After several weeks in which the bloggers and the students in the Daily Poem Project voted for the same poems (see the summary of the results for the whole project at the end of the week 9 results), the two groups produced different results again this week.
The class voted this morning, and Ditchdigger, by Liane Strauss, received the most votes (4 out of 13), with no other poem receiving more than two.
The bloggers, however, gave one poem a clear majority of the vote: Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV), by Hadara Bar-Nadav, ran away with it with 7 votes (out of 12 cast), with only Strauss's "Ditchdigger" also receiving more than one (and it only got two).
One of the votes for "Ditchdigger" was from yours truly: it was an easy choice for me, as that was the only poem I really liked on a first reading. Too easy, perhaps—all the votes for Bar-Nadav's poem made me look at it quite closely, and what I discovered is that the form becomes much less intrusive if I read the poem out loud. I'm still not entirely convinced by the form, but at least it is no longer obstructing my response to the content.
Frequent DPP voter Don Brown is on vacation, so I have to do without his detailed comments this week, but several voters contributed comments to the call-for-votes post:
Nic Sebastian said...
Friday, June 08, 2007
4 comments:
-
Anonymous said...
-
Woohoo! Glad the Maze won, although I see others shared my reservations about the form. It would be interesting to know what the author actually intended. Cheers, Nic
-
3:54 AM
-
Andrew Shields said...
-
She's got a website, http://hadarabarnadav.com/, with an email address on it somewhere, so we could go ask her ...
-
10:03 AM
-
Ms Baroque said...
-
Hi Andrew, and I missed the boat on this one. Last week was manic.
I should tell you that Liane Strauss is one of my best friends! So I'm partial. But I do think her poem is fresh, clever and fun, and the first time I ever read it I laughed out loud when I got to the end. I'm glad it got more votes than the others, but disappointed that more people aren't refreshed by its refreshingness!
The maze one interests me in that it is, at least, interesting - though hard to understand - the gimmick impedes the reading.
Most of the others blend into a bit of a blur. They didn't seem that much different to tons of stuff that's already all over the place. The dead one seems incredibly prosy to me.
There! I'll try and come back one week when I don't have a friend on the list! -
4:52 PM
-
Andrew Shields said...
-
Ms. B: You're allowed to vote for your friends!
That goes for everyone who votes here: you are allowed to vote for your friends! Or even for yourself. -
10:32 AM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm voting for the Maze, with the Fewer Disappointments next and the Poplars third. 68, 69 and 70 failed to pull me in for various reasons (many sonics-related) and although I found 64 interesting, I couldn't pull it together into any kind of an organic whole in the time allotted. I think it deserves a re-visit at some point. My thoughts on the Maze and the Disappointments at A Bundle of Biases.
I vote for Hadara Bar-Nadav's meditation on the Minotaur. I'm intrigued by animal speakers, or figures that are part animal, part human.--The poem is a bit of a formal experiment, which, I suppose, may have something to do with the maze, and the liminal or fragmented state the Minotaur is in.
Here's my ranked list (my favorite is at the top):
67. Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV), by Hadara Bar-Nadav
65. Poplars, by Donald Revell
66. In Another Year of Fewer Disappointments, by Eliza Griswold
64. from: The Book of the Dead Man, by Marvin Bell
68. Auroras, by Joanna Klink
70. Aftermath, by Forrest Hamer
69. Ditchdigger, by Liane Strauss