The Best American Poetry 2015 Read Free Page B

poetry is a valediction forbidding mourning. A man and a woman—in one of Strand’s late prose poems (“Provisional Eternity”)—lie in bed. The man keeps saying “Just one more time.” The woman wonders why he keeps saying that. “Because I never want it to end,” he says. And what is it that he doesn’t want to end? “This never wanting it to end.” Farewell, friend.
----
    1 . James Parker, “The Last Rock-Star Poet,” The Atlantic , December 2014, pp. 50–52.
    2 . Douglas Belkin, “For College Students, History’s a Mystery,” The Wall Street Journal , October 15, 2014, p. A6.
    3 .  The American Scholar , Spring 2013, p. 38; p. 43.
    4 . Ariel Kaminer, “Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia,” The New York Times , December 22, 2014, p. 1.
    5 .  “100 coups de fouet, si vous n’êtes pas morts de rire!”
    6 .  Time , January 19, 2015, p. 62.
    7 .  The Atlantic , June 2000.

Sherman Alexie was born in 1966 and grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. His first novel, Reservation Blues , received an American Book Award in 1996. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals , which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , a semiautobiographical novel, appeared from Little, Brown Books for Children and won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. His most recent books are the poetry collection Face from Hanging Loose Press, and War Dances , stories and poems from Grove Press, which was awarded the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Blasphemy , a collection of new and selected stories, appeared in 2012 from Grove Press. He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.

INTRODUCTION
----
by Sherman Alexie

    In lieu of a conventional introduction, we present these statements by Sherman Alexie and conclude with a poem of his that appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal in 2010:
    â€œPoetry = Anger x Imagination.”
    â€œYou know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it.”
    â€œI write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You’re an addict—so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That’s what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing—it would never account for twenty years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.”
    â€œThey’ve been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it’s in the hands of the corporate culture. If you’re an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago—that’s not true. I think the same percentage has always read.”
    [In reply to “What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?”]: “The collected Harold Bloom!”
    â€œI suppose, as an Indian living in the U.S., I’m used to crossing real and imaginary boundaries, and have, in fact, enjoyed a richerand crazier and more magical life precisely because I have fearlessly and fearfully crossed all sorts of those barriers. I guess I approach my poetry the same way I have approached every other thing in my life. I just don’t like being told what to do. I