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 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, 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 One Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE RESULTS

The winner of the first week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Sherod Santos's "Film Noir," which received 9 votes out of 36 cast.

In second place was Tomasz Rózycki's "Coral Bay" (tr. Mira Rosenthal), with eight votes, while Andrew Hudgins's "Walking a True Line" and T. Alan Broughton's "A Midnight Clear" tied for third with five votes.

Every poem received at least three votes!

For a while, I thought I would be the only person to vote for Hudgins's poem, but then suddenly it got several more votes.

We discussed Rózycki's poem in great detail in my Intensive Composition class on Wednesday, and I came to admire it more and more. One student reads Polish (her mother is from Poland), so she's trying to find the original Polish to see if this sonnet is rhymed in the original.

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

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