The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Nine Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK NINE

Here are the poems to vote for in the ninth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 26, to Sunday, May 2):

May 2: The Fever, by Kimiko Hahn (vote only on the first poem)
May 1: Fin, by Wyn Cooper
April 30: What Was Missing, by Susan Tichy
April 29: Another June & Journey, by Steven Heighton
April 28: Fire, by C. K. Williams (vote only on the first poem)
April 27: Arcadian, by Dan Beachy-Quick
April 26: Pussy Willow, by Paula Bohince

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 SATURDAY, MAY 8! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, May 9, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of week five was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
The winner of week six was Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.
The winner of week seven was H1N1, by Robyn Schiff.
The winner of week eight was Montana Sky, by Don Welch.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Eight Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK EIGHT RESULTS

The winner of the eight week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is Montana Sky, by Don Welch, which received 4 votes out of 17 cast.

In a very tight vote, three poems tied for second place with three votes: Beer, by Lee Upton; Summer without Summering, by Teresa Cader; and The Hammock Knot, by Keith Ratzlaff.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week eight shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of the third week was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of the fourth week was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of the fifth week was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
The winner of the sixth week was Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.
The winner of the seventh week was H1N1, by Robyn Schiff.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Eight Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK EIGHT

Here are the poems to vote for in the eighth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 19, to Sunday, April 25):

April 25: A Dozen Rainy-Day Couplets, by Killian O'Donnell
April 24: Montana Sky, by Don Welch (vote only on the first poem)
April 23: Beer, by Lee Upton
April 22: Pseudonarcissus, by Jeff Coughter
April 21: Summer without Summering, by Teresa Cader
April 20: The Golden Shovel, by Terrance Hayes
April 19: The Hammock Knot, by Keith Ratzlaff

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 SATURDAY, MAY 1! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, May 2, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of week five was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
The winner of week six was Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.
The winner of week seven was H1N1, by Robyn Schiff.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Seven Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SEVEN RESULTS

The winner of the seventh week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is H1N1, by Robyn Schiff, which received 7 votes out of 20 cast.

In second place with four votes was First It Is Taken Away from Me, by Richard Tillinghast; two poems received three votes each: Losing My Hair, by Wesley McNair, and That Sweet Before Emotion, by John Stammers.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week eight shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of the third week was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of the fourth week was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of the fifth week was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
The winner of the sixth week was Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Seven Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in the seventh week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 12, to Sunday, April 18):

April 18: Losing My Hair, by Wesley McNair
April 17: First It Is Taken Away from Me, by Richard Tillinghast
April 16: That Sweet Before Emotion, by John Stammers
April 15: That was the mind's wild swarm trapezing from an oak limb, by Carol Frost
April 14: The Spirit of the Lord, by Afzal Ahmed Syed, tr. Musharraf Ali Farooqi (vote only on the first poem)
April 13: The Conquerors, by L. S. Asekoff
April 12: H1N1, by Robyn Schiff

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 SATURDAY, APRIL 24! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, April 25, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of week five was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
The winner of week six was Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Six Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX RESULTS

The winner of the sixth week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin, which received 4 votes out of 17 cast.

In the tightest vote yet in this round of DPP, three poems tied for second with 3 votes each: The Burthen of the Mystery Indeed, by Maurice Manning; Fifth Avenue in Early Spring, by Philip Schultz; and The Rain at Sea, by Don Paterson. All the poems received at least one vote.

Am I correct in concluding that the closeness of the vote means that there were many good poems this week?

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week seven shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of the third week was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of the fourth week was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of the fifth week was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.

Rockfact in May (Human Shields on May 8)

Here's the May schedule for the Rockfact Club in Münchenstein. Human Shields on May 8!

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Six Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX

Here are the poems to vote for in the sixth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 5, to Sunday, April 11):

April 11: A Fisheries Scientist And His Father, The Preacher, Gather Salmon , by Peter Munro
April 10: The Burthen of the Mystery Indeed, by Maurice Manning
April 9: Returning to the Land of 1,000 Dances, by Sandra Beasley
April 8: Fifth Avenue in Early Spring, by Philip Schultz (vote only on the first poem)
April 7: The Hereafter, by Andrew Hudgins
April 6: Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin
April 5: The Rain at Sea, by Don Paterson

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 SATURDAY, APRIL 17! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, April 18, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of week five was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Five Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FIVE RESULTS

The winner of the fifth week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker, which received 7 votes out of 19 cast.

In second place with five votes is Some of David's Story, by Robert Hass. This week, two poems did not receive any votes.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week six shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of the third week was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of the fourth week was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve,

for Emma Bernstein

Here's a stunningly beautiful poem by Bob Perelman, a eulogy for Charles Bernstein's daughter Emma.

My Girls

Here's a short poem from Robin Robertson's collection The Wrecking Light:

MY GIRLS

How many times
have I lain alongside them
willing them to sleep
after the same old stories;
face to face, hand in hand,
till they smooth into dream and I can
slip these fingers free
and drift downstairs:
my face a blank,
hands full of deceit.

This one struck me because it so deftly captures the experience of lying down beside a small child who can't fall asleep by herself, complete with the bad conscience of the father who tells his girls that he will stay with them all night even though he knows perfectly well he is lying to them, not beside them.

But something crossed my mind when I read the poem: it describes an experience, but there is a way in which the poem does not become an experience itself. I suspect that those who have not shared the experience Robertson describes will not get that much out of the poem; or rather, they will learn something from the poem, but the poem will not be memorable for them as a poem, but only in terms of its content.

I've recently come to realize that many contemporary poets and readers of poetry don't particularly like this kind of poem: the one that presents an experience but in a sense does not become an experience itself. But I'm perfectly happy with poems like this, which capture a feeling and communicate something about that feeling, even if they don't create a feeling of their own through their shape or the process of reading them.

It may seem as if I am describing Robertson's poem as lacking something, but I am not: to me, it is complete, even if I recognize that there is a perspective from which it might seem lacking.

I better stop trying to make sense here, and just hope that I have made sense to others, even if not to myself. :-)

Safe; At Home; Matter; Returning from Arizona; Apocrypha

Jane Holland's "Safe" (from her collection Camper Van Blues) describes a bit of sex "in the claustrophobic dark of my car," and concludes with a moment of pity for her lover's sperm, "those pilgrims / barrelling / through vast red tunnels / and wormholes":

Poor things, all the while unaware
of the absence of egg
in those entrancing corridors
or how I pull my dress down afterwards
wet-thighed in the darkness;
smiling, replete.

Shortly after I read that poem, I found a description of conception in Don Share's poem "At Home" (from his collection Squandermania):

... where wine

was drunk and semen flooded
the egg which lodged in the uterus

that built the daughter who greeted
the man and the woman here

And as if that were not enough, a few weeks later I read Sinéad Morrissey's "Matter" (from her collection Through the Square Window), which put another spin on the matter:

And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur—
to his gauze impediments and penchant
for boiling—how you came to enter,
how you came to roll and hiccup and kick
against the windowless dark, feet to my heart
and skull to the pelvic cradle, I still think
of our lovemaking as a kind of door
to wherever you were, waiting in matter ...

And then a few pages later, "Returning from Arizona" concludes:

like longing for weeks to be sick
to prove the baby's taken,
then failing to find a tonic
for another being's foothold in your person.

As if that were not enough, Morrissey's collection also includes the wonderful "Apocrypha," which begins with her conviction, as a ten year old, that she "would never have children // simply by keeping my underwear on / at night-time," before veering off into the startling image of a woman impregnated by a bullet "still wet from the testicle / of a Roundhead Lieutenant // at the Battle of Marston Moor," and concluding:

What hope was underwear now?
If destiny hovered

with green wings and a stained,
indefatigable purpose

over my bedspread,
I, too, would be done for.

I don't want to do anything more with this collection of poems on conception and non-conception than note them here; I was just struck by the coincidence of reading several of them within a few weeks of each other!

[This was, I just noticed, my 1000th post on my blog!]

Leonti at Rockfact, April 10, 2010

Leonti will be playing at Rockfact in Münchenstein on Saturday, April 10. I keep promoting Nadia's shows because she keeps asking me to write more lyrics for her. There will be at least a couple world premieres on Saturday, as far as I know.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Five Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FIVE

Here are the poems to vote for in the fifth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 29, to Sunday, April 4):

April 4: According to Seneca, by Gustaf Sobin
April 3: Parable of the Children, by Cynthia Lowen
April 2: Letter to a City Under Siege, by Carolyn Forché
April 1: Strand, by Atsuro Riley
March 31: Some of David's Story, by Robert Hass
March 30: The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker (vote only on the first poem)
March 29: The Acacia Trees, by Derek Walcott

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, APRIL 9! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, April 11, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR RESULTS

The winner of the fourth week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve, which received 5 votes out of 17 cast (with one abstention).

Two poems tied for second place with three votes: Your Family’s Farm, Empty, by Nick Lantz, and Canticle of Assisi Rain, by Jennifer Atkinson. All the poems received at least one vote.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week five shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of the third week was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR

Here are the poems to vote for in the fourth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 22, to Sunday, March 28):

March 28: The Farm to Choose, by Nathaniel Perry (vote only on the first poem)
March 27: In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve
March 26: Your Family’s Farm, Empty, by Nick Lantz
March 25: Canticle of Assisi Rain, by Jennifer Atkinson (vote only on the first poem)
March 24: Metamorphosis, by Lynn Emanuel
March 23: Treatment, by Ange Mlinko (vote only on the first poem)
March 22: Scholar of the Sorrows, by Mark Conway

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 MONDAY, APRIL 5! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (I'll be out of town for Easter, returning Easter Monday, hence the longer voting period than usual.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE RESULTS

The winner of the third week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral, which received 7 votes out of 21 cast.

In second place was Watchful, by Bob Hicok, with four votes. All but one poem received at least one vote.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week four shortly.

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of the second week was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.

Human Shields videos from June, 2009

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther (words by A. E. Stallings)

*



Penny a Point

*



Gingerbread Blues

*



Judas Kiss

*



Pale Horse

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE

Here are the poems to vote for in the third week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 15, to Sunday, March 21):

March 21: Isis Unveiled, by Edward Hirsch (vote only on the first poem)
March 20: Waiting on Judgment in Prison, Regretting, by Hŏ Kyun, tr. Ian Haight and T'ae-yŏng Hŏ (vote only on the first poem)
March 19: Personal Estates, by Sandra McPherson
March 18: Vandals, by Jennifer Boyden
March 17: To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral
March 16: Little Diary of Getting Old: viii, by Carlo Betocchi, tr. Geoffrey Brock
March 15: Watchful, by Bob Hicok

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 26! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 28 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.

Tundral Glories video

Here's a video of "Tundral Glories," by Leonti, from the album "Everyone/I" (which you can get from iTunes), with lyrics by yours truly.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO RESULTS

The winner of the second week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa, which received 9 votes out of 26 cast.

In second place was Elegy, by Natasha Trethewey, with six votes. Every poem received at least one vote.

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

The winner of the first week was Trick, by Sam Willetts.

Trick

Interpreting poems is not a matter of having a set of pre-existing tools that you can choose among to find the right one. Instead, the poems themselves offer you tools for their interpretation, or, in a sense, you have to fashion your own interpretive tools from the raw materials that the poem itself offers you. But how can you fashion such a tool?

The "trick" is to find something in the poem that can be used to interpret other parts of the poem, as in the opening lines of Sam Willetts's "Trick":

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead.

The mystery of a moment of transformation (love to matter, Dad to dead) can then be a tool to interpret the poem further; here, as "Spring" is seen "breaking promises," or in the "opacity" of the alchemy with which the poem ends:

.... Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

"Dad" to "dead": an additional letter changes a vowel sound, and everything is changed. Poetry can act out this transformation, these "unexpected mysteries," but it cannot do anything about them, even when its own "opaque tricks" are made less mysterious by being made into tools.

Here's the whole poem, from Poetry Daily:

TRICK

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead. The ward grows and shrinks, early Spring
breaking promises through the glass.

Dad’s untoothed mouth gawps, and its last
O holds one darkness; dark of a worked-out

abandoned mine. His absence is brute
absurdity, his hand soft as vellum.

His new state exposes the stark child of him,
and un-sons me. No answers now to a son’s

questions, about this, about the sense,
for all his slightness, of a long life’s mass

coming to rest, a settling that churns up
grief in a rounding cloud. Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

Sam Willetts
Granta, Summer 2009

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 Humanities

Jonathan Mayhew has a quick and biting analysis of what's wrong with the "humanities."

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO

Here are the poems to vote for in the second week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 8, to Sunday, March 14):

March 8: Black Mane, by Henri Cole (vote only on the first poem)
March 9: The Edges of Time, by Kay Ryan (vote only on the first poem)
March 10: Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa
March 11: In the Language of the Here and Now, by Leslie C. Chang
March 12: Elegy, by Natasha Trethewey
March 13: What the Stars Will Bring, by Greg Hewett
March 14: Devotion: Thirst Reduction, by Bruce Smith

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 19! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 21 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was "Trick," by Sam Willetts.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week One Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE RESULTS

The winner of the first week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is "Trick," by Sam Willetts, which received 10 votes out of 32 cast.

In second place was "Landscape with Ignatz," by Monica Youn, with six votes, while "More Precisely," by Ander Monson, came in third with five votes. Every poem received at least two votes.

We discussed Youn's poem for a half an hour or so in my Intensive Composition class on Thursday, and I began to see a lot more in it than I had at first. I suspect that it is probably even more convincing in the context of Youn's book (which is called Ignatz).

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

Ad with musicians

This ad does not have deeper implications for me (unlike this one), but it did make me wonder why the two guys can't get together and have a good jam. It plays on — even appeals to — an excessive rigidity that many musicians unfortunately have ("I don't play country" or whatever style) while simultaneously trying to overcome it ("we don't jam, but we both shop at Coop").

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

Reading thousands of submissions

Timothy Green of Rattle has some interesting things to say here about a few recent essays on the state of poetry (and literature in general) these days. He's writing from an American perspective; I wonder how his comments play for those involved in the po biz in Britain.

Red Wheelbarrow video

This is striking and beautiful, but it also reminded me of a very different interpretation of William Carlos Williams's poem: in a seminar I took with him long ago, James Longenbach pointed out that WCW was very into modern painting, and it had crossed his mind to interpret the poem not as a realistic description of a real scene but as a modernist abstract painting with a blob of red and a couple blobs of white, with a bit of silver on the red as the "glaze." (Hat tip to SR!)

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"!)

Ode to My Sharona

You can read Sherman Alexie's wonderful "Ode to My Sharona" here (hat tip to Ron Silliman). It's get that awesome opening into your head!

The Rule of Law at work

Here's how Glenn Greenwald summarizes this case:

Najibullah Zazi was charged in a civilian court with plotting to blow up subways in New York City, was given a lawyer, was Mirandized, was not sent to Guantanamo, was not subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques," and was not put before a military commission. Today, he pled guilty, ensuring he will spend much of the rest of his life in prison, and is fully cooperating in an attempt to secure leniency in sentencing.

Too bad about all those guys who can't be tried because the rule of law was NOT followed.

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead?

... is the title of this article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic Monthly. I figured this stuff out 20 years ago! :-)

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.

Berlin Poetry Hearings, Nov. 2009

This is no longer news; instead, it's history. That's Alistair Noon, who did the first reading at the Berlin Poetry Hearings 2009, back on November 20.
Then came Mary Noonan.
And Maurice Scully.
And to close the first night, Matthew Sweeney.
Tom Chivers opened the readings on Saturday, November 21.
Donna Stonecipher was up next.

Then I read (and I have no photos of myself). My setlist:

Happening
Ars Conjectandi
Certain Restrictions Apply
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
Reception
Puppets
Aftermath
September Rain
Then Hannah Silva.
And Tim Turnbull closed out the evening—well, then there was a Johnny Cash cover band, but that was not part of the Poetry Hearings. Tim was gettin' down with Johnny!

True Art

What struck me when I saw this ad a few months ago was that the "true art of fine desserts" barely comes through when the Vermeer is there. I was so captivated by seeing the painting that I barely noticed the poster. The "true art" overwhelmed its use in the advertisement. The experience made me feel good about the power of something that is really "true" art: the real work cannot be put to use for purposes beyond itself. An optimistic view of art, but that was how I experienced this ad.

Synecdoche vermin

I found these two words on a blackboard recently.

Conversation (The Art Student's War)

I was moved by this passage from Brad Leithauser's The Art Student's War:

Bea had never known anyone so easy to talk to about nothing—although none of this felt like nothing, their rapid-fire chatter: oh, it felt like something, it felt like life itself.

Bea is falling in love, of course, and she's eighteen, and the sentence captures the breathlessness of falling in love at that age.

The passage also struck me in linguistic terms: "chatter" is a type of speaking that is often disparaged, but from a linguistic perspective, "chatter" is just as important as conversation that is full of "important content." And the passage captures its importance: "chatter" creates bonds between people, even when they are "talking about nothing."

A vague version of the above crossed my mind when I marked that passage, so I was pleased to find the following two pages later, as a kind of summary of what I had been thinking:

It was as though their remarks were gifts to each other—conversation as an exercise in gift giving.

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.

The Art Student's War

I picked up Brad Leithauser's new novel The Art Student's War the other day and have read the first chapter and a half. The first chapter is a tour de force, even if it begins in the present tense, something I often find irritating in fiction. But Leithauser makes a brilliant transition to the past tense:

Everything changes—as it so often does—the moment she climbs down from the enclosure of the streetcar; time itself shifts, shifted. When, in the open air, she spoke the words once more, Bea felt a renewed sense of wistful impoverishment: "He didn't even hear me thank him." This time the phrase sounded dry and matter-of-fact, as though the soldier really did belong to the past tense and their story were over.

I did not notice the shift of "shifts, shifted" until the reference to the past tense at the end of the paragraph.

Here's a whole nother point: in the second chapter, a character says, "I have a whole nother thermos." Is that use of "a whole nother" old enough to have been used in 1943? (Which is when the opening scenes take place.) As my friend Dan once said, "What is the status of the word 'nother'?"

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.

Google Books

I'm translating a German essay for an art catalogue, and I just came across a German translation of a passage from Lyotard. The essay provides excellent bibliographical information about the German publication the quotation was taken from, so I was able to do some searching and find the English title of the essay. And then Google gave me the first page of the essay from its publication in an English selection of Lyotard's works, and the quotation turned out to be from the first paragraph of the essay, so I could just type up the passage in question.

There are many good reasons to be suspicious of Google's project of scanning in entire libraries, but this experience shows that there is one excellent reason for doing such a project: research! I did all of the above from my desk here at home, at the computer. A German-English translator working in Basel on such an art-catalogue translation in 1990 either had to translate the translated text, find the original and translate it (if he or she could), or do all kinds of extra work to get the translated version from the UK or the US.

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!]

Amores

I recently read the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid's Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green. In the first sequence in the book, the Amores, I was quite struck by two poems in particular: number 13 in book 2 and number 7 in book 3. The former is about an abortion—a topic I would not have expected to find discussed in classical literature! How many abortion poems are there from before the late 20th century?

The latter is about impotence:

I imagined every variety of erotic pleasure, invented
No end of positions—in my head—
But still my member lay there, an embarrassing case of
premature death, and limper than yesterday's rose.

I suspect there are many more poems about impotence scattered across the centuries. In its tone and style, this one also reminds of Rochester's "The Imperfect Enjoyment"—but that one is about premature ejaculation, not about impotence!

Federer's most important X

Miles likes ranking things, and recently he asked me what Roger Federer's most important match has been. I wondered whether it might have been the first Wimbledon victory, or even perhaps the loss to Nadal at Wimbledon, but then I decided that his most important tournament win was the French Open in 2009 (tying Sampras, completing career Grand Slam), which means that his most important match must have been that final, right?

But no, that final was arguably a bit of a letdown; the semifinal against Del Potro was more crucial to the tournament win than the final against Söderling.

But then arguably the most important match of the tournament was the five-setter against Tommy Haas in the fourth round, where Federer came back from two-love down to win.

And if that is the most important match in Federer's career, then it's also possible to identify the single most important point in his career: a forehand winner on a break point in the third set. And from my narcissistic perspective, the coolest thing about that winner is that I noticed how important it was (in that match at least) right after he hit it! (And even before he won the tournament!)

Haze, by Mark Wallace

We live now in an empire which, in the name of reasons, has stolen our lives away from us, but which will then sell them back to us at the cost of all that we have ... ("Reasons To Write")

These lines from the brief opening essay in Mark Wallace's Haze made me think of some of my most-quoted lines from Greg Brown's song "Where Is Maria":

There'll be one corporation selling one little box.
It'll do what you want and tell you what you want
and cost whatever you've got.

As an iPhone owner, I quote these lines all the time! :-)

Another passage from Wallace's book made me think of another of my favorite musicians, this time Ornette Coleman, who once said something to the effect that he knew that the music he was playing had a system when he realized that he could play wrong notes:

Discourses create a network of statements it seems relevant to think and say. One of the main ways to recognize that one is in a discourse is through the feeling that one recognizes when other people make statements irrelevant to the discourse. ("The Haze")

And later in that essay, Wallace reminds me of Mark Rowlands's claim in The Philosopher and the Wolf that it is in our moments of defiance that we are most ourselves:

Haze shows that the potential of the human can be found just as much in what resists organized Discourse as in what organizes Discourse.

This could probably all be worked up into a nice little essay but I'll just leave it at that.

Chris Smither "Leave the Light On"

This song is so unbelievably beautiful!

Descartes' Devil

Highly recommended: Durs Grünbein, Descartes' Devil (tr. Anthea Bell). I have not read the English, but I have read it in German, and it's a truly fabulous book, as good a read as Descartes himself. You can read more about it here.

Now if only somone would commission me to translate Grünbein's Vom Schnee, his verse novel about Descartes in Germany, which is even better than Descartes' Devil.

Women-Centered Care

Congratulations to my sister Sara on the publication of her book Women-Centered Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth!

Practicing Gestures

Here's something from a poem by Jordan Davis ("Ira will not be attending the meeting") to add to my list of quotations about the provisional character of what we do:

So much of life is practicing gestures.
So much of living is evaluating
Those around you for signs of damage.

For comparison, check my post on Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, as well as this one, with my Mom's comment about "anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."

I also love the effect of the line break after "evaluating", as the gerund moves from the general (evaluating as such) to the particular (evaluating "those around you ...").

Anonymous users

I've been getting so many spam comments by anonymous users that I've had to turn off the comments for anonymous users. Has anyone else seen a rise in spam comments lately?