed. Poems I could not shake, texts that arrested me. Poems that
demonstrated a certain kind of thinking, imagistic or metaphorical thinking,
poetic inquiry. Literary investigations, obsessions, intelligence. Emotional
accuracy. Poems written under pressure, poems in which something dramatic is at
stake, at risk, for the speaker, who would not be deterred. A kind of ruthless authenticity.
Poems that take themselves to task. Poems in which something spooky or
unexpected happens in language, poems that stood up to rereading, experiences I
could not forget, the happiness and suffering of others. There are many poems
of grief and lamentation here, but also erotic poems of celebration, comic
poems of wild hilarity, odd joy.
I am proud to stand behind the poems in this book, an array
of voices, a record of the "best" from 2015. An impossible task-there
is no hierarchical or objective best-and only time, future readers, poets to
come, will determine what is lasting. We no longer believe in the ancient
literary ideal of "fame," which posits a posterity. And yet I found myself
returning to certain poems and not others, sometimes for inexplicable reasons.
It seems crucial to me to be open to different perspectives, a variety of
poetic forms and experiments, a range of viewpoints, some of them having to do
with class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and race. I am struck by how
often these testimonials speak from a particular vantage point, from inside the
experience of an "I," and present a witnessing. They will not be silenced.
Whitman's empathic imagination remains a bedrock goal: "I do not ask the wounded
person how he feels," he proclaims in "Song of Myself," "I myself
become the wounded person."
I would go so far as to say that the lyric "I" is
now returning with a vengeance. This book suggests that it is on the rise. The
poets and theorists of the avant-garde, many of whom are white men, have consistently
critiqued and disempowered the "I" in lyric poetry, the speaking subject.
They have attacked the very idea of subject matter itself and displaced it with
a theory of language as an entirely self-referential system. Poetry becomes
free play. It courts meaninglessness. This critique of meaning in poetry, which
initially came from right-wing modernists and later from left-wing
postmodernists, has all the entitlements of an elite institution. Despite its
protestations, it reinforces the reigning power structure. Why is it that the
avant-garde is in denial about the antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and
racism that powered so much of the modernist project? It has been ruinous for
ordinary, overlooked, and otherwise dispossessed people. The idea that subject
matter is naive or somehow shameful further marginalizes already marginalized
voices by rendering mute their experience.
The reclamation of the democratic "I" is an
implicit critique of the critique about poetry. It advances against the
"advance-guard" and recovers poetic territory that has been
prematurely relinquished. The responsive or revitalized "I" is not
naive but encompassing. Some of our poets are working in modes that have pushed
beyond the formulas of postmodernism. They blow open the old-fashioned idea of
a unified self, while also retaining what poetry does best, which is to press
down on the present moment, to pursue meaning out of experience. There is
genuine suffering in the world, the suffering of actual people, and poetry
addresses this suffering almost better than anything else. We are not passive
but active subjects both of personal and social history. Experience does not
come to us prepackaged. It demands our attention, our intervention. Losses
accrue, memory is a responsibility. We have not entirely abandoned our posts.
Some of our poets have decided to answer the call for a poetry of clarity and
mystery.
This book is multitudinous. A number of these poets I've been
reading for decades, others are entirely new to me. I made many discoveries-at
least they were discoveries to me-and I am glad to introduce a group of
tough-minded younger poets, who are bringing news from the front. There are at
least three generations represented here. And I am grateful to be able to
include six poets who are no longer alive-Frank Stanford, Larry Levis, Claudia
Emerson, James Tate, C. K. Williams, and Philip Levine-but whose work continues
to live. Charlie Williams and Phil Levine were two of my dearest friends and role
models in poetry, and I especially mourn them.
Kenneth Burke calls literature "equipment for
living." It is precisely that. Every couple of years someone comes along
and enthusiastically pronounces that poetry is dead. It is not. On the
contrary, it is an art form that continues to thrive in unexpected ways,
engaging and evading its own history, setting out on unknown paths. We live,
perhaps we have always lived, in perilous times, and stand on the edge of an
abyss, which absorbs us. We are called to task. Poetry enlarges our experience.
It brings us greater consciousness, fuller being. It stands on the side of life,
our enthrallment.
Edward Hirsch
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