Every year, The New Yorker publishes approximately a hundred original poems, by longtime contributors and by emerging poets, in the original English and in translation. (Subscribers can browse the complete poetry archive.) Here are a few highlights from 2014.
“Gravity,” by Galway Kinnell (January 20, 2014)
When a deer kenning us stands immobile,
and for one moment we know we exist
entirely within her thoughts, when cichlid fry,
sensing danger, empty their air bladders
and drop to the river bottom like pebbles,
when the snow goes and millions of leaves
reveal themselves pressed down over the contours
of earth to create her hibernation mask,
when a person in a military cemetery
among grave markers that spread to all the horizons
understands that all of existence has been destroyed
again and again…
“Pronoun Envy,” by Anne Carson (February 10, 2014)[#image: /photos/59096053c14b3c606c105be6]
is a phrase
coined by Cal Watkins
of the Harvard Linguistics Department
in November 1971
to disparage
certain concerns
of the female students
of Harvard Divinity School.
In a world
where God is “He”
and everyone else
“mankind,”
what chance
do we have for
a bit of attention?
seemed to be their question.
“In the Corner of a Room Where You Would Never Look,” by Mark Bibbins (February 10, 2014)
Warhol was right: he said athletes are fat
in the right places
and they’re young
in the right places. Apparently
the next Godzilla movie has Godzilla
just stomping around eating everyone’s
money and it’s the scariest thing ever—
we can rub bug powder on the national
anthem and run that over the closing credits
as long as the singer manages to sing
I’m in love with everyone but you, almost
convincingly.
“Invocation,” by Amit Majmudar (February 17, 2014)
The toddler’s arms with both hands scalded raw
all glisteny and hog-pink, swollen taut,
the tantrum over, the lesson taught,
two signal fires that call across a plain
the city is sacked and all the children slain.
It’s just that, holy jealous! His detective
gets mail. One young woman would drop her darling
village boy to marry him. Holmes,
that is. The doctor should be saying, yes, my stilted prose,
yes, rare luck of the draw, a great character
came to me. Dogged effort pays off.
Everything’s a mystery until
a narrative kicks in.
Every day love plays with another tongue, with other
lips, and wears thongs underneath its habit.
“Antebellum House Party,” by Terrance Hayes (April 28, 2014)
To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable
Furniture , we must first make her a bundle of tree parts
Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed,
Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants,
A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon.
Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss
Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary.
A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak,
Become a cooling board holding the boss wife’s body.
“State Bird,” by Ada Limón (June 2, 2014)
Confession: I did not want to live here,
not among the goldenrod, wild onions,
or the dropseed, not waist high in the barrel-
aged brown corn water, not with the million-
dollar racehorses, or the tightly wound
round hay bales.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it
moreover never lazy, day into night through the cold
pine forest we were bred to and for which I came to feel
love as fast as others as a blur that slowed around us
at our suppers, then watched us twitch in our heavy sleep.
“Country Music,” by Michael Robbins (July 7, 2014)
West Point to the south of me,
Memphis to the north.
In between is planted with
pinwheels for the Fourth.
Smokestack Lightning, Jesus Christ—
whatever your name is—
bless my fingers on these strings,
I’ll make us both famous.
“Ceres Lamenting,” by Linda Gregerson (August 4, 2014)
When everything else
had gone to hell—
rich men jumping from windows and
the whole
of Oklahoma turned
to dust—this farm,
this godsent
quarter section and a half, was like
a fence against
confusion. Now
we say to the children, This fenceless
world…
“The Lost Art of Letter Writing,” by Eavan Boland (August 25, 2014)
And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see
The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became
Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew
By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?
“About Muscle,” by Marylen Grigas (September 1, 2014)
The brain evolves in order to plan and execute reaching, grasping,
turning, according to the expert on Charlie Rose, which I watch
on my iPad while walking on the treadmill to rebuild my strength.
“Japanese Maple,” by Clive James (September 15, 2014)
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.
You chop an onion, bone a breast, cradle
an artichoke’s dense, thorny crown, you pluck
a chicken, a leaf, an eyebrow peddling luck
with love, you set a table, you seat, you ladle
your soup, you chomp an apple, you agitate
the linens. You agitate for justice.
“I Was Reading Up on My Hellenic Math,” by Heather Green (October 13, 2014)
I was reading up on my Hellenic math: no zero yet, no
transfinite set theory, no sine or cosine, just a Brotherhood that
felt divine to its practitioners. You were back in California,
riding on the waves, your father gone awhile, and me, you said,
no consolation outside of the bed.
** **“The Blackboard,” by W. S. Merwin (October 20, 2014)
The question itself has not changed
but only the depths of memory
through which it rises and now in a late
dream of childhood my father is a blackboard
that I have just erased and I am standing
with my back to it holding the old worn gray
felt eraser that we will take later
out into the schoolyard and will clap it
against the others that were used today…
What Eskimos advise:
build a sturdy igloo with
snow in your shoes;
the safety pin, forgotten
in the coat collar,
at your jugular.
“Feel Free,” by Nick Laird (November 17, 2014)
To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface
with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways.
I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,
the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang
above the ground, thus; hammocks, snorkeling, alcohol.
I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy
and to that end I set aside a day a week, Shabbat,
to not act. Having ceded independence to the sunset
I will not be shaving, illuminating rooms, or raising
the temperature of food. If occasionally I like to feel
the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural
tension, I walk off a Sunday through the high fields…
“Thirty Thousand Islands,” by Jana Prikryl (December 22, 2014)
The Indians announcing cigars
and vacation days
of a vanished clientele,
with sanded surfaces distinct
and eyes fixed
on the far gone,
long after the product stopped selling
and moved to where the money was
stayed on,
fading and slanting
into the small dirt beaches—
they consent to sentinel the place,
they quietly repel
any but the most literal description.
That one they also repel.
And that one.
