Here are the poems to vote for in the final round of my fifth Daily Poem Project. They are the winners of the twelve rounds from Monday, February 16, to Sunday, May 10 (each week's poems being those that appeared on Poetry Daily that week; week 5 ended in a tie, hence the two poems from that week):
1: Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
2: Edward Field, Cataract op.
3: David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
4: David Schloss, The Myth.
5a: Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted
5b: David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
6: Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
7: Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
8: Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
9: Louis Simpson, Ishi
10: Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.
11: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone.
12: Jennifer Grotz, Landscape with Arson.
2: Edward Field, Cataract op.
3: David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
4: David Schloss, The Myth.
5a: Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted
5b: David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
6: Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
7: Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
8: Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
9: Louis Simpson, Ishi
10: Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.
11: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone.
12: Jennifer Grotz, Landscape with Arson.
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 on my blog). I will post comments as they come in. (If you want to vote anonymously on the blog, please sign your vote with some sort of pseudonym, so that I can keep track of the various anonymous voters more clearly.)
Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).
Please VOTE BY SUNDAY, MAY 24! But you can still vote as long as I have not posted the results.
FEEL FREE TO POST THIS CALL FOR VOTES ON OTHER BLOGS WITH A LINK TO MINE (or on Facebook, or wherever). The more, the ... well, more work for me, but more fun, too! :-)
16 comments:
Oddly enough, the Santos and Bottoms poems are the ones I remember most after all these weeks, yet neither one gets my vote. After rereading them all, I still like Cradle Song, and have a new appreciation for Catact Op. But my vote goes to Wiman's Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone (which I don't think I voted for the first time around!).
3.
The Cow
A Chat With My Father, followed by Film Noir.
Between Knibbe, Wiman and Gilbert.
OK then.
Gilbert. Just over the other two.
I like Edward Field, Cataract op.Yes he is so adult at age 83, and so youthful. Wonderful.
Cataract Op,
by Edward Field
... and my second choice is:
Not Easily,
by Jack Gilbert
... as I re-read this 'collection' of poems,
I am surprised how many of them I recall
quite well, and how many of them I (still)
like a lot, even though most of them were
NOT my 'first choice' during their particular
DPP weeks.
-- dhsh
cataracy op stays the one for me
3. A Chat With My Father. Even though a very sad poem, I liked the way the mind of this old gentleman is introduced by Bottoms.
Dino
It's between Field, Bottoms and Wiman for me. I'll go with Edward Field, although I don't think I voted for this one first time round. It's got the cleverness of experience in it.
Lava and Sand by Hester Knibbe. What a striking poem, I think the best one of all the weeks. petra
8: Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope)
-sl
To the anonymous commenter whose comment I rejected: if you had signed your name, I would have published it.
Am I in on time?
Letter to the Unconverted
after much deliberation & discovering that more of my favorites made it to the finals than I remembered! :-)
It's almost a tie between Letter to the Unconverted and Chat with my Father - tough call. I will go with Letter to the Unconverted and will regret it tomorrow.
Finally getting around to tallying everything up.
For me it comes down to Gilbert's Not Easily and Bottoms's A Chat With My Father.
I actually had a first list of eight or nine poems, and then I found myself re-reading them looking for any detail that seemed even slightly off.
So the Bottoms and the Gilbert are the two that, under the most intense scrutiny, seemed flawless to me.
The Gilbert is the more philosophically interesting perhaps (with its take on how familiarization works), and it arrives there with very plain language.
The Bottoms is richer, more vivid, and in a sense, finally more startling and singular than the Gilbert (though this is hair-splitting really). So I'm going with the Bottoms.
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