Three versions of a paragraph

In my Intensive Composition course this morning, I gave the students an exercise that I took from Thomas Basbøll: they had 27 minutes to write one paragraph of no more than 200 words on a passage of their choice from Simon Armitage's poem "The Shout" (video below):

We went out

into the school yard together, me and the boy

whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range

of the human voice:

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm

from across the divide to signal back

that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.

Out of bounds,

he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,

from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm —

I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead

with a gunshot hole

in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,

you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

The Universal Home Doctor, 2002

(The poem is also the title poem of Armitage's American selected poems from 2005)

I did the exercise myself, too. The first time I tried this exercise in November, we were working on Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and I had enough time in the 27 minutes to do three versions (see below). This time I was able to do three versions as well.

One feature of the development of the versions is how they begin. The first begins with a descriptive introduction to the passage, but the second and the third take material from the end of the first and second versions, respectively, and use that material to introduce the passage more analytically than descriptively. I have not edited the versions beyond what I wrote in those 27 minutes.

Version 1
In the experiment described in "The Shout", two boys take advantage of the difference between the speed of sound and speed of light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

If the signals (a shout and a gesture; one acoustic, the other visual) that the two boys pass to each other both reach their destination, then the two boys are still within "range / of the human voice" from each other. Since sound is significantly slower than light, the shout will take more time to reach the other boy than the gesture will. The sound "carries," but the arm signal "carries" even faster. The experiment depends on this distinction to work: if at some point the shouting boy cannot be heard anymore, then the two boys will still be in sight of each other. They expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they expect "the range / of the human voice" to be less than the range of human vision.

Version 2

In the experiment, two boys take advantage of the difference between the speeds of sound and light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

There are two signals here: not only the shout but also the speaker's gesture in return. The former is acoustic, the latter visual. As long as these signals both reach their destination, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". As sound is slower than light, the shout takes more time to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they implicitly assume that "the range / of the human voice" is less than the range of human vision, while also assuming that the voice's range is best measured by shouting.

Version 3

The experiment the two boys devise depends on an implicit assumption: that the loudest voice possible is necessary to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

But there are two signals here, one loud and one silent: not only the shout (a matter of sound), but also the speaker's gesture in return (a matter of vision). As long as these signals both reach their recipients, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". Sound is slower than light, so the shout takes longer to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other. That is, they not only assume that shouting will measure the voice's range, but also expect that range to be less than the range of human vision.

*

In the course of the semester, I'll be doing this exercise with the students six more times, on poems by Adrienne Rich, Rob A. Mackenzie, Katy Evans-Bush, Andrea Cohen, Don Paterson, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Here's Armitage reading "The Shout":



*

And here are the three versions of the Dickinson paragraph (as I wrote them in November, without further editing):


Version 1
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker pass by as they ride along in Death's "Carriage":

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age (in this, it is reminiscent of the riddle of the Sphinx). The stages of life are bound together with the anaphora of "We passed" that begins the first, third, and fourth lines; the phrase is used transitively here, but its repetition opens up the possibility of reading it intransitively as a euphemism for death as well: "we passed" in the sense of "we died." This play of the transitive and intransitive is mirrored in the enjambment of the phrase containing the verb "strove" between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, the children's "striving" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of both play ("At Recess") and struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Thus, the two verbs in the stanza, "passed" and "strove," are both made ambiguous by the poem's form: "passed" refers to both death and the passage of life; "strove" refers to both work and play.

*
Version 2
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker see as they ride along in Death's "Carriage." The stanza contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated at the beginning of lines one, three, and four) and "strove," which is emphasized by its enjambed position at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age; the anaphora links those stages while also drawing attention to the isolated phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself. Thus, the anaphora connects the passage of human life and the passing of human life into one figure of "riding with Death." This formal construction of an ambiguity is repeated in the enjambment between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, "Children strove" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of play ("At Recess") as well as playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Just as "passed" refers to both death and the course of life, "strove" refers to both work and play—and both of these ambiguities are created by the poem's form.

*
Version 3
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated in lines one, three, and four) and "strove," in an enjambment at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" figures human life from childhood to adulthood to old age. The anaphora links those stages while also isolating the phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself; the passing of human life is thus contained in the passage of human life. The enjambment with "strove" repeats this formal construction of an ambiguity: read by itself at the end of the first line, "Children strove" refers to their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" becomes a matter of play ("At Recess") and of playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Again, one perspective is embedded in another, contradictory perspective; here, the striving of work is contained in the striving of childhood play.

The Bears in Yosemite Park

The issue of "evidence" that I have been posting about in my recent posts on Simon Armitage is one I began to identify while reading his first book, Zoom! (the subject of those posts). An issue I have been interested in for a long time that I first noticed elsewhere in Armitage's work (in Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid, to be precise) is that of the "moment" that becomes the focus of a poem. In "The Bears in Yosemite Park," from Zoom!, the moment that "lyric poetry" as such is interested in is described precisely:

this moment is one which will separate some part
of our lives from another.

What Armitage adds to this theme in the Tyrannosaurus Rex book is a significant complication: such decisive moments may not actually change anything—and they may even change things for the worse.

Blog for My Simon Armitage Seminar

I've started a blog for my course on Simon Armitage that is starting next week. The students will be posting there; I'll continue with more posts on Armitage here. (May the discussions in the seminar be as interesting as the discussion of my post on "Night Shift"!)

Night Shift

Looking for Simon Armitage's "Night Shift" (another poem from Zoom!), I found two postings of it in essays by Jeffrey Side that decry Armitage's poem from two very different perspectives. In one, Armitage's poem is used an example of how weak contemporary poetry is in contrast with Bob Dylan's lyrics ("Ambiguity and Abstraction in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan", from The Argotist). In the other, Armitage's poem is used an example of weak "empiricist" poetry ("Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers", from Jacket). In both cases, Side argues that the poem "leaves nothing to the reader's imagination" and is hence weak. But just because the scene described in the poem is clear does not mean the poem does not do anything, and just because the scene is free of abstractions does not mean that the poem does not make abstract interpretation possible. (I'm going out on a bit of a limb in saying this because I have not read the whole essay in either case.)

So here's the poem (I feel free to quote the whole thing since it's already on-line in two places, thanks to Side's interest in it; in fact, I'm grateful to him that I don't have to type it all up but can cut and paste!):

Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,

water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs

of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork

contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken

in acres of empty bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror

and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.

Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses:

the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.

Given my interest in the issue of "evidence" in Armitage's poems, it's not surprising that I noticed the ways in which identifying evidence plays a role here: the poem is about all the "signs" that "you" have left behind, signs that make it clear that the speaker has "missed you by moments." As in "Snow Joke," each detail is something that first has to be identified as more than just a detail; only then can it be "read" (or "misread") as evidence, as a sign.

That is at the level of the poem's story (that paraphrasable thing that Side identifies), but, as with my point about evidence in "On Miles Platting Station," every feature of the poem could be read as "evidence" of something else, by the very fact of its being in a poem. I am reading the details of the poem as evidence of how evidence works, so I pick out the details that are evidence of that, but a different reading could be developed about the role of "heat" in the poem, or perhaps the repetition of the word "lipstick."

*

It's striking that Side holds up songwriters (Dylan, Cohen) as better poets than Armitage. I wonder what he would make of Armitage's lyrics? On his Scaremongers CD, or in the musical documentaries that he has written lyrics for (see the Century Films website).

Greenhouse

Still working my way through Simon Armitage's first book Zoom! and discovering other passages that have to do with evidence in one way or another (as in my previous posts on "Snow Joke", "On Miles Platting Station", and "All We Can Do"). In "Greenhouse," the speaker recalls building a greenhouse with his father and later watching for him to come home after a night out and go out to check the greenhouse:

I'd wait, straining for the sound of the hasp
or guessing your distance by the sparkle
of a cufflink.

Again, it's a matter of evidence, of both perceiving something and distinguishing it from something else. And beyond that, there's the beautiful line break "sparkle / of a cufflink," the move from general to specific, and in this case, to a very surprising specificity.

All We Can Do

In my two recent posts on Simon Armitage poems ("Snow Joke" and "On Miles Platting Station"), I discussed how the poems raised the issue of what evidence is. The next poem in Armitage's Zoom! is called "All We Can Do," and it brings up a related issue: reading and misreading. After all, in order to determine which things are evidence, you have to read them correctly, and the danger of misreading always looms. Here's the beginning of the poem:

The engine has less bite 

than a baby's cough

so you nurse it into

the all-night forecourt.

David will come,

the cordage 

of his half converted skip truck

clanging from streets away,

his bush-baby eyes

picking us out

in the battered kiosk.

This David who comes to take care of the speaker's car trouble has to perform an act of reading to find "us," "picking us out" in the dark. But not only does he have to read the scene, he also has to read the car, as it were, to determine the source of the problem:

He cleans the dip-stick

under his armpit

and tells us the car

has more faults

than he could shake a stick at.

As David tows the car away, a misreading is explicitly mentioned:

I steer and brake 

in the car behind,

misreading the tangents

of the pavements and corners

as the gold 

of each streetlight

burns

through your hairstyle.

The poem ends up identifying David as someone who reads things correctly and the speaker as someone who misreads things; the larger issue is how reading and misreading function in the determination of what is evidence and what is not. Or in the case of the speaker, not what is evidence, but where he should steer the broken-down car, and he gets the geometry of it wrong.

On Miles Platting Station

Simon Armitage's "Snow Joke" raises the issue of how something becomes a sign of something else, of how something becomes evidence. "On Miles Platting Station," the next poem in Armitage's Zoom!, concludes with an explicit mention of a different kind of evidence:

Somewhere beyond that the water in Shiny Brook

spills like a broken necklace into our village.

The police are there again: boxhauling the traffic,

adjusting the arc-lights. They have new evidence tonight

and they lift it from behind the windbreak, cradle it

along their human chain and lower it carefully down

into Manchester.

This makes me wonder about evidence: when is something evidence, and when is it not? How does something that is not evidence turn into evidence? I assume there are theoretical discussions of this in criminology, the philosophy of science, and philosophy in general (not to mention medicine and psychology, where the issue is what a symptom is).

But in the reading of poetry, and in the reception of art in general, everything in the work is evidence; that is, everything is ready to be understood as a sign of something else, as a symptom. Every feature of a work of art is always both itself and, by virtue of being in a work of art, something more—if nothing else, it is evidence of that surplus, that excess, an excess created by the identification of art as art, by the recipient's readiness to understand the object at hand as art.

Snow Joke

Poems can raise questions about how things are perceived, and it is often best when they leave those questions unanswered. Simon Armitage's "Snow Joke," the first poem in his first book, Zoom!, tells a story about a man who dies when his car gets stuck in a blizzard, and concludes by addressing the question of which of the three men who found the car under the snow "was to take the most credit":

Him who took the aerial to be a hawthorn twig?
Him who figured out the contour of his car?
Or him who said he heard the horn, moaning
softly like an alarm clock under an eiderdown?

Beyond the openness of this ending, there is also the issue of the details of these perceptions and misperceptions: the aerial as a hawthorn twig; the mound of snow understood to be the contour of a car; the horn under the snow (something alarming, cold, dangerous) heard as an alarm clock under an eiderdown (something alarming, of course, but warm and unthreatening). The harmless has to be perceived as a site of harm in order for the dead man to be found. Evidence has to be seen as evidence, as sign, rather than as ... well, nothing much at all.

You can read the whole poem on this discussion page, a little ways down (where it is posted without its quatrain form).

[Warning: I have Armitage on the brain right now, as I am preparing a seminar on his work!]

Scaremongers

I've been enjoying Born in a Barn, by The Scaremongers, which is a British band whose singer is none other than poet Simon Armitage. I picked it up because I'll be teaching a seminar on Armitage next term, and I thought it would be fun to have some of his lyrics/songs to consider, too.

Of the songs on the CD, I particularly like "From the Shorelines of Venus," which as far as I can tell you can only listen to by buying the CD, but if you want to check out some of the tunes, a few can be heard on the band's MySpace page.

Perhaps I'll soon get around to ordering a CD by Rackett, too (Paul Muldoon's band).

Out of the Blue

Up until now, the best poems I have read about September 11, 2001, have been Martin Espada's "Alabanza" and Glyn Maxwell's verse novel The Sugar Mile. But now I can add a third item to that list: Simon Armitage's "Out of the Blue."

In a 24-page sequence, Armitage puts himself into the head of an English trader who works at the World Trade Center. In section 4, he presents a catalogue reminiscent of Günter Eich's "Inventory":

Arranged on the desk
among rubber bands and bulldog clips:

here is a rock from Brighton beach,
here is a beer-mat, here is the leaf

of an oak, pressed and dried, papery thin.
Here is a Liquorice Allsorts tin.

A map of the Underground pinned to the wall.
The flag of St. George. A cricket ball.

Here is calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in its frame:

this is my wife on our wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space,

plus rockets and stars and the Milky Way,
plus helicopters and aeroplanes.

Jelly-copters and fairy-planes.
In a spidery hand, underneath it, it says:

'If I stand on my toes can you see me wave?'

Section 7 is a prose poem of the responses of the World Trade Center workers after the planes hit the buildings. Shortly before I got to the end of it, I realized that it reads the same backwards as forwards, trapping the people in the poem, as it were, along the lines of how they were trapped in the doomed building.

The sequence's timing is excellent—it is just long enough to make you forget section four, so when you get to the list of things found in the rubble in the final section, the return of the items from section four is all the more powerful.

And then the sequence concludes (reminding me, as I typed it in, of this):

Five years on
what false alarm can be trusted again,
what case or bag can be left unclaimed,
what flight can be sure to steer its course,
what building can claim to own its form,
what column can vow to stand up straight,
what floor can agree to bear its weight,
what tower can vouch to retain its height,
what peace can be said to be water-tight,
what truth can be said to be bullet-proof,
can anything swear to be built to last,
can anything pledge to be hard and fast,
what system can promise to stay in place,
what structure can promise to hold its shape,
what future can promise to keep its faith?

Everything changed. Nothing is safe.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage

... I spent so long in your lordship's land / and was hosted in your house ...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage

I read Sir Gawain a few years ago, as translated by Brian Stone, and I enjoyed it, but I ended up with very little clear memory of the story. Everything seemed vague and dreamy in retrospect, even shortly after I had read it.

I doubt that will be the case with Simon Armitage's new translation, which is full of energy and clarity. I enjoyed reading it so much that I tried to convince Miles to let me read it out loud to him, and he let me read the first part and a bit of the second part to him before he got bored, wanting more action. The pleasure of reading this:

So summer comes in season with its subtle airs,
when the west wind sighs among shoots and seeds,
and those plants which flower and flourish are a pleasure
as their leaves let drip their drink of dew
and they sparkle and glitter when glanced by sunlight.
Then autumn arrives to harden the harvest
and with it comes a warning to ripen before winter.
The drying airs arrive, driving up dust
from the face of the earth to the heights of heaven,
and wild sky wrestles the sun with its winds,
and the leaves of the lime lay littered on the ground,
and grass that was green turns withered and grey.
Then all which had risen over-ripens and rots
and yesterday on yesterday the year dies away,
and winter returns, as is the way of the world
through time.

Armitage's alliterations never grow stale, and his attention to the form keeps the language focused and clear. Surprise: I recommend this book highly!

Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid

I finally got around to reading Simon Armitage's 2006 collection Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid (I had lots of time to read while recovering from pneumonia).

I was not surprised to be so pleased, as I generally enjoy Armitage's poems quite a bit. I'll just mention two here that I particulary liked: "Horses, M62" and this one:

EVENING

You’re twelve. Thirteen at most.
You’re leaving the house by the back door.
There’s still time. You’ve promised
not to be long, not to go far.

One day you’ll learn the names of the trees.
You fork left under the ridge,
pick up the bridleway between two streams.
Here is Wool Clough. Here is Royd Edge.

The peak still lit by sun. But
evening. Evening overtakes you up the slope.
Dusk walks its fingers up the knuckles of your spine.
Turn on your heel. Back home

your child sleeps in her bed, too big for a cot.
Your wife makes and mends under the light.
You’re sorry. You thought
it was early. How did it get so late?

Below the poem, I wrote "and miles to go before I sleep." I highly recommend this collection.

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?

Household Names

Simon Armitage provides a wonderfully funny definition of "household names" in his article on war poetry in the Times:

"Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are still household names (that is, the answers to questions in the earlier rounds of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) ..."

Try watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in a country that you did not grow up in. For you, the hardest questions will be the early ones about idioms and common cultural references in that country. Even if you speak the language very well, you'll still regularly struggle with an idiom or two! A "household name" in one country is completely obscure in another. (Try talking about baseball players with the Swiss!)

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.

Daily Poem Project, final vote(s)

The final vote for the Daily Poem Project took place this morning, Tuesday, July 4. The twelve finalists had been narrowed down a little bit for purposes of discussion: all the students and I had written shortlists of two to six or seven poems (with each student making his or her own choices about how to pick which poems were on his or her shortlist). My tally of the shortlists led to an initial list of four poems for discussion: A. E. Stallings, "Fragment," Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs, John Balaban, "If Only," and Bill Zavatsky, "Monologue" (with Stallings having been named on 16 shortlists of the 22 submitted to me, including my own).

Before discussing the poems, though, I asked two questions: first, how many of the students had already made up their minds about what to vote for? If only one or two had not decided yet (along with me), then I would have had the vote then and there, and the discussion would have occurred after the vote. However, as seven or eight people were still undecided, I put off the vote until after the discussions. (Still, it is worth noting that that means the clear majority had already decided before the discussion.)

I then asked if there were any poems that any student wanted to ask to have added to the discussion. This led to two further poems being added to the list for discussion: Terrance Hayes, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)" and C. K. Williams, "Thighs."

This left us with about ten minutes to discuss each poem, which is, of course, not much, but it was also enough to sketch out what the issues raised by each poem were. The selection from Sutzkever's Epitaphs, for example, raised the issue of how we would read the poem if we did not know it was about the Holocaust. The poem does contain some information that points toward the Holocaust for contemporary readers (a young woman is being taken against her will from Paris to Poland by train, and she throws her most precious possession, a pearl necklace on a red silk thread, out the "grate" of the train—not the window). But many readers, even today (and definitely in the future), might well read the poem without its historical context; we agreed, though, that they would still have a sense of the poem's power. That power might be more mysterious then, even eerie, but it would remain.

The issue of information is raised by C. K. Williams's "Thighs." The poem contains a great deal more information and contextualiztion than Sutzkever's does, and to someone aware of the what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is nothing mysterious about the poem. (Its strengths lie elsewhere.) However, it struck us that quite a bit of what we can infer from the poem depends, as with Sutzkever's, on our knowledge of things that the poem does not mention explicitly (for example, it never mentions the United States!). In rereading the poem before class, I had also noticed that its depiction of the powerlessness of the newspaper reader when confronted by information that he cannot do anything about is repeated not only for the speaker of the poem but also for its reader: we read the poem and remain as powerless and frustrated as the speaker does. In this light, the poem also ends up highlighting how the sheer quantity of information in newspapers does not empower the newspaper reader; on the contrary, "Thighs" suggests, all the reader can do is make his ironic comparisons (perhaps by writing a poem about them).

The discussions of both Balaban's "If Only" and Zavatsky's "Monologue" focused on how the poems' conclusions change the rest of the poem. Balaban's final line ("This is how it should have been"), some suggested, provides a twist that strengthens a poem that otherwise takes the risk of being too "sentimental" (as one student put it, one who did not think the twist was effective). For me, the most interesting point was about typography: the italicization of the line, it was argued, made the conclusion too heavy-handed, precluding a neutral, even resigned reading of the line.

Zavatsky's poem also ends with a striking image, when the speaker of the monologue compares the old friend he has been breaking off with to a "pesky insect that flies around, / buzzing in one's ear its tiny / message about mortality." My sense of this startling image was that it overwhelmed the rest of the poem with its vividness. This led one student (who had had the poem on his shortlist) to agree with me in these terms: the change in tone in the final lines does not work (whether you prefer the tone of what comes before, as he did, or the concluding image, as I do).

Before the final vote, I asked whether anybody had changed their minds because of the discussion. Nobody had! :-)

The results were quite clear:

1. A. E. Stallings, "Fragment": 10 votes
2. Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs: 4 votes
3. Ingeborg Bachmann, "I Step Outside Myself": 3 votes
3. Rachel Hadas, "The Nosebleed": 3 votes
3. Dick Allen, "On Tenterhooks": 3 votes
6. Terrance Hayes, "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)": 2 votes
7. John Balaban, "If Only": 1 vote
7. Bill Zavatsky, "Monologue": 1 vote

I had also polled "outside" voters, just to spice things up a bit. I received (only) 10 votes (after emailing over 100 people, but it was at short notice, so I understand why many people might not have wanted to participate). Here, the results were much more spread out: A. E. Stallings, "Fragment," and William Wenthe, "Groucho and Tom," each received 2 votes, while six poems received one vote each:

Hayden Carruth, "Springtime, 1998"
Abraham Sutzkever, from Epitaphs
Ingeborg Bachmann, "I Step Outside Myself"
Rachel Hadas, "The Nosebleed"
Dick Allen, "On Tenterhooks"
John Balaban, "If Only"

After we determined the final winner, I wondered whether the class all felt comfortable with the result (as was the case with last year's winner, "The Shout," by Simon Armitage). That group was smaller, so it was not hard to achieve consensus acceptance of the winner; in this, larger group, several students mentioned that they had not liked the poem at all. One of them made an interesting characterization of the group: most of them were students of philosophy. One could ponder why that might be so, but it is true that the poem begins with a reference to philosophy: "The glass does not break because it is glass, / Said the philosopher."

If you have read this far, thanks. Feel free to comment!

Finalist list
Week 12
Week 11
Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Daily Poem Project, Week 12

The vote for the 12th and final week of the Daily Poem Project (poems on Poetry Daily from June 20, 2006, to June 26, 2006) took place on Tuesday morning, June 27.

The clear winner was Bill Zavatsky's "Monologue" with seven votes. In second place was the selection from Brian Henry's book "Quarantine" with four votes. The rest of the votes were scattered among the other poems from the week.

I was disappointed that Bob Hicok's "The Evolving Landscape," which I voted for, did not receive more votes (it received only two). Hicok is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and his poem "Solstice: voyeur" came in second to Simon Armitage's "The Shout" in last year's project. But it is interesting to note that René, the only student who was also in last year's course, was the other person to vote for Hicok. Perhaps Hicok's work takes some getting used to (I know it did for me, though I have now long since been hooked), or perhaps the students were just put off by the length of the poem, as is often the case when one is reading poems on computer screens.

Week 11
Weeks 9 and 10
Weeks 7 and 8
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)

Daily Poem Project, week 1

This semester, I am teaching a course called "13 Ways of Looking at a Poem." As part of this course, I am repeating the "Daily Poem Project" that was part of the course on "Quality" that I taught last summer with my colleague Lucia Michalcak.

The Daily Poem Project 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. As the course is on Tuesday mornings, our week runs from Tuesday to Monday. 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. Last summer, the winning poem in the end was "The Shout," by Simon Armitage. Poems by Bob Hicok and Ted Kooser came in second and third.

The first vote for this semester took place this morning. The poems were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, April 4, to Monday, April 10, including a selection from Czeslaw Milosz's brilliant "A Treatise on Poetry" (which is included in a new and selected edition that has just been published) and "Elena Ceauçescu's Bed," by W. D. Snodgrass, a poet I have recently come to admire.

But the winner was a much younger poet, as well as a poem that I recommended yesterday in my last blog entry: "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings. Not only did it win, it won hands down: it received 11 votes, and all the other poems received one each. I was quite surprised that AES's poem won so easily against such strong competition (in addition to Milosz and Snodgrass, Tomaz Salamun; for the complete list, see PD's archive). Alicia beats the old guys!