Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Call for Votes

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."

Rain on a Still Pond

This poem by Allen Grossman struck me in a considerable number of ways. I especially noted the use of "it is as when", a figure that always reminds me of Dante. I don't think there is a taboo on such similes in contemporary poetry in English, but they are quite rare.

There's also the "just as ... so" form that appears in Dante, and is also rare in English-language poetry these days.

But I should also add that I just think Grossman's poem is beautiful.

DPP4 results

This morning, the class voted on the poems. The vote was both close and a runaway, as two poems had five votes each:

22. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
24. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"

In the class, no other poem received more than two votes.

The blog voters (16 votes this time, counting mine; thanks, everyone) produced an entirely different result, with Dockins receiving 0 votes and Harrington 2. Again, 5 votes for the winner:

28. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"

And 4 for the poem in second place:

26. Jeffrey Franklin, "Drucker's Mule Barn"

Last night, Franklin had received 4 votes, and Grossman 3, but when I checked my email this morning, two more votes had come in for Grossman.

My short list had been Franklin, Grossman, and David Harsent's "Spatchcock" (poem 23). I waited several days to see which poem would convince me to vote for it; after a while, I got tired of Harsent's weirdness, and when I went to choose between Franklin and Grossman, Franklin's mules threatened to kick me, so I voted for his poem:

That's why when someone I don't know
and don't want to know rings my phone
I sometimes pick it up and say, "Drucker's
Mule Barn."

Or as I always wanted to say on the phone: "Fenway Park, second base." (Hey, how do you like them Sox?)

I'll be posting a call for votes for week five on Sunday (Dylan in Zurich on Sunday evening!); in the meantime, of course, you can already read the poems on Poetry Daily (the poems from April 23 to April 29).

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two
Week Three

DPP4

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR

Here are the poems to vote for in week four of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 16, to Sunday, April 22):

22. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
23. David Harsent, "Spatchcock"
24. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"
25. Fleda Brown, "Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center"
26. Jeffrey Franklin, "Drucker's Mule Barn"
27. Moira Linehan, "Refuge"
28. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"

The Rules:

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). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list above! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem! Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, APRIL 26!

Results of previous weeks:
Week One
Week Two
Week Three

Good Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd's "One State of the Art" is yet another fine piece of prose from the pen or keyboard of RS:

"Reversing Pound's dictum that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, many contemporary American poets seem to believe that technique is instead a sign of insincerity, that something too apparently shapely cannot be deeply felt, or that the urgencies of feeling are necessarily at odds with the imperatives of form."

"... what Allen Grossman has called the four tasks that the significant poet must be expected to perform: to point out what is significant in the world of common experience; to defeat given expectations with respect to how things are assembled (and poems themselves are very much in the category of 'things'); to make clear how difficult it is to make meaning; and to make clear how interesting the world is."

I also liked this tidbit from D. W. Fenza's "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?", a link I found thanks to John Gallaher:

"Poets often allude to other poets, not because they like to show off or generate footnotes, but because they love to enter that mysterious communal place where the dead, the living, and future generations exchange their gifts with one another. Poetry is the loveliest of all conversations, for it seeks to belong to no one person but to overlapping and concentric circles of self, friends, family, tribes, communities, and humanity."