The Best American Poetry 2011

Series Editor David Lehman

David Lehman, Kevin Young, David Lehman, Kevin Young

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781439181515
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Rally

(Miami, October 2008)

The awesome weight of the world had not yet descended
upon his athlete’s shoulders. I saw someone light but not feathered

jog up to the rickety stage like a jock off the court
played my game did my best

and the silent crowd listened and dreamed.
The children sat high on their parents’ shoulders.

Then the crowd made noise that gathered and grew
until it was loud and was loud as the sea.

What it meant or would mean was not yet fixed
nor could be, though human beings ever tilt toward we.

from The American Scholar

SHERMAN ALEXIE
Valediction

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know
That I could not have convinced you of this,

But these dark times are just like those dark times.
Yes, my sad acquaintance, each dark time is

Indistinguishable from the other dark times.
Yesterday is as relentless as tomorrow.

There is no relief to be found in this,
But, please, “Yours is not the worst of sorrows.”

Chekhov wrote that. He meant it as comfort
And I mean it as comfort, too, but why

Should you believe us? You didn’t believe us.
You killed yourself because your last dark time

Was the worst, I guess, of many dark times.
None of my verse could have saved your life.

You were a stranger. You were dark and brief.
And I am humbled by the size of your grief.

from Cave Wall

RAE ARMANTROUT
Soft Money

They’re sexy
because they’re needy,
which degrades them.

They’re sexy because
they don’t need you.

They’re sexy because they pretend
not to need you,

but they’re lying,
which degrades them.

They’re beneath you
and it’s hot.

They’re across the border,
rhymes with dancer—

they don’t need
to understand.

They’re content to be
(not mean),

which degrades them
and is sweet.

They want to be
the thing-in-itself

and the thing-for-you—

Miss Thing—

but can’t.

They want to be you,
but can’t,

which is so hot.

from Poetry

JOHN ASHBERY
Postlude and Prequel

Would I lie to you? I don’t know what to say to you,
and the season is coming into season just now
with long-awaited words from back when we were
friends and still are, of course, but the tides
pursue their course each day. Perturbing elements
listen in the wings, which are coming apart at the seams.
Is it all doggerel and folderol? A cracked knowledge?
Monkey journalism?

This is better than the other overlooked good
that dried up a while back and whispers.
The results, if any, won’t last too much longer
and I meanwhile am on my way to correct you
about the tickets and their availability.
We pitch and stiffen, elbowed by traffic mysteriously
descending the other lane of the avenue
as lamps burst in many-benched Central Park.

from London Review of Books

JULIANNA BAGGOTT
To My Lover, Concerning the Yird-Swine

Lover,

Don’t let the yird-swine in.

You can feed them at the door.

Hungry yird-swine.

You can polish their teeth and sharpen their claws,
but never, Lover, never

let them in.

(Here, I am milksop and blur-blind.

I’m an ugly welt. I love too much

my own filth.)

Somewhere there are deer

antler-rushing the hunters.

There are dogs who love chains.

I love the yird-swine, Lover,

as you do.

I listen to them tunnel through

the family plots—

they want to eat up from the past

paw and claw in our bed.

They know that you cannot love me and my
stiff knot buns, worn hornish.

You hate me

so well—
so thoroughly
only because you have practiced

(rigorous scales, taskmaster metronome)

hating yourself.

from AGNI

ERIN BELIEU
When at a Certain Party in NYC

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks,
and everyone here lives in a converted
chocolate factory or deconsecrated church
without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup
in sight, but only carefully edited objets like
the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen
that looks like an industrial age dildo, and
when you rifle through the bathroom
looking for a spare tampon, you discover
that even their toothpaste is somehow more
desirable than yours. And later you go
with a world famous critic to eat a plate
of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from
Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like
“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is
so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself
impossible to eat. And your friend back home—
who says the pioneers who first settled
the great asphalt parking lot of our
middle were not in fact heroic, but really
the chubby ones who lacked the imagin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Back Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Elizabeth Alexander, “Rally”
• Chapter 2: Sherman Alexie, “Valediction”
• Chapter 3: Rae Armantrout, “Soft Money”
• Chapter 4: John Ashbery, “Postlude and Prequel”
• Chapter 5: Julianna Baggott, “To My Lover, Concerning the Yird-Swine”
• Chapter 6: Erin Belieu, “When at a Certain Party in NYC”
• Chapter 7: Cara Benson, “Banking”
• Chapter 8: Jaswinder Bolina, “Mine Is the First Rodeo, Mine Is the Last Accolade”
• Chapter 9: Catherine Bowman, “The Sink”
• Chapter 10: Turner Cassity, “Off the Nollendorfplatz”
• Chapter 11: Michael Cirelli, “Dead Ass”
• Chapter 12: Billy Collins, “Here and There”
• Chapter 13: Olena Kalytiak Davis, Three Sonnets [“Sonnet (division),” “Sonnet (motion),” “Sonnet (silenced)”]
• Chapter 14: Matthew Dickman, “Coffee”
• Chapter 15: Michael Dickman, “From the Lives of My Friends”
• Chapter 16: Denise Duhamel, “My Strip Club”
• Chapter 17: Cornelius Eady, “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket”
• Chapter 18: Jill Alexander Essbaum, “Stays”
• Chapter 19: Alan Feldman, “In November”
• Chapter 20: Farrah Field, From “The Amy Poems” (“Amy Survives Another Apocalypse” and “You’re Really Starting to Suck, Amy”)
• Chapter 21: Carolyn Forché, “Morning on the Island”
• Chapter 22: Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “Everything Is Nervous”
• Chapter 23: Benjamin S. Grossberg, “The Space Traveler Talks Frankly about Desire”
• Chapter 24: Jennifer Grotz, “Poppies”
• Chapter 25: Robert Hass, “August Notebook: A Death”
• Chapter 26: Terrance Hayes, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”
• Chapter 27: K. A. Hays, “Just As, After a Point, Job Cried Out”
• Chapter 28: Bob Hicok, “Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry”
• Chapter 29: Jane Hirshfield, “The Cloudy Vase”
• Chapter 30: Paul Hoover, “God’s Promises”
• Chapter 31: Andrew Hudgins, “The Funeral Sermon”
• Chapter 32: Major Jackson, From Holding Company (“Bereft,” “Lying,” “The Giant Swing Ending in a Split,” “Narcissus”)
• Chapter 33: Allison Joseph, “Notebooks”
• Chapter 34: L. S. Klatt, “Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91”
• Chapter 35: Jennifer Knox, “Kiri Te Kanawa Singing ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’”
• Chapter 36: Yusef Komunyakaa, “A Voice on an Answering Machine”
• Chapter 37: James Longenbach, “Snow”
• Chapter 38: Bridget Lowe, “The Pilgrim Is Bridled and Bespectacled”
• Chapter 39: Maurice Manning, “The Complaint against Roney Laswell’s Rooster”
• Chapter 40: Morton Marcus, “Pears”
• Chapter 41: Jill McDonough, “Dear Gaybashers”
• Chapter 42: Erika Meitner, “Elegy with Construction Sounds, Water, Fish”
• Chapter 43: Paul Muldoon, “The Side Project”
• Chapter 44: Jude Nutter, “Word”
• Chapter 45: Jeni Olin, “Pillow Talk”
• Chapter 46: Eric Pankey, “Cogitatio Mortis”
• Chapter 47: Alan Michael Parker, “Family Math”
• Chapter 48: Catherine Pierce, “Postcards from Her Alternate Lives”
• Chapter 49: Robert Pinsky, “Horn”
• Chapter 50: Katha Pollitt, “Angels”
• Chapter 51: D. A. Powell, “Bugcatching at Twilight”
• Chapter 52: Gretchen Steele Pratt, “To my father on the anniversary of his death”
• Chapter 53: James Richardson, “Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0”
• Chapter 54: Anne Marie Rooney, “What my heart is turning”
• Chapter 55: Mary Ruefle, “Provenance”
• Chapter 56: David St. John, “Ghost Aurora”
• Chapter 57: Mary Jo Salter, “The Afterlife”
• Chapter 58: James Schuyler, “The Smallest”
• Chapter 59: Charles Simic, “Nineteen Thirty-Eight”
• Chapter 60: Matthew Buckley Smith, “Nowhere”
• Chapter 61: Patricia Smith, “Motown Crown”
• Chapter 62: Gerald Stern, “Dream IV”
• Chapter 63: Bianca Stone, “Pantoum for the Imperceptible”
• Chapter 64: Mark Strand, “The Poem of the Spanish Poet”
• Chapter 65: Mary Jo Thompson, “Thirteen Months”
• Chapter 66: Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy”
• Chapter 67: Lee Upton, “Drunk at a Party”
• Chapter 68: David Wagoner, “Thoreau and the Lightning”
• Chapter 69: Rosanna Warren, “The Latch”
• Chapter 70: Rachel Wetzsteon, “Time Pieces”
• Chapter 71: Richard Wilbur, “Ecclesiastes II:I”
• Chapter 72: C. K. Williams, “A Hundred Bones”
• Chapter 73: David Wojahn, “Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab”
• Chapter 74: Charles Wright, “Toadstools”
• Chapter 75: Stephen Yenser, “Cycladic Idyll: An Apologia”
• Contributors’ Notes and Comments
• Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
• Acknowledgments
• Footnote