The Best American Poetry 2014 Read Free Page A

Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” is more controversial.
    CK: We should talk about that one.
    TH: I’m not sure what to say about it. There’s so much to say about it. Which is why it’s here speaking for itself.
    CK: So we’re not going to talk about it?
    TH: Listen, a dude can’t really cheer for a poem called “Rape Joke.” But what I felt reading it is akin to what I feel reading poems white people sometimes write about race. I’m thinking especially of Eleanor Wilner’s “Sowing,” or Tony Hoagland’s poem, “Write Whiter.” A reader can call for silence when a poem engages taboo subjects, or a reader can call for conversation. “Rape Joke” calls for conversation.
    CK: Soon our opinions will realign, Terrance. I have faith.
    TH: It’s OK with me if they don’t.
    CK: Here is the opening sentence of Italo Calvino’s essay, “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism”: “Sexuality in literature is a language in which what is not said is more important than what is.” Does this hold true for poetry as well?
    TH: Gerhard Richter says something similar: that painting shows what isn’t there. So maybe it’s a better general statement about the effort of Art to make the immaterial material? Lockwood’s poem does that. As does Joseph Ceravolo’s “Hidden Bird.” But such big declarations about Art, even when it’s Richter or Calvino positing them, are always slippery. Rothko was making fun of rules even as he offered a fairly palatable recipe for Art in his 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute:
    1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality. . . . Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
    2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
    3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
    4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
    5. Wit and Play . . . for the human element.
    6. The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.
    7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.
    It’s a pretty good recipe for poetry.
    CK: Certainly there are poems preoccupied with death. Mark Doty in “Deep Lane,” Sharon Olds’s elegiac “Stanley Kunitz Ode,” Corey Van Landingham’s “During the Autopsy.” You have more poems by dead poets than most of the anthologies in this series: Kurt Brown, Joseph Ceravolo, Adam Hammer, Larry Levis, Jake Adam York. Interestingly, all of them are deceased white male poets . Is this to suggest the white male poet is a dying breed?
    TH [laughing]: Of course not! You really shouldn’t be drinking red wine and espresso.
    CK: What are we to make of the specter of death in poetry? Seems the hour is always elegiac, the heart cries out.
    TH: I remember something the poet John Shade said once. I’m sure you remember because he said it to you: “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
    CK: You, Mr. Hayes, are no John Shade. I pray you do not find this fact offensive.
    TH: That’s cool. Sorry I brought him up. Seems like a good time to read the “Death Cento”:
    DEATH CENTO
    There is a double heart behind the breast bone. | In particular, there is a rift through everything | You/I take/nurture my/your | I live alone with my life | I have come to believe in loss as a way of knowing | for dying is a song the body is learning | the choir shouts Praise! Stand up and be forgiven | It is customary to hold the dead in your mouth | One must at times learn to ignore the body | I mean, what good are words | they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world | I tell them to imagine me on horseback