THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN
Here are the poems to vote for in the eleventh week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 27, to Sunday, May 3):
May 3: Du Fu, Mr. Song's Deserted Villa (tr. David Young: vote only on the first poem)
May 2: Randall Mann, The End of Landscape
May 1: Patrick Warner, The Lost Years
April 30: Richard Jackson, Cause and Effect
April 29:Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Geisblatt
April 28: Jim Harrison, Age Sixty-Nine (vote only on the first poem)
April 27: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone
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.)
Here are the poems to vote for in the eleventh week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 27, to Sunday, May 3):
May 3: Du Fu, Mr. Song's Deserted Villa (tr. David Young: vote only on the first poem)
May 2: Randall Mann, The End of Landscape
May 1: Patrick Warner, The Lost Years
April 30: Richard Jackson, Cause and Effect
April 29:Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Geisblatt
April 28: Jim Harrison, Age Sixty-Nine (vote only on the first poem)
April 27: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone
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 FRIDAY, MAY 8! But you can still vote as long as I have not posted the results, which I will due by Sunday, May 10, at the latest.
The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
The winner of week seven was Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
The winner of week eight was Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
The winner of week nine was Louis Simpson, Ishi
The winner of week ten Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.
10 comments:
Du Fu's third poem is my favourite this week, but I can't vote on it, so... hmmm. The rest are a bit prosy this week, to my taste anyway. I'll go with Christian Wiman's Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone, because I like the story.
Off to the Somme this week, armed with Andrew Motion's anthology of WWI poetry.
i find myself very much in accord with colin this week so i too will fo with christian wiman
Jim Harrison's Age Sixty-Nine
is my choice for 'best of the week'.
Here are the bits and pieces of Harrison's poem that really grabbed my attention:
I hope one day to be a spiral
on local earth my heart is at rest
At dawn I have birds
BTW and fyi: I've been reading and enjoying Jim Harrison's fiction for decades -- from way back when he still lived in and wrote about life in the sticks of northern lower Michigan. Since my dad's family was -- and much of it still is -- from that same neck of the woods, Harrison's early stories have always felt especially real to me. But at some point JH moved to Montana, so I no longer get quite the same 'kick' out of his more recent landscapes and characters.
-- dhsh
PS: I also very much liked Richard Jackson's Cause and Effect (partly because long ago I enjoyed the friendship of someone named Richard Jackson, so of course I wonder if this poet might just be the same fellow. Sounds like a task for google!)
PS: I didn't even need google ...
The bio that Salt Hill included along
with Richard Jackson's poem proved,
beyond any doubt, that the poet is
NOT the same RJ I knew during the
1950s at the University of Michigan.
-- dhsh
I like pieces of many (much of Harrison, much of Kelly), but as a complete piece, I'd go with Du Fu.
I also like best one of the Du Fu poems that is ineligible (the second). Otherwise, this week's choices don't appeal too much. I also think, as someone else said, they are prosey and description-y, with little attention to other elements of poetry. Bits and pieces grab me. I think Geissblatt builds toward the end and has some surprises, so I will vote for that.
Marshall - Lost Years
Du Fu...does it get any better? But I don't think I'll vote for it.
Patrick Warner has good control of the relation of sound and specific detail, but I really have no idea what he's talking about, nor why whatever he's talking about has to be so deliberately 'artful.' I'm not convinced.
Jackson: the opening two lines struck me as awful; but I read on; the memories like an oil slick made me cringe, then dropping in Wittgenstein sealed the deal. I stopped.
Kelly: I couldn't get past 'indescribably beautiful.' For my money, no poem ever needs to include the phrase 'indescribably beautiful.'
Harrison's was a relief because it so cleanly avoided egregious poeticisms, and the ending three lines caused me to give the old dude a bow. Great ending.
Wiman, though, gets my vote, even though it wanders a bit into magazine verse poeticizing and I was getting bored, but then it lays it on and convinced me from "The Longhorn Diner's long torn down" till the end.
Then I went back and read the two I couldn't finish. Jackson's just gets worse and worse; Kelly's goes on a nice description jag, but the aside about Catherine Wheel undermines it.
So, Wiman, especially since I didn't even notice the couplets till I re-read it. That ain't prose, people.
Jackson - Cause & Effect
runner-up Kelly - Geisblatt
guess I'm into the text ones this week. :-)
My list: Wiman, then Harrison, then Du Fu.
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