The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND RESULTS

The winner of the final round of my fifth Daily Poem Project (see the call for votes here) is Cataract op, by Edward Field, which received 6 votes out of 29 cast.

David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father, came in second with 5 votes, with Jack Gilbert, Not Easily, in third place with 4 votes. Three poems (by Jason Gray, Hester Knibbe, and Andrew Hudgins) received 3 votes each.

I would like to thank everyone who participated, especially those of you who took the time to vote almost every week!

The winners of the first four Daily Poem 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

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND

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.

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! :-)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE RESULTS

The winner of the third week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father, which received 11 votes out of 31 cast.

That makes "A Chat With My Father" the clearest winner yet in the fifth DPP, as second place went to D. A. Powell, corydon & alexis, with 7 votes. In third was Rae Armantrout, Dark Matter, with five votes. Three other poems had eight votes between them, and for the first time in this DPP, a poem received no votes.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week four on Sunday morning, March 15.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE

Here are the poems to vote for in the third week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 2, to Sunday, March 8):

March 2: Emma Neale, Farewell Do
March 3: Sarah Barber, To a Ring I Lost Planting Bulbs
March 4: D. A. Powell, corydon & alexis (vote only on the first poem)
March 5: Rae Armantrout, Dark Matter
March 6: David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father
March 7: Keith Ratzlaff, The Struggle between Plenty and Thankfulness
March 8: Greg Wrenn, Pontiff

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, MARCH 13! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 15 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.

(And one other thing to add: feel free to pass the call for votes on to anyone you know who might be interested!)

David Bottoms on Poetry and Philosophy

I found this passage from an interview with David Bottoms quite compelling (although I am not sure I agree with it one-hundred percent). I'd be interested in any comments people may have on it:

"[Young poets] want to write ideas and not poetry, and I'm of the old 'show me, don't tell me' school. Students sometimes have trouble with that. Someone asked me once in a class, 'Hey, but can't the poem be an idea?' I said no, absolutely not, and I stick by that. On the other hand, it can express an idea, and it usually will if it's any good. Karl Shapiro puts this well in an essay called 'What is Not Poetry.' He says, 'If poetry has an opposite, it is philosophy. Poetry is a materialization of experience; philosophy is the abstraction of it.' I love that, and it's a point I try to get across to all my students. Okay, think about this. Here's a story I like to tell. It's another simplification, sure, but it makes the point well enough for students. A poet and a philosopher are walking across Woodruff Park [in Atlanta], going over to Fairlie-Poplar for some Thai food. When they reach Peachtree Street they see a yellow flash go by, then hear a gigantic crash under the traffic light at Five Points. A yellow MG has tried to beat the light and smashed into the side of a furniture truck. It's a mess. Well, the poet and the philosopher rush over and try to help. A crowd gathers, somebody's on a cell phone calling an ambulance. The driver of the MG has been thrown into the street. The sports car's a tangle of crushed metal. Gasoline, blood, and glass are everywhere. So, the philosopher takes it all in and immediately abstracts. He thinks 'Accident, Chaos, Fate.' The poet, on the other hand, whips out her notebook and writes down everything that happened. The yellow flash on Peachtree Street, the smell of the smoking brakes, the spilled gasoline, the sound of the impact, the blood in the street. She goes back to her apartment and fleshes it all out on a legal pad as vividly as she can, then she types it up into a poem, and sends it to Five Points. You get your copy a few months later and turn to a poem called 'Smash Up.' You read the poem. You ponder it for a few seconds. You think 'Accident, Chaos, Fate.' The point is this. The poet and the philosopher are both traveling to the same city. The poet is simply taking the scenic route. The poet is trying to make the world material on the page, so that the reader can abstract, so that the reader can take what clues the world offers and decipher meaning from them. The poet wants the reader to participate, to experience the event in a vivid way."