Richard Siken's poem, "Why," is the prompt that won't go away. And because it infuses my reading of poems—and speaks to what we find as readers in addition to what we do as poets—I decided to reconstruct the entire poem, in order, as a frame for speaking about other poets and poems I’ve enjoyed this year. The words from the poem are direct quotations. Don’t ask me why any of this matters. It is what it is—or what it does.

Because poetry is the language of the imagination and you need a larger imagination.

You need an imagination with enough space to imagine fucking the ocean inside Diamond Forde’s “I Can’t Write About the Ocean Without It Being About Slavery”, and then spend an hour lost in marvel, eating “Moon Pie, or a Fat Ode to Pussy and Marshmallows,” numbering euphemisms.

Because you need more than a gun and a jug of water.

You need to taste the sky in Mahmoud Darwish's wilderness—the desert and the deserted—to find your voice in the desertification.  You need to be there, on the page, “Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh” in Sinan Antoon’s translation.

I shut the door to my emotions to become my other
I don’t feel that I am a stone sighing
as it longs for a cloud
Thus I tread as if I am a tourist

And you need to read Darwish in all these translations, in all these brushstrokes and proximities.

Because you have explicable and inexplicable needs and the world is full of things and you want some of them and to get them you need to be able to say them and think them. 

But surely some of them return like echoes, and so writing the non-material needs— the immaterialities of the human spirit— can be the most difficult, the easiest to botch, which is what Etel Adnan does not do in Sea and Fog, where “love precedes us to the grave and follows us into it.”

Because undigested biography is boring.

And the roughage of real biography includes dreams, “The Sleep Stage” elucidated by Kim Addonizio wherein someone feeds pudding to temporality, itself.

Because what we call sincerity is an oversimplification.

And the line in Renee Gladman's Calamities is inseparable from the line in her art: "They entered blank space and made a problem for the page - what next, where to go – and they were lovely in themselves." Which may be to say: they were lovely in their ability to expose language down to " the live wire set loose," and then seeing the burned, "the map it made" by electrifying a particular space.

Somewhere in the object world, I'd decided I would talk about the drawings: I'd give them language so that I could say they weren't language exactly.

A map is a page with markings. For Gladman, drawing and writing both make lines to think their way into something, which is to become. The line deserves following. Sincerity may be structural.

Because sometimes desire in a person sounds like whining. 

Or like “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons” by A. E. Stallings, where pronouns share vowels with disavowals, and desire is a flotation device that disappears between mother and child.

Because nostalgia is always creepy and it makes you seem helpless. 

But nostalgia is neither creepy nor helpless—it is daunting, dangerous, evocative, resplendent as Hua Xi’s ““Heaven””:

Loneliness is an imaginary thing,
but so is the entire country.
You try. There are ceilings
you hold up
like heavens.

Because you can evoke instead of recount.

And you can write from the evocation and thereby raise the dead inside a poem as Luisa Muradyan does with “Bruce Willis, in the Light”, where the evocation blurs with invocation, and something sacred emerges from this layering of pop culture and a grandmother’s out-raged spirit:

I was named for 
my grandmother, and I carry
her anger in this life and the next.

Because you can trace the path of the mind as well as the way the body drags through the mud.

And give us the alphabet needed to describe what is seen and what is done, the relationship between the mind and the landscape, as Natalie Diaz does in "Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation”, meeting the myths:

Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white.
Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?

Because we’re savvy and media drenched and you can leave out the parts of the story we already know. 

By already know, one means we know nothing. Which is to say we know the form and shape by which others feign to know things, and these very forms, shapes, and vessels deserve their own bawdy invocation—they deserve to be revisioned as Alejandro Zambra does in “Multiple Choice.”

Because knowing where to put the commas is boring and subject-verb-object is boring but knowing how to break a line to push against a sentence, make a friction, spin against the way you drive, find the place to breath, is interesting.

Knowing how to bring the bend of a blue note into a line break is astonishing. The reader can't unhear it in Carolyn Oliver's "Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams on a Tuesday Night."

Because what it does is more interesting than what it is about.

And what A. E. Stallings does in "Dyeing the Easter Eggs" is both iconoclastic and iconographic. Notice how it moves through colors; how it lands in "chrism"; how the contrasts depend on connection and cycles of resurrection and birth.

I am the children’s blonde American mother,
Who thinks that Easter eggs should be pastel—
But they have icon eyes, and they are Greek.

Because you have a rich inner life, or want one, and everyone looks good smoking a cigarette in a cage with a notebook and a faraway look. 

But no looks as good, as gruff, as amazing in its reversals, leaving so much to hinge on “the demotic—John Ashbery.

Because notebook.

May be a pilgrimage which resembles Anne Carson's space, somewhere between the ancients and the present, where ruins meet in us—or in Caron’s lyric essay, “The Anthropology of Water.”

How can you see your life unless you leave it? 
It is already late when you wake up inside a question. 
Pilgrims were people who got the right wish. 
I'm asking you to study the dark.

Because the page.

Is filled with sheets. And Patrycja Humienik finds in them a “Failed Essay on Repressed Sexuality.”

Because paper is cheap and no one really gets hurt.

W. H. Auden knew this when he wrote what Elizabeth Hardwick called “a throwaway libretto” for Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan in 1940, shortly after his arrival to the United States. Auden never sought to reprint the text of this libretto: one instance. Paper is cheap. Maybe someone gets hurt. Maybe someone else finds freedom in it. Maybe someone’s sprained ankle is as dramatic as someone else’s broken back.

Because language existed before you.

And language is what must exist in order to cross us. As it appears in Ross Gay's "Alzheimer's," where the use of repetition both creates and de-creates a grandmother’s portrait, in her own words, a wind:

She stood in her doorway, asked my name
Again—something she would never
remember. A breeze
loosed some cherry blossoms, petals
flipping through her open arms
as she whispered, “Look what God has done,
look what God
has done.”

Ilya Kaminsky pointed out that the work of this poem is done in the titling: the Alzheimer’s, there, as both a character and a diagnosis—and one can’t help thinking about the before/after selves of chronic illness, the division between the body that didn’t know division except as a spectator, even though Gay gives us this portrait from two planes, the subject watching the speaker, the speaker drawing the subject. There is a haunting tenderness in the pitch of the refrain.

Because you rise up into language for only so many hours before falling back down into silence and you might as well do something useful while you’re here. 

You might lay the sonnet space for the last supper and invite everyone you can imagine to discover a shoreline, as Diane Seuss does in “[Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions.]”

Because you’re susceptible, elastic, thin-skinned, moody.

And when you describe it, readers find themselves in the graft of your dislocation. You are "The Street You Cross" by Ryszard Krynicki. You are Poland, at some point, the line between traffic and complicity, the ethics no one mentions underneath.

Because landmark.

And Jason McCall needs to show us why even the landmark, itself, dies inside a particular body. He does this on so many levels which re-mark, de-mark, and rattle the ground the landmark needs to exist.  

Because amnesia.

Is an unremembered map, and we need to find our way back. The poem in drafts may be asking for a cartographer. And because poetry "has no obligation to the present that it forms its own time, or duration," to quote Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk.

Because you will not remember this moment with accuracy.

You will spend years trying to reconstruct your steps towards the bed with a dead baby, towards the ways you could have prevented what you could not prevent. The death of a baby has no meaning. There is no salve, no salvation, no syntax to hold it together. Beth Gordon will write these difficult poems anyway. 

Because language belongs to those who use it and some things develop sideways.

And so Shane McCrae enters the experience of being biracial in the US sideways, through the persona of Jim Limber, a mixed-raced man adopted by Jefferson and Viola Davis. McCrae offers backstory in titles, which refer to Limber as “the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis”— and he uses the word “mulatto” to indicate the characters will be bound by time, by the specificity of gaze which McCrae uses to develop tension across time.

Because the landlord will let himself in without notice. 

And Dean Young will bring drive-in, the piano, the girlfriend, the infected finger—all into “Lives of the Inventors”:

Because your supervisor will change your schedule without notice. 

The schedule, itself, may be a transcript of the end times. The funeral home is haunted by what we don’t want the morticians to say, as Luisa Muradyan does in "If You Were Wondering About the Couple Who Runs the Funeral Home", narrated from inside the mind of that couple, and how they cope with their work, or what work-life balance means in the context. Notice how she sets up the title perfectly, the couple runs the funeral home, rather than owns it, which lets us know that they are involved in the daily details. the long title keeps the poet from having to get bogged down in back story. The poem takes its cue or beat from an inventory, and the "beautiful pie charts" which the couple "makes up" to you "stay sane."  this is where the motion and imagery against – as the poet plays out what each color symbolizes:

Violet means these bodies 
just got here and haven't even taken their clothes off.

 And she says what each color means to the couple, who is both directly addressing the reader in an intimate you, accomplished in the final line's "your"-- also narrated as an "I" which stands for the couple. it's a feat of narrative power – and the poem which opens her book, American Radiance.

Because hot pants.

Maybe a failed sestina, may be a poem by Jane Huffman which undoes itself at the seams.

Because parataxis.

Because a myth can be a costume that lets Cavafy imagine himself into a space—and Leonard Cohen can pick up this space inside the hot pants of his own song decades later.

Because we need more than a clunky extrapolation.

Something like Marie Howe opening the archives of where we are now by organizing the archives we made of others. Something like discovering the need for a concordance which includes sparrows.

Because we are waiting for you to make sense of it for us. 

We are waiting to hear a composition by La Monte Young titled “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1”.

Because poetry can move the fulcrum of the mind just enough so that the world, this same world, becomes electrified and bewildering.

And Alice Notley knows this. She knows that the baby had to emerge from the owl's forehead in a poem about post-partum depression. To choose both is to refuse the very choice. I am grateful for every poem and every poet that teaches us to write us.

Because poetry is mysterious and criticism is not.

And, often, the form, itself, creates the questions it cannot answer, as in Oliver de la Paz’s extraordinary poem, "Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay.”

Because craft can be taught but vision can’t, which is problematic, since you need both. 

I keep thinking of Sophia Stid’s poem, “Lifestyle Factors,” about gendered apologies, and how the poem locates itself within the body of one single, long stanza trying to figure itself out, using form to make physical the figuring, the accounting, the embodied ledger:

And now sorry is one more way to be wrong, to be hungry,
the secret stare I carried stolen & thrown right back
at me.

The lifestyle factor of having a body.

Because a consistent way of seeing is a philosophy. 

And gratitude is a lens, or angle which amplifies the small intersections of life in Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” where poet gives the bird permission to come in, come in through the window “coochie-cooing my chin.”

Because when you mess with syntax, you’re messing with morality. 

So Kyle McCord can lean into the language and syntax of iconography—and the diptych and triptych of forms with the gorgeous couplets of “Triptych for Nighthawks”:

She slurred words
as she pointed to the print.

Only the corymbs flowering
my father’s canvas were absent.

Hot pants, because some things are worth repeating. 

And the form of repetition may be a poem titled “C.V". that subverts its inhumanity, as Iman Mersal does.

Hot pants, because image is the coal you shovel into the poem to fuel its little engines. 

And how to describe the poem that includes an aside to the image that it can’t quite abandon in another poem? I’m thinking of Patrick Donnelly’s intertext in “Jesus said Will someone”:

(Fleeing the deep grasses of the hunting ground,
Sokaku wrote, I heard the stag cry
—my friend is lost—)

Because there are more ways of getting there than just plot.

And Cedar Sigo believes we must keep touching them, keep inhabiting the ways of getting there. And I believe him.

Because the sound of a singular human voice.

The echo of tappings inside a prison wall. The poetry that emerges as a way of speaking with the dead, with the mother who dies as you sit in a Russian prison, trying to divine what it means to live. Vera Figner was a revolutionist, but poetry was the language she used to speak to her mother. The most precious return, somehow, "To My Mother," a missive.

Because they will not lay down in the streets and give you the keys to the city until you give them what they want and what you want to say and what they want to hear will overlap anyway so why not give it to them, love, love, it’s not like there’s only so much, it’s not like it’s gonna run out, so give it to them, give it to them.

All I can say is Tiana Clark’s “Broken Ode for the Epigraph”—all of it. Here’s how it begins:

O, intertextuality.
O, little foyer to my poem.
O, little , first and foremost.
My amuse-bouche, meaning mouth amuser,
a little glimpse of the meal to come. And sushi:
little epigraphs over rice. And if I could, I would add
an epigraph over everything. Wait . . . who says I can’t?

Because you can go ahead and make it happen, finish the thought, say the dream was real and the wall imaginary, raise the dead, heal the sick, cast out demons, and levitate. 

And if you do this, it might take an epistolary form that resembles Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters, where the sent letter, “November 30, 2016,” sits next to the “[unsent draft]”, creating a dialogue between the speakable, the written, and the subtext of the conversation. To raise the dead is to remove the imaginary wall between said and unsaid. Or, to quote an “unsent”:

Before you, I wrote myself letters.

I typed them and saved them in a folder marked Vacation Photos.

Because readers are greedy and great literature is about its readers not its writers.

And sometimes I still can’t believe I get to live in a world that include Alison C. Rollins’ “Quartet for the End of Time”…even this first quartet—-astonishing.

Because participation.

Includes giving grief a shape through pacing, as does Chris Abani in his new collection (Restless Books), and this stanza:

I will fashion you from your relentless 
darkness.

The motion here is so different from walking. Closer to lifting blades of grass from a patch and trying to blow them, looking for that shrieking whistle – and yet not wedded to defining the satisfaction of the moment by it.

See "Terminus" and the role "incessant" plays. And then the haunted image of shadow behind the eyes. Abani chases his brother across continents. Use of the word blessed to flip at the end; use of pyromania to suggest it leads to self-immolation and maybe that is what it signifies. The effect of "desire" here as it intersects with grief. And how grief renders us homeless. Perhaps this is an argument for an expansive poetry based on grief and loss, how our place in the world no longer exists. But also: sparseness in pacing.

Because witness.

Sometimes looks at the children, or the ones who won’t live to witness the world we have made for them, as in this “For the Kids” by Langston Hughes.

Because history.

May return in "the smooth cup" passed by a brown hand in Hoa Nguyen's "I Didn't Know." A certain can offer a cup across time which feels like tomorrow.

Because, in spite of it all, it’s between you and the page.

To stare into the sky and refuse to write it. To break it down into morsels like Kay Ryan that are easier to carry in a pocket, and which feel like silences or vegetables. 

Because sometimes, in spite of it all, it’s just words on a page. Because sometimes, in spite of it all, it’s still in your head and not on a page and you have to do it all over again.

To watch a daughter in the mirror noticing where the light intersects with memory, as Carmen Bugan does in "She looks in the mirror." To look—and look again, seeing how she sees, how she is seen, how the seeing, itself, becomes a story about salience.

Because you want to be heard, or overheard, or you don’t and you need to invent a coded language to get the message underneath the radar. 

As when Ludwig Wittgenstein turned to his landlady as he lay dying, and said: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

Because you want to write it down and slide it under the door and run away or you want the words to outlast you or at least do their job while you are sleeping. 

You want your dead brother to read the letter which tries to make sense of his absence, and yet which cannot believe in this absence entirely, even as the poem is addressed to it. See Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” where the traditional, public-facing elegy is replaced by an epistolary form, and the intimacy of private conversation includes failures with Drano.

Because even when intent and urgency push past dexterity into blather and deceit you have still accomplished something.

As Noah Warren accomplishes something which sticks, something which rumbles, something resilient in "Operation Pedro Pan”, a portrait with sharp elbows, fascinating rhymes, revisionary repetitions:

and Rich the careful, the claims adjuster,
the trembler, then the trembler

Because sometimes the places you’d like to smooth over are the places where you have betrayed yourself and you should take a minute to really think about that. 

In the black hole, maybe even in a cemetery, 
humans, my armed friends, absorbed their own whispers --
all were filthy, thin, pathetic per Shakespeare, 
they numbered their bullets & days & dreams in overnight attacks.

Then the moon appeared without a helmet, coming forth from thorned darkness; 
but my friends failed to fall with their faces to the ground; 
instead they lit cigarettes, talked of liberty, the shooter's freedom, 
their backs leaning loosely against the black hole, the possible gravestone.

And I cannot stop thinking about the ways in which one betrays the self in translation, or in the assumption that translation is not both a funeral and a birth.

Because you don’t need to be brave but it helps to be unashamed. 

It helps to sit in Dorothea Lasky’s extraordinary “Lilac Field” and imagine ourselves.

To perform death is something only humans would do
No animal would sit there
With a blank look on its face
Just because the camera is there

Because we are all always moving forward in time, word by word, and you can trust us to follow you into the future.

You can trust us to notice the enjambments which sever the speaker from the words, the mischief of breaking a line after "you"—the committed, recursive hauntedness of Shane McCrae's "To Make a Wound."

Because we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. 

And no one can prove the future will not resemble “The House” by Warsan Shire.

Because black square, white square, goes the linoleum.

Gherasim Luca wrote “Inventor of Love” in 1945 and I will never get over any of it. Or poetry.

I carry with special elegance the suicidal head on my shoulders and I circulate an infamous mile from one place to another, poisoning the breaths of beings and if things over a range of several kilometers....... I look at myself in the mirror and I see my face full of eyes, mouth, ears, numbers. Under the moonlight, my body casts a shadow, a half-shadow, a pit, a quiet lake, and an onion.

*

Presses & journals associated with these poems: University of Nebraska Press; Wave Books; Bull City Press; Four Way Books; BOA Editions; Archipelago Books; Harvard Review; NYRB Imprints; Tin House; FSG Books; Restless Books, countless journals, I give up…