The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR

Here are the poems to vote for in the fourth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 22, to Sunday, March 28):

March 28: The Farm to Choose, by Nathaniel Perry (vote only on the first poem)
March 27: In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve
March 26: Your Family’s Farm, Empty, by Nick Lantz
March 25: Canticle of Assisi Rain, by Jennifer Atkinson (vote only on the first poem)
March 24: Metamorphosis, by Lynn Emanuel
March 23: Treatment, by Ange Mlinko (vote only on the first poem)
March 22: Scholar of the Sorrows, by Mark Conway

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY MONDAY, APRIL 5! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (I'll be out of town for Easter, returning Easter Monday, hence the longer voting period than usual.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE RESULTS

The winner of the third week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral, which received 7 votes out of 21 cast.

In second place was Watchful, by Bob Hicok, with four votes. All but one poem received at least one vote.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week four shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.

Human Shields videos from June, 2009

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther (words by A. E. Stallings)

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Penny a Point

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Gingerbread Blues

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Judas Kiss

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Pale Horse

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE

Here are the poems to vote for in the third week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 15, to Sunday, March 21):

March 21: Isis Unveiled, by Edward Hirsch (vote only on the first poem)
March 20: Waiting on Judgment in Prison, Regretting, by Hŏ Kyun, tr. Ian Haight and T'ae-yŏng Hŏ (vote only on the first poem)
March 19: Personal Estates, by Sandra McPherson
March 18: Vandals, by Jennifer Boyden
March 17: To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral
March 16: Little Diary of Getting Old: viii, by Carlo Betocchi, tr. Geoffrey Brock
March 15: Watchful, by Bob Hicok

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. I will post comments as they come in.

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, MARCH 26! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 28 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.

Tundral Glories video

Here's a video of "Tundral Glories," by Leonti, from the album "Everyone/I" (which you can get from iTunes), with lyrics by yours truly.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO RESULTS

The winner of the second week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa, which received 9 votes out of 26 cast.

In second place was Elegy, by Natasha Trethewey, with six votes. Every poem received at least one vote.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week three on Sunday morning.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.

Trick

Interpreting poems is not a matter of having a set of pre-existing tools that you can choose among to find the right one. Instead, the poems themselves offer you tools for their interpretation, or, in a sense, you have to fashion your own interpretive tools from the raw materials that the poem itself offers you. But how can you fashion such a tool?

The "trick" is to find something in the poem that can be used to interpret other parts of the poem, as in the opening lines of Sam Willetts's "Trick":

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead.

The mystery of a moment of transformation (love to matter, Dad to dead) can then be a tool to interpret the poem further; here, as "Spring" is seen "breaking promises," or in the "opacity" of the alchemy with which the poem ends:

.... Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

"Dad" to "dead": an additional letter changes a vowel sound, and everything is changed. Poetry can act out this transformation, these "unexpected mysteries," but it cannot do anything about them, even when its own "opaque tricks" are made less mysterious by being made into tools.

Here's the whole poem, from Poetry Daily:

TRICK

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead. The ward grows and shrinks, early Spring
breaking promises through the glass.

Dad’s untoothed mouth gawps, and its last
O holds one darkness; dark of a worked-out

abandoned mine. His absence is brute
absurdity, his hand soft as vellum.

His new state exposes the stark child of him,
and un-sons me. No answers now to a son’s

questions, about this, about the sense,
for all his slightness, of a long life’s mass

coming to rest, a settling that churns up
grief in a rounding cloud. Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

Sam Willetts
Granta, Summer 2009

Haunt

Sherod Santos's "The Olive Stump" (which I discussed in my previous post) connects Aeneas and a Hutu soldier as figures of war; Maureen N. McLane's "Haunt" does the same with the Iraq war (or at least a war that closely resembles it?) and Scottish "murder ballads," again asking the implicit question of how to respond to violence beyond one's control or influence. "Haunt" concludes (with lineation I don't know how to reproduce here):

there's a dead soldier in the desert
& three crows wonder over and over
whether to cry out
an elegy
or to sit on his breastbone and pike out
his bonnie blue een

Is the poem considering whether one's proper response to violence should be to participate in it (piking out the dead soldier's eyes) or to memorialize its victims (crying out an elegy)?

Earlier, a different kind of memorializing is mentioned:

testimony weaving its own
shimmering cloth
we wear to keep ourselves warm
& to spare the others
our nakedness

"Testimony" appears here as something done both for oneself (to keep ourselves warm) and for others (to spare them), but even the latter is for oneself, in a way (to spare them our nakedness). And beyond that, the poem continues by apparently rejecting "testimony" entirely: "better not to have heard / the stories."

"Haunt" captures the deep ambiguity of the relationship between the individual and "murder ballads" old and new: what is "testimony" for? What are elegies for? Whom does memorialization serve? The "three crows" cannot choose between elegy and the continuation or confirmation of violence, and McLane's poem raises the haunting issue of how much "elegy" and "testimony" (and even "murder ballads") participate in the violence they describe.

The Olive Stump

What stands out for me in the first two stanzas of Sherod Santos's "The Olive Stump" is his use of the word "but":

1.

When hearing the name of Turnus,
Aeneas leapt the high walls of the citadel
and took the field, the crimsoned warring soldiers
might've marveled, might've set aside their shields
and dropped their battering rams, but they couldn't
have been surprised. The open ground was cleared.

2.
An old wild olive surviving shipwrecked
seamen had for centuries fixed with offerings to
a sheltering god was cut down with the rest and left
a stump. The gods overlook a lot of things, but not
a slight. Aeneas's launched spearhead buried itself
in that tough wood and the hero could not rearm.

These two contrasts function in the same way: "They might've ... but they couldn't" and "overlook ..., but not." The soldiers and the gods are Aeneas's audience; the contrasts highlight how they respond to the hero's actions: this, but not that.

This use of "but" in the first two stanzas marks an alternative in which there's one thing but not another. That is how "or" is normally also used, but the word's use in the third and fourth stanzas of the poem is quite different:

3.

At least until a siding spirit intervened and broke
the bite. The hero weighed his heavy weapon
and towered up again. We're not told if
the olive bled, or if it wept. Like the man
who clung to the lead pipe a Hutu soldier used
to beat his wife and son, it was beside the point.

4.
Meanwhile, the upper hand was hammered out
by the powers that be. The scales were lifted,
balanced, trued. The fight's outcome was settled on.
Who knows what happened to the olive stump,
or to the family of the man the Hutu soldier
dragged outdoors, doused with kerosene and burned.

These stanzas present an alternative only to dismiss it: the first alternative is "beside the point"; the second is framed by an equivalent question ("Who knows?"). The two scenes of violence that the poem compares (Aeneas, a Hutu soldier) generate effects and lead t0 conclusions—but is n'tthe poem saying that they are, in the end, "beside the point"? An epic hero is compared to a faceless participant in genocide, and the heroism is diminished.

The Humanities

Jonathan Mayhew has a quick and biting analysis of what's wrong with the "humanities."

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO

Here are the poems to vote for in the second week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 8, to Sunday, March 14):

March 8: Black Mane, by Henri Cole (vote only on the first poem)
March 9: The Edges of Time, by Kay Ryan (vote only on the first poem)
March 10: Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa
March 11: In the Language of the Here and Now, by Leslie C. Chang
March 12: Elegy, by Natasha Trethewey
March 13: What the Stars Will Bring, by Greg Hewett
March 14: Devotion: Thirst Reduction, by Bruce Smith

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. I will post comments as they come in.

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, MARCH 19! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 21 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was "Trick," by Sam Willetts.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week One Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE RESULTS

The winner of the first week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is "Trick," by Sam Willetts, which received 10 votes out of 32 cast.

In second place was "Landscape with Ignatz," by Monica Youn, with six votes, while "More Precisely," by Ander Monson, came in third with five votes. Every poem received at least two votes.

We discussed Youn's poem for a half an hour or so in my Intensive Composition class on Thursday, and I began to see a lot more in it than I had at first. I suspect that it is probably even more convincing in the context of Youn's book (which is called Ignatz).

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week two on Sunday morning.

Ad with musicians

This ad does not have deeper implications for me (unlike this one), but it did make me wonder why the two guys can't get together and have a good jam. It plays on — even appeals to — an excessive rigidity that many musicians unfortunately have ("I don't play country" or whatever style) while simultaneously trying to overcome it ("we don't jam, but we both shop at Coop").

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week One

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE

The Daily Poem Project (or "Poetry Idol," as C. Dale Young likes to call it) involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week, then voting for the poem you like best. We do this for twelve weeks, and at the end there is a final vote among the twelve winners to determine an overall winner. (For a list of previous winners, see below.)

I'm running the project with two classes this term, and I will tally all the votes from the classes and the blog to determine the winner.

So here are the poems to vote for in week one, the first week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 1, to Sunday, March 7):

March 1: The Olive Stump, by Sherod Santos (vote only on the first poem)
March 2: Landscape with Ignatz, by Monica Youn (vote only on the first poem)
March 3: Haunt, by Maureen N. McLane
March 4: Trick, by Sam Willetts
March 5: Resort, by Kate Potts
March 6: The School of the Arts, by Adrian Blevins
March 7: More Precisely, by Ander Monson

The project will run for twelve weeks, and then the twelve weekly 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 (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. I will post comments as they come in.

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, MARCH 12! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 14 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winners of the previous projects:

1DPP: "The Shout," by Simon Armitage
2DPP: "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.
3DPP: "Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV)", by Hadara Bar-Nadav (blog vote)
3DPP: "Friends", by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (class vote)
4DPP: "Come to Me, His Blood," by Martha Rhodes
5DPP: "Cataract op," by Edward Field

Reading thousands of submissions

Timothy Green of Rattle has some interesting things to say here about a few recent essays on the state of poetry (and literature in general) these days. He's writing from an American perspective; I wonder how his comments play for those involved in the po biz in Britain.

Red Wheelbarrow video

This is striking and beautiful, but it also reminded me of a very different interpretation of William Carlos Williams's poem: in a seminar I took with him long ago, James Longenbach pointed out that WCW was very into modern painting, and it had crossed his mind to interpret the poem not as a realistic description of a real scene but as a modernist abstract painting with a blob of red and a couple blobs of white, with a bit of silver on the red as the "glaze." (Hat tip to SR!)