THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR
Here are the poems to vote for in week four of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 10, to Sunday, March 16):
22. "Afar," by Allen Grossman
23. "Plague," by Damian Walford Davies
24. "Everything to Measure," by Julia Hartwig / tr. by John and Bogdana Carpenter (please vote only on the first poem)
25. "The Mission," by Matthew Sweeney (please vote only on the first poem)
26. "The Heavenly Ladder," by John Witte
27. "Black Baldwin Grand," by Gretchen Steele Pratt
28. "Mud Cap," by Dana Roeser
This is the fourth week of twelve weeks, at the end of which the twelve winners will be put together for a final vote.
HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).
You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).
I will be out of town for Easter, returning late on Easter Sunday. So I will accept votes until Sunday, March 23 (and I will probably only post the results on Monday, March 24, and the call for votes for week 5). If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).
The winner of week 1 was Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter."
The winner of week 2 was Martha Zweig's "Overturn."
The winner of week 3 was B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo."
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12 comments:
Wow, I'm first! &, I have to say that I was pretty close with my comment last week when I said this week would be a doozy of good poems. I'm torn between two...so while I think, I'll talk about my runners-up.
I think "The Mission" by Matthew Sweeney has a nice poke at the end, like a well-swung base hit, it's good.
"The Heavenly Ladder" by John Witte reminds me of one of my favorite movies "Don't Look Now" by Nicolas Roeg. If you haven't seen it, rent it & see if the opening scene reminds you of this poem.
Oh, now to the choice! Argh.
I love love love "Black Baldwin Grand" by Gretchen Steele Pratt. The repetition of phrases reads like playing piano, practicing over and over (how well I remember that!), life and scales looping and twining together like DNA. Oh so lovely.
Then there's "Mud Cap" by Dana Roeser. I laughed out loud at "Mary was of course immaculate" what a delicious play on words! All those interesting analogies, not ones you'd normally think of, & oh the ending. Wow! Subtly woven back around to the beginning.
Ooh! I guess I am going to go with Roeser by a nose for that ending, but what a tough call!
Dana Roeser, with Matthew Sweeney in the #2 spot.
Black Baldwin Grand. I so love a pantoum, and this brings back so much, even if we only had an upright. I think it was the image of the creche that sealed the deal.
difficult choice for me also. i really liked dana roeser's thing but in the end damian walford davies gets my vote.
'seam of femurs' wasalways going to be a winner for me!
I'll go for "Everything to Measure," so it will get a vote at least (because of that spooky ending and for doing what it does so swiftly).
The pantoum is a perfect example of padding for the sake of form; "the heavenly ladder" was effective in parts but its syntax shifts didn't always work with the lines, for me. I liked about half of "mud cap," but that genre of poem (the extended free associated analogy) I find more tiresome than other readers here (like the one a week or so ago about the hare and the bird and the wren and Keats...).
I almost abstained...
Although I am not attracted
to its topic, I am voting for
Matthew Sweeney's "The Mission"
because it is spooky mysterious.
Yes, a more compelling batch this week. At first I couldn't decide between the final two (Pratt and Roeser), but after reading everyone's comments and rereading the poems, I think I am changing my mind and will vote for Davies. The "seam of femurs" is lovely indeed, as is the overall tightness, and even the annoying look-at-me line breaks through words can be explained, I suppose.
I'd love to see the piano without the pantoum as well, which doesn't seem to render enough new meaning to work for me. And what's up with the creches? How you get from them to portobellos never quite makes sense to me in Roeser. There is lots to like there, for sure, e.g. the ending, but also unsatisfying line breaks as well as the use of "sexy" twice in connection with mechanics, in a tiny three-line stanza, that's riding a clichee I find problematic to begin with.
The syntax shifts in "The Heavenly Ladder" are quite annoying, and "The Mission" reads more like a short-short, very much about effect and almost too Hollywood for me.
I did like paradise as the "victory of order," though.
I'm writing to applaud your poll and say thanks to all who vote, though it does seem "Galileo" received the nod last week by default. Perhaps there's a poem in it: Best of the Worst...at any rate, best to you all. BT Shaw
plague (23 davies) or heavenly ladder (26 witte) ... which shall be my choice?
I think I'll go with plague, because I do NOT like heavenly ladder's success in expressing (or at least suggesting the appropriateness of) the guilt of a parent who went to work instead of staying at the kid's riding class ... how's that for backing into a vote?!
-- dhsh
my vote's for Mud Cap
I'm going to go with Matthew Sweeney's "The Mission," even though in a sense I am voting for the book it comes from rather than for the poem itself. That poem is one I noted when I read the book, as it is told from a quite singular perspective, but there were other individual poems in the book that would have been clear winners from me.
"Plague": I did not really like the odd word-breaks.
"Black Baldwin Grand": if it had been two or three stanzas shorter, I might have voted for it. But it is probably great to hear this one read out loud.
"The Heavenly Ladder": either drop punctuation entirely, or punctuate clearly!
"Mud Cap": a little too rambling for my taste. A bit more focus and I might have voted for it.
Re: strange word-break(s) in =Plague=
The one that really tripped me up was
"... Knight-
sbridge ..."
which indeed seems really weird!
Now I'm going to go back and look for others.
By the way, what is a "syntax shift"? I noticed that phrase in more than one comment, and am a little unsure of how it's being used.
-- dhsh
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