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

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week One

THE FIFTH 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, but unlike in the third project, where I ran separate votes for the blog and for the class, I will tally all votes together this time (from the classes and from the blog).

Here are the poems to vote for in week one, the first week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, February 16, to Sunday, February 22):

February 16: Charles Simic, Trees in the Yard
February 17: Tomasz Rózycki, Coral Bay, tr. Mira Rosenthal
February 18: Jacques Réda, Lament of the Old Pole , tr. by Andrew Shields
February 19: Andrew Hudgins, Walking a True Line
February 20: Chard DeNiord, The Woe That Is in Friendship
February 21: Sherod Santos, Film Noir
February 22: T. Alan Broughton, A Midnight Clear

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. 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.

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, FEBRUARY 27! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 1 at the latest.)

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

Twins

My sisters are twins (though not identical), and one is gay and one is straight, so the image that C. Dale Young posted today means a lot to me (especially given the fact that it's also my sisters' birthday today!).

Household Finance

A tip of the hat to C. Dale Young for posting this one:

Fourth Daily Poem Project

The Daily Poem Project (fondly dubbed "Poetry Idol" by C. Dale Young) 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 am starting the new project with the PD poem from today (the first day of the first-ever Spring Semester at the University of Basel). I'll be posting a call for votes for the first week this coming Sunday. If you want to begin thinking about what poem to vote for, here are the poets whose work will be considered this week (their poems will be appearing on Poetry Daily from today until Sunday):

Monday - Alison Brackenbury
Tuesday - Tony Towle
Wednesday - Gregory Woods
Thursday - Bob Hicok
Friday - Lee Sharkey
Saturday - Muriel Nelson
Sunday - Lisa Williams

I will be doing one thing differently this time around: I will still moderate comments (and hence votes), but I will be posting them as they come in (between the posting of the call for votes and the deadline for voting), so that people can argue with each other if they want to!

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)

This time around, though, I will be having only one set of votes (as I am not running this project in tandem with any particular class).

Any questions?

Hicok afterwards

Thanks to C. Dale Young for the link to "So I Know," by Bob Hicok, who, as you can gather from the poem, was one of the Virginia Tech killer's creative writing teachers.

I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.

Foe 2

"There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will."

Here, Coetzee's Susan Barton is writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe) about the mute Friday whom she has brought back from Cruso's island.

It is a less extreme version, perhaps, of the end of the long text Conrad's Kurtz writes about the problem of the natives (in Heart of Darkness): "Exterminate all the brutes!"

I was inspired to reread Heart of Darkness by C. Dale Young's comment that he re-reads it every year. But I have not gotten around to it yet. First a bunch of Coetzee.

Poetry Bestsellers

C. Dale Young linked to this list of current bestsellers in poetry. I thought it would be interesting to edit the list as follows:

a) take out any dead poets (Bukowski, Plath, Larkin).

b) take out any poets who appear more than once (Collins, Oliver, Bukowski again, Berry).

The first bit of editing seems to go without saying. The second is less clear, but perhaps it's like taking Rowling off the bestseller lists so you can see what else is doing well. This is the list I ended up with after editing:

1. Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
2. Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)
3. Averno by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
4. The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
5. District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6. The Human Line by Ellen Bass (Copper Canyon Press)
7. Present Company by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
8. Queen of a Rainy Country: Poems by Linda Pastan (W. W. Norton)
9. Sleeping Upside Down by Kate Lynn Hibbard (Silverfish Review Press)
10. After by Jane Hirshfield (Harper Perennial)

A few remarks:

a) Copper Canyon is doing well. I am delighted to hear it!

b) Five books published by relatively large publishing houses, three by Copper Canyon, one by a university press, and one by a very small poetry press.

c) It's not a bad list, is it? Sure, one can argue about one or two of the poets on it according to one's taste, and some people might see all these writers as being more or less the same (card-carrying members of the "School of Quietude"), but really, the poets I know from this list are quite distinct: Kirby, for example, is not at all like Heaney, who is not at all like Merwin, who bears a slight but superficial resemblance to Hirshfield—and none of those are at all like Kooser or Glück.

DPP9 results

At one point, I was a bit concerned about the blog vote in this week's Daily Poem Project, because there had been only 9 votes, and 6 poems had received votes, with no poem getting more than two.

By now there have been 17 votes, and all 7 poems have received votes (only the second time in nine weeks that no poem has been shut out). The winner is 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young, with 4 votes, with two poems tied for second with 3 votes: A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good and Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy.

The class vote was also very close, with Young and Hennessy tying for first with four votes each, and The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie receiving 3 votes (out of 14 votes cast).

Although I am a devoted admirer of C. Dale Young, I was a bit disappointed by Poetry Daily's choice of "33rd & Kirkham" to represent his new book The Second Person. I would have gone for "Proximity" or "Prognosis" instead; the latter, especially, would have easily received my vote. (Buy Young's briliant book to check it out.)

As it is, I chose between Jamie and Hennessy, and I went for Hennessy, because of the simultaneous economy and excess of the poem's language.

The comments to the blog included the following:

Donald Brown said...

I can't be dismissive like last week. This is all good stuff. All that careful, even, finely tuned verse that poetry in our time is best at. Which is a way of saying I'm not bowled over by great lyrical moments. The best for that is perhaps #60 by Regan Good, but lifting from Shakespeare (Lady M to her hubby: 'what's done cannot be undone") is a little suspect, to me. "The natural law is wearing winter's face" appeals to me though, and the poem is spooky. It's also suggestive where others are too deliberate, so it almost got my vote. Of the others: #57 Baker, my initial impression is that it's too long and doesn't fully orchestrate all its parts, so that I'm not convinced by all of it. Don't like the Keats part much, for instance. #59, Rose indicates to me the limits of the Poetry Daily enterprise: it's so concentrated I want to read it on paper. It seems unsuited to online poetry, for me. A very good narrative poem. #61, Hennessey, fun, but he's Irish and so of course his diction is interesting, but the subject matter doesn't seem all that striking; #62, Young, very nice, elegant, but seems already too familiar. My vote goes to #58, "The Well at the Broch of Gurness" by Kathleen Jamie which is evocative and elusive and lyrical in a way that appeals to me, mostly.

Bruce Loebrich said...

Here's my ranked list (my favorite is at the top):

60. A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good
57. Posthumous Man, by David Baker
62. 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young
59. Ablution, by Rachel Rose
63. This Morning, by Sarah Sawyer
61. Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy
58. The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie

SarahJane said...

I thought this was a particularly good week. Couple of strong contenders here, but without wavering I vote for Regan Good. cheers

Felix said...

My vote goes to C. Dale Young. "33rd & Kirkham" is, I suppose, an Alba poem. Alba is the dawn which unfaithful lovers dread. But the lovers in Young's poem are not necessarily unfaithful; they may simply not find room for the love, except at night, and in poetry itself.

dhsh said...

Top 3 are in an almost dead heat (to my ear).

#1: 33rd & Kirkham .... by C. Dale Young

#2: Ablution .... by Rachel Rose

#3: A Stone Should Mark the Place
.... by Regan Good

Next 2 are also almost-a-tie.

#4: The Well at the Broch of Gurness
.... by Kathleen Jamie

#5: Dialing While Intoxicated
.... by John Hennessy

Last 2 "lost" me in one or more ways.

#6: This Morning .... by Sarah Sawyer

#7: Posthumous Man .... by David Baker

We're nine weeks into the project, with three weeks to go. Here are the nine winners of the blog votes:

1. Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tom Sleigh, "Blueprint"
3. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
4. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"
5. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends"
6. Robin Ekiss, "Vanitas Mundi"
7. Maurice Manning, "Where Sadness Comes From"
8. Reginald Shepherd, "Eve's Awakening"
9. C. Dale Young, "33rd & Kirkham"

Week 12 will be from June 11 to June 17; I will post a call for votes for the above list of finalists (plus the three remaining winners) on June 24, with at least a week to allow people to choose among them.

For comparison, here are the winners of the first nine weeks of voting by the class (poems that tied for first are given letters along with the week numbers):

1. Derek Walcott, "The Castaway"
2a. C. D. Wright, "Dear night dear shade dear executioner"
2b. Elizabeth Bradfield, "Industry"
2c. Paul Zimmer, "Suck It Up"
3. Josephine Dickinson, "The Bargain"
4a. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
4b. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"
5. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends"
6. Kevin McFadden, "The Ides of Amer-I-Can"
7. Maurice Manning, "Where Sadness Comes From"
8. Reginald Shepherd, "Eve's Awakening"
9a. C. Dale Young, "33rd & Kirkham"
9b. John Hennessy, "Dialing While Intoxicated"

DPP9 voting still open

I'll still accept votes for week 9 of the Daily Poem Project today (Friday, June 1), as the voting is very close and I'd love to see things shuffled up a bit still. Here are the poems to choose from:

57. Posthumous Man, by David Baker
58. The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie
59. Ablution, by Rachel Rose
60. A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good
61. Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy
62. 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young
63. This Morning, by Sarah Sawyer

You can vote by email or by a comment here or on the original post linked above. Vote for only ONE poem!

DPP9

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK NINE

Here are the poems to vote for in week nine of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, May 21, to Sunday, May 27):

57. Posthumous Man, by David Baker
58. The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie
59. Ablution, by Rachel Rose
60. A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good
61. Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy
62. 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young
63. This Morning, by Sarah Sawyer

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). 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 THURSDAY, MAY 31!

If you want to receive an email announcing the results, send me your email address with your vote (if you have a public blogger profile, I can usually find it).

Abstaining: If you read the poems but decide that there is no poem that you want to vote for, I would be interested to know that you decided to abstain.

Week 8 results are here. Week 7 results are here. The results of the first six weeks are summarized in the post about the week 6 results.

A poem as a political reference point

In my post on "poets as intellectual reference points," I quoted Durs Grünbein:

"When an average intellectual today reflects on the last century's great artistic and intellectual achievements, he first thinks of such names as Freud and Picasso, Stravinsky and Heisenberg, Hitchcock and Wittgenstein. It is impossible to imagine that one of them could be a poet. Not a single poet from the ancestral gallery (whether Pessoa, Cavafy, or Rilke, whether Yeats, Mandelstam, Valéry, Frost, or Machado) will cross the mind of the historically-informed thinker, who dares to claim a monopoly on Modernism anyway."

As I summarized the issue: "what 'artistic' references do intellectuals use to support their points in cultural and political discussions?"

Well, C. Dale Young drew my attention today to a New York Times article by Adam Cohen, "What W. B. Yeats's 'Second Coming' Really Says About the Iraq War." Cohen indirectly deflates Grünbein's claim, in two ways:

1) He refers to many "uses" of Yeats's poem, belying the claim that poets and poems are never reference points for intellectuals.

2) "The pundits ... are picking up on Yeats's words, but not his world view": "world view" is a bit strong, but Cohen implies that it may not be possible to use a poem's words as intellectual reference points without engaging in careful interpretation of their nuances. In other words, the problem with poets, poems, and poetry is not that people do not refer to them in intellectual discussions but that poems resist being co-opted for such arguments in any straightforward way. Yeats's poem, Cohen concludes, is in fact "a powerful brief against punditry," against the very idea of predicting the future through intellectual argument.

This is still not a definitive rebuttal of Grünbein's claim, but it does put it in a somewhat more questionable light.

Lying in submissions

C. Dale Young writes, in his post "Lies and Garbage" (and in his role as poetry editor of New England Review):

"Why do writers lie in their cover letters? I mean, they not only lie but they lie like dogs. Not all of them. Not even the majority of them. But the ones that do just about kill me. It is never a good idea to lie about something like having work in The New Yorker and POETRY. These can be checked in less than a minute. And even if your lie gets your work past the screeners and into the hands of the poetry editor, s/he will know almost immediately that you are lying. So weird."

My comment to him:

1) I, too, am astonished that somebody would lie about the really biggest names, where it is, in the age of the web, astonishingly easy to be caught in one's lie.

In composition classes and academic work, it is easy these days for students to steal essays from the web (or essay-like texts from blogs), but it is also incredibly easy for their teachers to find them, too (and the stolen material sticks out like a sore thumb, because of the change in style—and, with my students, the sudden absence of the common mistakes made by German speakers). In fact, the English Seminar in Basel subscribes to a service that can identify plagiarized texts—the flip side of students' buying essays from web services.

2) Why do editors need bios at all? I just read the guidelines page at NER. It does not ask writers to submit a bio in their cover letters. Have you thought about asking people to NOT send bios?

What is the purpose of a bio with a submission to a literary magazine, anyway? If the editors are really serious about the idea that they look only at the poems themselves and not at the names of the poets who wrote them, then a bio should be superfluous. If a good bio increases the poet's chances of being published, then the editors are looking at more than just the poems themselves, aren't they?

Of course, even without bios in cover letters, editors will still recognize the names of many of the poets who submit to them. But short of blind submissions (as in prizes), there's nothing to be done about that.

What's on my desk

C. Dale Young posted a list of everything on his desk. I posted a comment with what is on my desk, but actually only with what is on the top of the piles, plus a few stray things:

These are the things on TOP of the piles:

The latest issue of Conduit.
Bill Coyle, The God of this World to His Prophet (which I received because I did not win the New Criterion Prize for 2005)
Two DVDs of Greg Brown concerts.
Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (waiting to be given to a friend, since I have her Collected Poems)

Then some stray things:

A pink highlighter; a lost pen cap; a small post-it pad; a black Pentel mechanical pencil; some ungraded papers; a guitar tuner; an electronic letter scale; a green clothespin; a small package of Kleenex.

What do you have on your desk?

Math and German

C. Dale Young wrote today about his decision to do medicine and poetry, instead of Studio Art.

Twenty-two years ago, I decided to drop the Math part of my planned double major in Math and German. Later, I switched to English, still writing poetry all the time. Today, I wonder why I thought I could not do mathematics and literature at the same time. I have even considered doing a B.S. in Math part-time here in Basel. Maybe I'll still get around to it, but not before Sara goes to kindergarten, which will not be until August 2011.

My reflections on this, as well as CDY's, reminded me of John Koethe's poem "Hamlet."