THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX
Here are the poems to vote for in week six of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 24, to Sunday, March 30):
36. The Chardin Exhibition, by Edward Hirsch
37. Strangers Buried Him, by Pat Boran (vote only on the first poem)
38. Genesis: Primeval Rivers and Forests, by Pattiann Rogers
39. Theory of Incompletion, by Mark Doty (vote only on the first poem)
40. Little God Origami, by Stefi Weisburd
41. A Witch's Dictionary (M-N), by Sarah Kennedy
42. Ode to the Maker of Odes, by Bill Zavatsky
This is the sixth 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).
Please VOTE BY SATURDAY, April 4! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which I will do on April 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."
The winner of week 4 was Damian Walford Davies's "Plague."
The winner of week 5 was Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View."
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16 comments:
pat boran, but run very close by bill zavatsky
Point of View: read Stephen Crane for heaven's sake and then we shall discuss leaden clouds. Keeping it spare.
Oh, dear. After a 'ho hum' selection last week, this time it's difficult. Some good poems here, a couple outstanding. I'll have to read them all again before making a decision.
Oh, goodness. I’m still having problems choosing. Let me tell you some of my difficulties. The Hirsch is excellent, but I’ve read a lot of poems about painters recently. Pat Boran’s poem strikes a lot of chords with me, but Patiann Rogers even more so. I’ve studied and worked in geology and botany – I know the Devonian Rhynie flora she talks about – and this is a fine realisation. I like Mark Doty, but I don’t think this is among his best. Stefi Weisburd is new to me, but I love the imagery here. Sarah Kennedy’s poem is rich and well-crafted, and I love the subject matter of the Zavatsky, although I think it’s a bit long.
I’ll go for Stefi Weisburd, for the originality of her vision. But it’s by a narrow margin.
Ode to the Maker of Odes, by Bill Zavatsky. Hands-down for me this week. Liked bits and pieces of the others, but Zavatsky grabbed me from the very beginning & I knew all the way through reading it that I couldn't vote for any of the others.
Doty.
Mark Doty.
Ode to the Maker of Odes is my choice.
This is not yet my vote, but wanted to share this observation right away:
Doty's "I" on the ladder painting the woodwork and (nearly) swooning over the gorgeous but unfamiliar opera on the radio ... terrific!
BUT I think something went a little haywire
at this point:
"... the rapture of denied closure,
no need to go anywhere, entirety
forming and reasserting itself,
an endless —self-enfolding,
self-devouring— ..."
Is this one of those syntax problems someone alluded to a couple times these past few wks? It is at least a quite glaring awkwardness, interrupting an otherwise grand sweep of words and impressions ... imnsho. (It's
almost as though the painter fell off the
ladder at that point :D))
-- dhsh
Another pre-vote comment ...
I really like the story that "Ode to the Ode-Maker" tells. Not knowing exactly what the ode FORM is noted for, I am left feeling that this excellent tale doesn't need to be made up of all those short lines, that it might as well be formatted as prose.
Does anyone want to convince me otherwise?
-- dhsh
Okay, I've decided ... my vote goes to Hirsch's Chardin exhibition poem. It's one of the three that I liked a lot, and I don't have any "BUT" about it (as I do about the other two, Doty and Zavatsky, as I've already commented).
I also liked "Strangers Buried Him" and "Little God Origami" ... but they were both a little too puzzling(?) for me, I guess.
-- dhsh
"Ode to the Maker of Odes"
Not sure I remember this correctly,
but Robert Bly interviewed Neruda
in NYC years ago; and in that
interview/ Neruda tells Bly about
an incident (a mystical one as I
see it) when he was a child which
involved an exchange of gifts
between him and another child
through a hole in fence.
My knowing this, however vaguely,
is why I favor this poem.
Pat Boran, by far!
I liked the way the Hirsch poem interacted with my reading of it. After four stanzas, I thought, "Ok, you've set it up; now do something with it!" — And then he did, in the sixth, with "one of your last." — And then I thought, "Ok, do something with that!" — And then he did: "to defy death on a sheet of blue paper."
In the case of Rogers's poem, though, it's not that I wanted more: I wanted less. The last two stanzas overdevelop and overinterpret the first three.
Doty's poem is quite beautiful, but a little more ragged than Hirsch's, whose elegance so befits its subject. And the Zavatsky is great fun to read, and I could imagine voting for it in a different week ... but I'll go with Hirsch.
[I haven't read any of the comments yet; didn't want to be biased.]
It's a close tie between Edward Hirsch's "The Chardin Exhibition" and Pat Boran's "Strangers Buried Him." But I have to go with Edward Hirsch here. I really like the setup of it.
Somehow the second part of Boran's poem is stronger and would make for an interesting poem all by itself. The first stanza of that section struck me in particular:
Strangers buried him
(family by credentials)
Anyway, the vote goes to Ed Hirsch.
If there is still time, I am voting for Doty. He writes so well about the enchantments of Baroque opera that I cannot go with anyone else.
Zavatsky is charming, but lost me somewhere along the way; Hirsch is well-crafted and beautiful, but I've been hearing a lot of criticism of, if not disgust with, the epiphanic moment by the young poets who've been reading here in Akron/Cleveland this past week... Well, if Hirsch had written about music instead of art I might have been won over.
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