DPP1 Results

Here are the results of the first week of voting in my Daily Poem Project.

My students voted for Derek Walcott's "The Castaway," which received four votes. In second place was Lee Slonimsky's "The Burial of the Sun," which received three. Thirteen votes were cast in all.

Blog voters went for Christian Wiman's "The River," which received four votes. Four poems received two votes each (numbers 2, 4, 5, and 6). Thirteen votes again.

Overall, the Walcott would win with six votes out of twenty-six, with Wiman and Slonimsky each receiving five. (But that's not how I am doing the vote, especially as my vote counts both in the class and on the blog.)

I voted for the Wiman in the end, with Walcott's poem and Susan Tichy's "Couplet" being the other poems on my shortlist. Tichy's poem seemed too vague when I looked at closely: if I was enthralled but puzzled on a first reading, I was only puzzled after a third. Walcott is always rich and dense, but the poem seemed too dense for its own good; the richness prevented me from being able to think it through completely, and it prevented me from being able to feel the poem strongly enough. Wiman's poem had one irritating feature ("I can see"), but while I pondered it while biking home from a meeting, that irritating feature began to make sense, and the poem's one unclear element (is the father present in the scene or is he a memory?) added to the power of the work rather than subtracting from it. (While biking, I was unable to think about Walcott's poem because it was not wholly present in my mind: the over-richness of the language again.)

This from someone who does not usually like prose poems.

(For those who posted your votes through comments, the comments are now up, and you can read what other people said about the poems.)

Daily Poem Project 2007, week one

The Daily Poem Project (which I am running as part of my course "Songs and Poems Were All We Needed" this semester) involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week. Then the students in the course vote, as I do, for the best poem of the week.

The course is on Friday, but the weeks will run from Monday to Sunday, starting last Monday, March 26, After we have done this for twelve weeks, we will have a final vote in the last week of the term on the best of the winners. Two summers ago, the winning poem in the end was "The Shout," by Simon Armitage. Last summer, the winning poem was "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.

This term, I will be running a blog vote parallel to the class vote. If you want to participate, 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 below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem!

Oh, and a deadline: please send your week-one vote by Thursday, April 5.

One other rule: if PD has more than one poem on a given day, we will consider only on the first poem.

Think of it as Poetry Idol. :-)

The poets and poems for the past week:

1. Monday, March 26 - Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tuesday, March 27 - Derek Walcott, "The Castaway"
3. Wednesday, March 28 - Linda Gregerson, "Spring Snow"
4. Thursday, March 29 - Susan Tichy, "Couplet"
5. Friday, March 30 - Robert Kelly, "Rembrandt's Raising of Lazarus, 1642"
6. Saturday, March 31 - Lee Slonimsky, "Burial of the Sun"
7. Sunday, April 1 - Hailey Leithauser, "Coo"

It's worth noting that the blog finalist list could end up being quite different than the finalist list in the class.