Terrance Hayes - The Best American Poetry 2014

Thank you for downloading this Scribner eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

John Ashbery, editor, The Best American Poetry 1988

Donald Hall, editor, The Best American Poetry 1989

Jorie Graham, editor, The Best American Poetry 1990

Mark Strand, editor, The Best American Poetry 1991

Charles Simic, editor, The Best American Poetry 1992

Louise Glck, editor, The Best American Poetry 1993

A. R. Ammons, editor, The Best American Poetry 1994

Richard Howard, editor, The Best American Poetry 1995

Adrienne Rich, editor, The Best American Poetry 1996

James Tate, editor, The Best American Poetry 1997

Harold Bloom, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry 19881997

John Hollander, editor, The Best American Poetry 1998

Robert Bly, editor, The Best American Poetry 1999

Rita Dove, editor, The Best American Poetry 2000

Robert Hass, editor, The Best American Poetry 2001

Robert Creeley, editor, The Best American Poetry 2002

Yusef Komunyakaa, editor, The Best American Poetry 2003

Lyn Hejinian, editor, The Best American Poetry 2004

Paul Muldoon, editor, The Best American Poetry 2005

Billy Collins, editor, The Best American Poetry 2006

Heather McHugh, editor, The Best American Poetry 2007

Charles Wright, editor, The Best American Poetry 2008

David Wagoner, editor, The Best American Poetry 2009

Amy Gerstler, editor, The Best American Poetry 2010

Kevin Young, editor, The Best American Poetry 2011

Mark Doty, editor, The Best American Poetry 2012

Robert Pinsky, editor, The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition

Denise Duhamel, editor, The Best American Poetry 2013

SCRIBNER POETRY

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2014 by David Lehman

Foreword copyright 2014 by David Lehman

Introduction copyright 2014 by Terrance Hayes

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner edition September 2014

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Jacket/cover design by Leslie Goldman

Jacket/cover art: John Sloan (American, 18711951), Isadora Duncan, 1911 (oil on canvas). Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Abert. Photographed by P. Richard Eells 2014 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Library of Congress Control Number: 88644281

ISBN 978-1-4767-0815-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-0817-1 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4767-0818-8 (ebook)

David Lehman was born in New York City. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trillings research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), Yeshiva Boys (2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook/Schocken), the most recent of his six nonfiction books, won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Among Lehmans other books are a study in detective novels ( The Perfect Murder ), a group portrait of the New York School of poets ( The Last Avant-Garde ), and an account of the scandal sparked by the revelation that a Yale University eminence had written for a Nazi-controlled newspaper in his native Belgium ( Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man ). He teaches in the graduate writing program of The New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sat sipping Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Fergusons late-night talk show. Are you on Twitter? the host asks. No, Draper says. I dontand here he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verbtweet. Next question. Do you read a lot of poetry? The ad agencys creative director looks skeptical. Though the hero of Mad Men is seen reading Dantes Inferno in one season of Matthew Weiners show and heard reciting Frank OHara in another, the question seems to come from left field. Poetry isnt really celebrated any more in our culture, Don says, to which the other retorts, It can beif you can write in units of 140 keystrokes. Commercial break.

The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of poetry in the digital age, a panel-discussion perennial. The panelists agree that text messaging and Internet blogs will be seen to have exercised some sort of influence on the practice of poetry, whether on the method of composition or on the style and surface of the writing. And surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. Whatever else Twitter is, its a literary form, says the novelist Kathryn Schulz, who explains how easy it was for her to get addicted to a genre in which you try to say an informative thing in an interesting way while abiding by its constraint (those famous 140 characters). For people who love that kind of challengeand its easy to see why writers might be overrepresented among themTwitter has the same allure as gaming. True, the hard-to-shake habit caused its share of problems. Schulz reports a huge distractibility increase and other disturbing symptoms: I have Television producers love it (Keep those tweets coming!). So does Wall Street: when Twitter went public in 2013, the IPO came off without a hitch, and the stock climbed with the velocity of an over-caffeinated momentum investor eager to turn a quick profit.