“Being among the best. . .” [by Susan Mitchell]

I have hesitated to post a personal joy amid so much tragedy and horror—but that said: I am thrilled and honored to have a poem, “Chopin In Palma,” in The Best American Poetry 2023. So my deep-felt thanks and gratitude to series editor, David Lehman, and this year’s guest editor, Elaine Equi. Oddly, when I got the news my poem had been selected, I had been re-reading The Best American Poetry 2005, guest edited by Paul Muldoon—and was right in the middle of a marvelous poem by Elaine Equi “Pre-Raphaelite Pinups.” Yes, I do re-read The Best American Poetry anthologies, and am amazed to see how many poems, like good wine, acquire depth and complexity as the years pass—as do the introductory essays which deserve to be collected into an anthology of their own. I also want to express my gratitude to Major Jackson, poetry editor of The Harvard Review, where my poem was first published. Since “Chopin In Palma” was the last in a group of four I submitted, I know that Major Jackson reads every single poem! Some remarks about the poems in this most recent Best American Poetry. When I received my contributor’s copy, I started with the first poem and unable to stop reading, stayed up all night because: finally, here were all the feelings blocked out by the rage that has dominated American poetry since about 2016. Anger is a noisy emotion. It makes it impossible to hear what Peter Gizzi in his poem “Revisionary” calls his “inner weather.” In this anthology’s poems I was hearing the “inner weather” of American society—despair, disillusionment, disgust, disappointment, dislocation, disbelief, rejection, hurt. I felt at home for the first time in a long time. Which is not to say there isn’t humor—at its darkest—and irony, lots of irony. When I got about half way through and read David Lehman’s brilliant poem “Traces,”—brilliant because it is two poems, one written by a younger inexperienced poet and the other by an older experienced poet—I thought about how I would understand the last lines if I read the poem by itself—and how differently those last lines reverberate within this anthology: “the old plains / of America’s darkness.” And how they reverberate right now— taken utterly out of context—as sadly I witness my own society for what it has always been. This is a landmark anthology because its poems dare to feel emotions other than rage, which is after all a defensive emotion,—and because its poems are able to find objective correlatives for complex emotional states for which there are no dictionary names. What I think of as a major purpose of poetry.

 

— Susan Mitchell