Cogitatio Mortis

Above: the forgotten vignettes of constellations.
On the river, the ache-song of a slow thaw;
Each stone, anchored, measures the same hour.

I hitched home, which means I walked most the way.

After a while, each journey is thread spun from distance and sleet.
Moon on the pond like an open door.
After a while, each room is a waiting room.

Eric Pankey

This poem first appeared in New England Review and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. It appears in Eric Pankey’s collection Trace, published by Milkweed Editions. Poem copyright 2011 Eric Pankey, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author. Order the book here.

Read about Eric Pankey.

See more work from video artists Jeff Saunders and Scott Olson. Other motionpoems by Jeff or Scott are Jane Hirshfield’s “The Cloudy Vase” and Thomas Lux’s “Render, Render.”

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

Snow

Snow that covers us from above,
Cover us more deeply.
Whiten the city with its houses and churches,
The red house and the yellow house,
The port with its ships.

Cover the Garden House
Where we could never get warm.
There was a fireplace so we learned to build fires.
We had a baby so we walked in the rain.

Cover the fields, cover the trees,
The river beneath us prodding its black stones,
The suffering of which I wasn’t aware.

Cover the house where I grew up in New Jersey,
The basement where I learned how to paint,
To hammer a nail, to cut a silk screen.

The harpsichord I built,
The piano I played,
The attic where I stood alone in the cold
Listening for something, I didn’t know what.

I hid a book in the eaves,
I couldn’t find it when we moved.

Snow that covers us from above,
Cover us more deeply.
Cover the rooftops,
Cover the sea.

James Longenbach

This poem first appeared in Salmagundi and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. The poem appears in Longenbach’s collection The Iron Key, published in 2010 by W. W. Norton. Poem copyright 2011 James Longenbach, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

Read about James Longenbach.

See more work from video artist Deb Kirkeeide.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled

World, I honor you.
After everything
we’ve been through

I honor you and take you with me
up the mountainside
where we will live
in wonderment.

I take you to the desert
where we shrivel like worms
and become tongues
for other people to kiss with.

World, there are two baskets
on my back.
Fill them. Fill them with fruit
and more fruit.

Or fill them with whatever
is customary
but tell me it is fruit.
Call it something good.

World, some have satisfied their thirst.
But I am the crying-out animal
who can see in the dark.
Forgive me.

Bridget Lowe

This poem first appeared in Ploughshares and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Bridget Lowe, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

Read about Bridget Lowe.

See more work from video artist Angella Kassube.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry

Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.
They—it?—are concerned about the environment.
I—it?—am concerned about the environment.
They—him?—convey their concern through commercials,
in which a man talks softly about the importance
of the Earth. I—doodad?—convey my concern
through poems, in which my fingers type softly
about the importance of the Earth. They—oligarchs?—
have painted their slogans green. I—ineffectual
left-leaning emotional black-hole of a self-semaphore?—
recycle. Isn’t a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren’t I technically a person
and responsible? In a legal sense, in a regal sense,
if romanticism holds sway? To give you a feel
for how soft his voice is, imagine a kitty
that eats only felt wearing a sable coat on a bed
of dandelion fluff under sheets of the foreskins
of seraphim, that’s how soothingly they want to drill
in Alaska, in your head, just in case. And let’s be honest,
we mostly want them to, we mostly want to get to the bank
by two so we can get out of town by three and beat
the traffic, traffic is murder, this time of year.
How far would you walk for bread? For the flour
to make bread? A yard, a mile, a year, a life?
Now you ask me, when are you going to fix your bike
and ride it to work? Past the plain horses
and spotted cows and the spotted horses and plain cows,
along the river, to the left of the fallen-down barn
and the right of the falling-down barn, up the hill,
through the Pentecostal bend and past the Methodist
edifice, through the speed trap, beside the art gallery
and cigar shop, past the tattoo parlor and the bar
and the other bar and the other other bar and the other
other other bar and the bar that closed, where I swear,
al-anon meets, since I’m wondering, what is the value
of the wick or wire of soul, be it emotional
or notional, now that oceans are wheezing to a stop?

Bob Hicok

This poem first appeared in New Ohio Review and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Bob Hicok, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

Read about Bob Hicok.

See more work from video artist Joanna Kohler.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

See behind-the-scenes production photos from the creation of this motionpoem!

Captions by video artist Joanna Kohler.

Producers, AD and crew getting a blackout tent assembled to control the lighting inside the garage.

Talking over the shot-list with Bryan Shelley, the Assistant Director.

Pete, the main talent, gets his naked feet shot in the grass of the yard. This is meant to look like a nighttime shot. We shot it this way and then flipped the image in post to look like the camera is Pete’s perspective.

Awesome animal handlers test out the cow’s temperament to see if we can go without her harness.

Here’s Mike Hartzel getting ready to grab shots of the cow the moment she may give us something useful.

Everyone waits and works with the cow’s mood in a single-car garage.

I couldn’t resist a facebook pic with the cow!

The Cloudy Vase

Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

Jane Hirshfield

This poem first appeared in McSweeney’s and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. It appears in Jane Hirshfield’s collection Come, Thief, published by Knopf. Poem copyright 2011 Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

Read about Jane Hirshfield.

See more work from video artist Jeff Saunders.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

Ecclesiastes 11:1

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

Richard Wilbur 

This poem first appeared in The New Yorker and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Richard Wilbur, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

Read about Richard Wilbur.

See more work from Faith Eskola.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

THOREAU AND THE LIGHTNING

The white ash tree, the one he’d visited

time after time and season after season

and had studied and admired like a proud father,

had been struck by lightning. Lightning

had gouged downward, tossing broken limbs

every which way, had split the trunk

into six twenty-foot splayed, upstanding fence rails

still held up by the roots, had plowed a furrow

into a cellar (where it scorched the milk pans),

had bolted out in a shower of soil, had shattered

weatherboards and beams and the foundation,

had smashed a shed, unstacked and scattered a woodpile,

had flung pieces of bark two hundred feet

in all directions. It had thrown into disorder

or destroyed in a moment what an honest farmer

had struggled for years to gather, and had killed

a great tree. Was he supposed to be humbled

by the benign, malign, inscrutable purposes

of the Source, the blundering Maker of Thunderheads,

and give thanks he hadn’t been standing under it?

DAVID WAGONER

This poem first appeared in Ecotone and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. It is collected in After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and is reprinted here with the author’s permission. Poem copyright 2011 David Wagoner, all rights reserved.

More about David Wagoner.

Visit Adam Tow’s web site or follow Adam on Twitter.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

THE POEM OF THE SPANISH POET

In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, an old Spanish poet, nearing the end of his life, who walks to Guadalquivir and watches the ships, gray and ghostly in the twilight, slip downstream. The little waves, approaching the grassy bank where he sits, whisper something he can’t quite hear as they curl and fall. Now what does the Spanish poet do? He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a notebook, and writes:

Black fly, black fly
Why have you come

Is it my shirt
My new white shirt

With buttons of bone
Is it my suit

My dark blue suit
Is it because

I lie here alone
Under a willow

Cold as a stone
Black fly, black fly

How good you are
To come to me now

How good you are
To visit me here

Black fly, black fly
To wish me goodbye

MARK STRAND

This poem first appeared in Salmagundi and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Mark Strand, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

More about Mark Strand.

More about Juan Delcan.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

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 imagination

to go all the way to California—it could be that

she’s on to something. Because, admit it,

when you look at the people on these streets,

the razor-blade women with their strategic bones

and the men wearing Amish pants with

interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you

will never cut it anywhere that constitutes

a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in

a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.

So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators

practically tweaking, panting all the way down

from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on

with their long planned business of snuffling

trash or peeing on something to which all day

they’ve been looking forward, what you want is

to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other

losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are,

as we speak, halfheartedly exploding.

ERIN BELIEU

This poem first appeared in 32 Poems and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Erin Belieu, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

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More about Amy Schmitt.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.

JUST AS, AFTER A POINT, JOB CRIED OUT

The soil froze, cursing the weather. It turned a stoic face

to winter’s switchblade and brass knuckles

so that when the warm rain came, the soil said, Go on,

there’s no room for you now. Let the backyards

pool up, and the river pitch to the bridges, dragging

the bridges down. Now the billboards will become great

silent rafts so anyone can climb on them and look out,

saying, I would have done the same.

When the water covered the tree trunks and crept up,

the ground shrugged. See, it said. Now,

weather, do you understand? Soon,

there will be no resting place.

K. A. HAYS

This poem first appeared in Black Warrior Review and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 K. A. Hays, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.

More about K. A. Hays.

More about Emma Burghardt.

This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.